Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes

 

Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes, by Louise A. Mozingo, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011. Hardback, 315 pages.

 
Frank Edgerton Martin

 An earlier version of this book review appeared in Landscape Architecture magazine in 2012.

 Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes explores the orgins of today’s corporate enclaves through three alluring Anglo-American landscape ideals: the “estate,” the “campus” and the “park.” In writing this new chapter in landscape history, Louise Mozingo, a professor in landscape architecture at Berkeley, offers fascinating insights into overlapping stories of technical research, the military-industrial complex, gender roles in the workplace, fear of the city during the 1960s, and fragmenting effect of the automobile.

 Landscape architects and planners should read this book for many reasons, not the least of which is that leaders of the profession—ranging from the Olmsted Brothers office to Peter Walker—played important roles in designing virtually every project discussed over six chapters. Suburban history is a relatively new field for research, but much has already been written on the rise of housing, manufacturing, and retail commerce outside the urban core. Mozingo tells the less known story of the rise of corporate workplaces outside traditional downtowns and in separation from the infrastructure of factories where many of today’s global corporations such as GE began. She argues that “pastoral capitalism” is a uniquely American invention that came into full force in the 1940s after years of suppressed investment in new building.

The Rise of Managerial Capitalism and the Corporate Campus

 One spark for this move to the countryside can be traced to the rise of managerial capitalism beginning in the 1920s. “Rather than conferring position based on ownership or nepotism,” Mozingo claims a the outset, “corporations awarded management authority to a meritocracy of salaried, professional managers.” Thus, talent attraction and retention mattered. Corporate leaders came to believe that with increasing traffic and pollution in core cities, white-collar workers, scientists, and executives might be happier in greener pastures. Yet there were deeper fears that drove leaders of such companies as General Foods and Connecticut General Life to the suburbs—including a desire to separate office workers from unionized locations, a sometimes not so subtle desire to exclude minorities from the mainline workforce, and even fear of nuclear attack focused on city cores.

 The corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park are three built responses that Mozingo investigates. The corporate campus was largely invented at the Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Designed by the Olmsted Brothers in the 1930s and early 1940s, the project evoked a fairly traditional campus model of connecting buildings surrounding a central open space. In terms of sheer numbers of discoveries, we might consider Bell Labs one of the most historically significant corporate landscapes of the twentieth century. “By 1948,” Mozingo explains, “Bell Labs produced discoveries that sealed the interlinked reputations of its management, scientists, and site. Its scientists invented the transistor and the bit (the basic mathematical unit of electronic information) and fundamentally revolutionized electronic technology and, arguably, human existence.” Not bad for just a few years of operation.

 Pastoral Modernism: The Illusion of Aradia and Natural Systems

 In terms of corporate design audacity, the real leap into the future came to fruition in 1956 when General Motors opened its new Technical Center near Detroit to centralize numerous advanced operations on one campus. Eero Saarinen developed five complexes of buildings housing styling, engineering, process development and research along with the Technical Center’s administrative offices. Landscape architect Thomas Church sited four weeping willow islands in a 22-acre lake at the center of the campus. He also set out a restrained palette of linear bosques, rectangular lawns, and a forest of trees encircling the site.

 Mozingo provides a fine description of how the landscape complemented the buildings with contrapuntal vegetative patterns and reflective water. In one of her best passages, she writes that the “design result was cinematic, more art direction than urban design, exhibiting a supremely dynamic sense of space. In the huge site, dramatic vistas were oblique and did not oriented to culminating axial viewpoints.” This was a new kind of campus meant to be seen from the window of a car (preferably a GM car), a new kind of research city with soaring fountains and a metallic exhibit pavilion dome serving, perhaps, as a new kind of temple. 

 From here, the story moves to the great “corporate estates” of the Connecticut General Life campus designed by SOM and the later John Deere headquarters in Moline, Illinois—a collaboration of Saarinen and Hideo Sasaki. Spanning a gentle ravine, the Deere headquarters completely hides surface parking and makes the landscape itself the star of the experience. Initially, Deere’s leaders feared that their farmer customers would see the new setting as overly opulent. But, as visitorship to the model exhibit center grew, it was obvious that Saarinen’s pioneering use of Cor-Ten steel in the buildings and Sasaki’s integration of building and site sent the perfect message: Deere is a growing, high-tech international company that has not forgotten its grounding in midwestern agriculture.

 Revisiting the Googleplex

Corporate office parks grew out of early experiments by Stanford and other universities to develop sites for research partnerships near their campuses. By the 1970s, Atlanta was ringed by 39 of them and, as with many regions, they were the sites of the greatest growth in white-collar employment. Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, began in an office park that it ultimately took over. The mighty Google’s “Googleplex” is also set in an office park in Mountain Lake California.

 Life and death come fast to today’s technology companies; and many new facilities are designed with “exit strategies” in mind. The oldest of Google’s buildings date to 1997 when they were built as research and development facilities for the late SGI (Silicon Graphics Incorporated). As I read this background and viewed the Terraserver photo in chapter 6, a flash of recognition struck me. I visited this former SGI campus with its sharp angled plazas designed by SWA shortly after it opened order to write a feature story for Landscape Architecture magazine. SGI was thriving then and “Google” was not even a popular word, let alone a verb.

 Mozingo’s lasting message is that even as corporations are merging, vanishing, and evolving ever more quickly, our paradigms for corporate site plans are largely unchanged over the last sixty years. From Sprint near Kansas City to Pepsico in Purchase, New York, both of which I have also covered for Landscape Architecture, buildings are sited around courts, ringed by parking, and set off from the thin suburban growth by open lawns and berms of trees.

 

Corporate Solipsism

 Most headquarters today are entirely closed to the public yet provide a tranquilizing sense of peace for their employees even as they sometimes manage environmentally-destructive operations around the world. Almost fully-reliant on car commuting and set in campuses the size of small colleges, they are also highly resource-consumptive. Mozingo believes that we have descended from the pastoral landscapes for community betterment proposed by Olmsted to a new kind of quiet illusion that she calls “corporate solipsism.” She argues that corporations might “ask themselves whether an unquestioned nineteen-century taste for retreat and verdant isolation applied to the workplace is the way forward on a planet of perilously compromised resources.”

 But, this sounds more like a landscape architect’s sensible plea for reason than one that makes bottom-line sense to stockholders. Pastoral Capitalism could be much more forceful in its conclusions and provocations. The forces of secrecy and isolation that drive corporations behind green lawns are also those that inflamed the Occupy Wall Street movement. Lack of transparency and glaring social inequity cannot be concealed forever behind a nice façade, even if it is LEED certified.

 It has always been fairly easy to disparage suburban workplaces as “unsustainable” or “homogenous.” But a real critique can only happen when we begin to understand the interwoven stories of business and design innovation that created the pastoral capitalism we know today. Though far from complete, this book marks a beginning of such historic understanding.