In a previous post I reviewed the main ones background aspects of the book Pastoral capitalism. A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes, by Louise A. Mozingo, but it was left on the way to go into each of the three types of development that the author proposes in a little more detail.
CORPORATE CAMPUS
The laboratories and R&D centers that were beginning to be integrated into large corporations need to leave the center of the cities, where until then these companies operated. It is not a suitable place for doctors and engineers who, after all, already live outside the city in their suburban illusion. It is the beginning of the story of the suburbanization of knowledge-intensive activities in the postwar period. Bell Labs is the main example and premonitory of what would later be the development of corporate campuses, with a first plan from 1942 designed by the landscape architects and Olmsted brothers, thus initiating the pilgrimagefrom city centers (in this case, New York) to the peripheries (the outskirts of Summit, New Jersey). A space of attraction for engineers, doctors and researchers in a bucolic suburban setting. These campuses, as concentrations of the specialized laboratories of the great post-war corporation, all follow an architectural pattern and layout of its different elements: circular or square formation of the different buildings, which enclose a large green space and surrounded by trees. , parking and undulating lines on the ground.
It is the beginning of large marketing operations so that companies appear in the press as agents creating privileged environments to live and work without having to go through the cities. It is the time when these brochures and advertisements promote the family values of the big corporation and prop up the bad image that city centers and CBDs had in those days. This is how the spaces destined to centralize and rationalize the research functions in the bureaucratic company were born, with the argument of stimulating the creativity of the most qualified workers.
GENERAL ELECTRIC ELECTRONICS PARK (SYRACUSE, 1949). Image taken from USGW
BELLS LAB. Image taken from The Architects Newspaper
CORPORATE ESTATE
As we said, companies in the early 1950s discovered the success of research campuses and bet on extending this concept to their own administrative headquarters (headquarters). General Foods, Deere Company and Connecticut General Life Insurance Company stand out here for being the most symbolic projects of this new typology, which now takes the top executives of their companies out of the center of cities. The city is no place for white-collars. Once again, the careful landscape design is repeated to create a symbolic scenario of power in a natural environment idealized as icons of the great multinational capitalist company, in a tradition that continues to this day and, especially in the 1990s, saw its great expansion. In fact, the success of these forms, especially the Deere Company building, brought with it immeasurable architectural awards and the explosion of suburban corporate headquarters in the 1970s, the time when the headquarters of PepsiCo, American Can or Union Carbide were born. And, just as the first corporate campuses on the outskirts of San Francisco laid the seed for what we know today as Silicon Valley, the expansion of corporate headquarters in the outskirts of Boston was the trigger for another of one of the most well-known and thriving specialized areas of research today, Route 128.
DEERE & COMPANY ADMINISTRATIVE CENTER (ILLINOIS, 1964). Image taken from Gardenvisit
PEPSICO HEADQUARTERS (HARRISON, NEW YORK, 1970). Image taken from Glassdoor
MERCK WORLD HEADQUARTERS (NEW JERSEY, 1990). Image taken from Pappironworks
OFFICE PARK
And by evolution, we arrive at the great model of territorial expansion linked to the knowledge economy and professional services. The large office parks are the children of a new economic phase of the great corporate company, which in the 1960s began to expand its power through regional headquarters, but it is also the phase of the birth of what today we would call the first technological startups. and the consolidation of the service economy and the generalization of professional services to companies (marketing, lawyers, consulting, auditing,…). All these new needs for the organization of work call for space on the outskirts of cities, creating for this an extensive zoning process to accommodate rental office spaces in almost any city, benefiting from tax reductions and exemptions and taking advantage of the extension of the great post-war project to extend the interstate highway network.
Once again, the pattern of large urban spaces mixed with architectural modernity is repeated, proclaiming the advantages of leaving the confusing complexity of cities to settle on monothematic and functional developments around a symbolic setting of idealized nature and architectural modernity.
Other large spaces with a high concentration of R&D activities fall into this category as precursors, such as the first university park aimed at research, that of Stanford University, in San Francisco. (Stanford Research Park), but also Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, both urban occupation processes in a permanent open state that have been completed over the last four decades.
THE OFFICE PARK, MOUNTAIN BROOK (ALABAMA, 1951). Image taken from Wikimania em>
STANFORD INDUSTRIAL PARK (PALO ALTO, 1960). Image taken fromPalo Alto Historical Association
FROM THE UNITED STATES TO THE WORLD
Although the book is a historical survey of the birth of the idea of the suburban capitalist landscape in the United States, Mozingo ends his book with a review of how this idea has spread throughout the world. And it is that the model spread late in the world, more easily in the Anglo-Saxon countries, with a similar urban tradition and more fluid contact between their schools of architecture. But, after all, it also reached Europe. Mozingo highlights here how IBM was the first North American company to establish a research center outside the United States, and how in the early 1970s it opened the European regional headquarters in Portsmouth, and a few years before it had already done so in France. The European capital companies took a little longer, but Volvo, for example, opened its R&D center outside Goteborg in the early 1980s. And with it came the generalization that today we can find ourselves in any city, as we approach it by road and discover how its outer ring is dominated by a landscape of office developments, technology parks, and corporate headquarters.
The previous article I ended it with some reflections on the meaning of this historical process that has survived to this day. Beyond the interest in historical, architectural and landscape studies, the flight of companies from the center of cities at a certain moment has been of key importance in the development of the organization of work, in the definition of the company model predominant in recent decades, in the structuring of vital spaces and, in general, in the organization of economic processes . All children of their time, of which these urban developments are a reflection (and, also, in some way, their multipliers). But with the emergence of new ways of organizing work around non-centralized and bureaucratic schemes such as those offered by the digital society, will these developments continue to make sense for a long time?
Cover image corresponding to Microsoft.