On one end of Corktown, Ford Motor Co.'s brightest minds are trying to map out the business plan and maneuvering of computer-driven vehicles inside a factory building that was turning out women's stockings 20 years before nylon was invented.

At the other end of Detroit's oldest neighborhood, Ford's building engineers and architects are trying to figure out how to piece together crumbling plaster that was bound together using horse hair.

This certainly isn't Henry Ford's automobile company anymore.

In the matter of a year, the Dearborn-based automaker has taken a giant leap into an enormous project to remake where its employees think, design, create and attempt to innovate the vehicles of the future in a Corktown campus that is four years away from becoming a full reality.

At the building known as The Factory, the 111-year-old one-time hosiery factory now houses more than 200 Ford employees working in teams that are developing the planned 2021 launch of an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service.

"There's a lot of thinking that we're doing here in this building around the journey and how people are going to be using the service, how people are going to be interacting with the car," said Sherif Marakby, CEO of Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC.

The three-story building features wood floors and beams and the kind of trendy open-floor office space that is the exact opposite of the cubicle-and-closed-door office designs that most Ford employees have worked in for years at the Glass House in Dearborn. The Birmingham-based architectural and interior design firm McIntosh Poris Associates designed Ford's office layout at The Factory.

"There's no hierarchy here. I have no parking spot," said Marakby, Ford's top executive stationed in Corktown. "Not only do I not have an office, I don't have an assigned desk — I float around."