The Auburn Hills tower with a window shaped like a car logo

Drive up I-75 through Auburn Hills and you can’t miss it: a glass tower with a single huge window near the top, shaped like a five-pointed star. That’s the Pentastar — Chrysler’s old logo — blown up to 35 feet of glass and bolted onto the roofline so drivers know exactly whose building they’re passing.

The Chrysler Technology Center went up on a 504-acre site beside the freeway, finished in 1996. That’s when the company moved its brains and its headquarters here from Highland Park. The numbers are hard to picture. The complex holds more than five million square feet of floor space, which makes it one of the largest office buildings in the whole country. CRSS Architects laid it out as a giant cross — four long glass-roofed walkways meeting under an eight-sided skylight in the middle. The place reads less like an office and more like an indoor city with its own main streets.

The Pentastar tower came later, designed by the SmithGroup. At 249 feet it’s the tallest thing in Auburn Hills, and that star-shaped window glows at night like a lantern over the highway. The building has outlasted the name on the door more than once. It carried Chrysler, then DaimlerChrysler, then Fiat Chrysler, and now Stellantis — each merger leaving the tower exactly where it stood.

There’s something fitting about a car company announcing itself with a logo you can read at 70 miles an hour. Most headquarters hide behind a name on a sign. This one put its badge on the skyline and dared you to look up while you merged.