The company’s first urban headquarters

Headquartered since 1848 in Moline, Illinois, John Deere has grown from a pioneering farming equipment manufacturer into a global company that is the world’s largest producer of agricultural machinery. The company’s new Chicago office—its first in an urban center—marks a new era for John Deere. Located in the West Loop, a neighborhood that has become a hub for technology companies, the new office demonstrates Deere’s commitment to innovation and opens new avenues to recruiting world-class talent.

Deere occupies the fourth floor of SOM’s 800 Fulton Market, dubbed “Chicago’s smartest building.” The building’s architecture honors the neighborhood’s industrial past while integrating cutting-edge technology—an ethos well aligned with John Deere’s. The vision for the new space focuses on the company’s future and the wellness of its employees, while connecting it to a vibrant neighborhood—all in support of delivering world-class products that customers expect from the John Deere Company. The new 31,000-square-foot headquarters houses nearly 200 employees in a space that celebrates the company’s history and culture.

Making connections

Arriving from the elevators, staff and guests enter the office through a wide space known as “Main Street,” which runs the width of the floor and connects to an outdoor terrace. With a variety of seating arrangements and a large coffee bar, this area can accommodate team collaboration, coffee breaks, larger client events, and even town hall gatherings. Overhead, an array of diagonal fixtures creates intersecting lines of light, providing flexible lighting levels to support the various zones. Intersecting hallways make Main Street the focal point of the office concept as a “crossroads”—a place for connections. 

Main Street is punctuated by a 25-foot-long sliding glass wall that opens to an outdoor green space and patio. The terrace offers views of the skyline and of the iconic neon Fulton Market District sign below. Two heated trellises, designed by the same team of structural engineers that designed the building’s signature X-braces, help to blur the line between indoors and out.

Accommodating a range of work styles

Spaces across the office are designed to accommodate both focused individual work and collaborative team meetings, either in open collaboration spaces or in nearby “bins.” These enclosed and semi-enclosed spaces provide a range of configurations: individual focus rooms, virtual team huddle rooms, and standing work tables. Anchoring the entire office is the Collaboration Core. This space features two large conference rooms that can open up onto a central zone between them, giving large teams space to spread out, write on the walls, and use technology to meet with colleagues across the globe.

Rooted in history and place

The design of the Chicago office blends elements from John Deere’s iconic Moline headquarters, designed by Eero Saarinen, with inspirations from the surrounding Fulton Market District. The industrial backlit ceiling within the Collaboration Core evokes the ceilings at the Moline headquarters, while the neon sign embedded in the green wall—with the slogan “Nothing Runs Like a Deere”—references the signage that welcomes visitors to the Fulton Market District.