American Pastoral
When companies needed more space, they moved to the suburbs, placing headquarters and R&D facilities in office parks and on lush campuses. But we’re all paying a price now.
By Matthew Budman
Matthew Budman is editor of TCB Review. After a lifetime in the suburbs, he recently moved to Greenwich Village.
Once upon a time, big corporations put offices downtown and factories outside of town, and that was pretty much it. Then, beginning in the 1940s, as expanding roadways and cheaper cars and housing sent middle-class Americans to new suburban neighborhoods, companies began purchasing enormous tracts of land, with rolling hills and sparkling ponds and piney woods. And upon that land they built gleaming complexes of concrete and glass, situating their white-collar workers in the most desirable locations imaginable.
Of course, there’s more to the story, says Louise Mozingo, author of Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (MIT). Corporate campuses might be lush and verdant, but they’re expensive, inaccessible to many or even most workers, and incredibly resource-consumptive. “The idea,” she says, “is that you’ll look out your window and see green. I’m not saying it’s not appealing. I’m saying it might not be appropriate for a workplace in a post-peak-oil world.”
Mozingo lives in San Francisco; she spoke from her office at U.C. Berkeley, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning.
I lived in central New Jersey for nine years and was always fascinated by the sprawling corporate campuses along Route 1—just acres and acres of grass, with trees and ponds. They seemed like lovely places to work.
Indeed, if you didn’t mind driving fifteen minutes to find somewhere to eat lunch.
How did you become interested in corporate suburban life?
I’m a landscape architect by trade, and I worked for two firms that designed these kinds of landscapes. That’s how I became cognizant that these campuses were very important projects for landscape architects in the postwar era, in the same way that park design had been in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And eventually, I realized that people use imprecise terms such as corporate campuses, office parks, and technology parks, but that nobody quite understood these projects— and that nobody had studied them.
When did companies start leaving cities?
It started much earlier than people think. The first plan for a corporate campus was in 1929, for the AT&T division Bell Labs. The company bought land in Summit, New Jersey; they hired the Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts; and they came up with plans that looked like a classic college quadrangle. The Depression hit, so AT&T didn’t build it right away, but they had the land and the plan, and in the late 1930s they revised it to emphasize the buildings and the technology. Bell Labs moved there in 1942, and the site became a fundamental model for everything that followed.
In the way that American managerial capitalism was invented in the 1920s and then became the model for most corporations globally, American companies developed a new management structure in that period. They created a new middle-management division: research and development. And companies needed new facilities for R&D—not downtown, where the CEO might be, and not in the factory, where scientists had typically been.
How did things work out in Summit, New Jersey?
Summit was a very genteel area, a classic railroad suburb with no large commercial enterprises. The locals went ballistic over AT&T moving in, since they assumed the facility would be a factory and were a little worried about the workers being blue-collar. The president of Bell Labs assured people it would not be a factory, but to make sure, Summit created the country’s first research-and-development zoning. The buildings were surrounded by a huge, designed landscape; it looked like a campus, so people begin to call it a campus, which was appropriate: These companies were competing with universities for scientists; they were trying to entice them into the capitalist enterprise.
