In fact, pizza won't be the only business operating out of Domino's Farms. The company plans to lease available space to a variety of tenants, at least one of which -- the University of Michigan's Sports Medicine department -- should help defray the cost of all those massages. Having the sports docs around also serves Monaghan's notion of integrating personal interests into his work environment: one of his closest friends is Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler, who, three years ago, was given a Domino's franchise by Monaghan, who hoped that it would convince him not to take a rival coaching job. (A year later, when Tiger general manager Jim Campbell called Schembechler to ask about this crazy guy who said he wanted to buy a ball club that wasn't even on the market, Bo said, "Jim, if Tom Monaghan says he's got that kind of money, believe him.")
Monaghan is, moreover, obsessive about his own physical conditioning. Rising every morning at 5:45, Monaghan runs for 50 minutes, exercises for 40 more, and then heads for morning Mass at the office. In addition, he visits the UM weight room twice a week for some extracurricular iron pumping. Is this the regimen of a man who worships self-discipline?
"It's actually the opposite," he confesses. "I'm so undisciplined that if I didn't make these daily habits, I'd be a complete vegetable."
The walking tour stops at the executive dining room. "All the dishes will be from the collection Wright designed for the Imperial Hotel," Monaghan continues, ducking under some scaffolding. "Next door are five vice-presidents' offices. Two of them are temporarily unoccupied."
How come? he is asked.
"I caught one of my executives shacking up with a staff member," he says, without elaboration, "so I had to let him go."
He moves to the far corner of his upper office and steps out on the balcony. Ahead of him is a vast clearing sloping gently upward to the west.
"Most of what you see out there will be turned into a man-made lake. A bridge will eventually go over the water and connect this building to the conference center. And that, of course, will be the Golden Beacon."
Ah yes, the Golden Beacon. Designed in 1956 for the Chicago lakefront (and adapted from earlier plans dating back to the '20s), the slender, futuristic-looking office building soared higher than anything else Wright ever conceived. Like many of his projects, however, it stalled on the drawing board for lack of funding; later it was adapted for the concept of Broadacre City, Wright's utopian vision of a community where man, nature, and industry could thrive as one.
In much the same spirit, if not precisely the same form, the Beacon will now rise over Monaghan's corporate utopia. Shrunk to 30 stories, its spire is to tower over a vast panorama of fruit trees, gardens, stables, horse-drawn carriages, and jogging trails. A cooperative vegetable farm will provide pick-your-own produce for employees paying a nominal membership fee; on an adjoining site will be the reconstructed Usonian house that Monaghan bought at auction in New York last year. A full-scale Wright museum is also a possibility. Other Wright designs have been built since the architect's death, but nothing on this scale, nothing so ambitious, so unusual. The fact that the Beacon itself is neither space-efficient nor cost-effective in terms of strict company needs bothers Monaghan not a whit. He wanted it for his own offices, and is happy now that it will serve as both symbol of Domino's Farms and an eye-catching conference center for visiting executives.
"I think it's the most graceful of all his designs, almost more a piece of sculpture than a building," he declares. "If Domino's were a public company, I probably couldn't justify it. But we're not, so I don't have to."
True, but there still have been heard some discouraging words. "Tom's always been impressed by 'the best' this and 'the most' that," says one Domino's franchisee," and now he's getting the most expensive office complex in the state, maybe the whole country. It's hard to believe my costs won't rise to subsidize all that."
Over in this corner, meanwhile, are those who take exception to Monaghan's appropriation of the Golden Beacon, period. Before plans were scrapped to build the Beacon in downtown Ann Arbor, some wags dubbed it the "Tower of Pizza." Others in professional circles have questioned the project's historical integrity. "What Tom Monaghan is getting . . . is a shop piece," one critic has written. "At best [his architects] will have exchanged design for scholarship, and the result will be a building on a different site, with different spaces, different details, and a different sense of the whole than Frank Lloyd Wright intended; and they will build it for a client with whom Wright never exchanged a word."
The "they" being referred to are the architects who have survived Wright to oversee the later disposition of his designs. Dean among these former apprentices is Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation chairman William Wesley Peters, a charter member of the so-called Taliesin Fellows. Project architect on the Golden Beacon plans, Peters explains there is a "very rigid policy" about using Wright's designs directly, and that all modifications "must fulfill the original intent of the architect." Of Monaghan's own intentions, he says this:
"Even though he never met him, Tom Monaghan obviously has a great interest, a reverence, really, for Mr. Wright's work. It may be less intellectual than instinctive, but that's the best situation to have, because [Wright] didn't necessarily create his designs for people of great wealth or intellectual accomplishment. His architecture spoke directly to the people, and obviously it spoke to Tom Monaghan a long time ago.
