Corporate office parks line America's highways like trees along a forest path. Big-box buildings of glass and steel huddle amid spindly shrubs and vast parking lots in ever-expanding suburbs outside nearly every city in the country. These are the places where the nation does business.
But America didn't always look like this. Prior to World War II, most corporations still clustered in the downtowns of major cities. After the war, a corporate exodus to the suburbs ensued. Their arrival, says Louise Mozingo, locked in sprawl as an entrenched feature of the American landscape.
Louise Mozingo
Photo by Marcus Wohlsen
Mozingo, an associate professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, has spent almost a decade studying the origins of American office parks and their elite cousins, the corporate campus and the corporate estate. She is currently the recipient of a 2005 Townsend Center Initiative Grant who is working on a book on the subject.
"I'm committed to reshaping the American landscape in a variety of more responsible ways," Mozingo says. "Part of what we need to do is understand how these landscapes emerge and how we can shift their direction."
Mozingo says America's suburban office parks and their more exclusive cousins, the corporate campus and the corporate estate, today can seem like a natural part of the landscape, so ubiquitous that no one imagines a world without them.
John Deere World Headquarters, Moline, Ill.
Photo by Louise Mozingo
But the specific designs of the first corporate estates in the late 1940s and early 1950s actually came about as the result of "very deliberate decisions," she says. Analyzing and critiquing the history of those decisions forms the heart of Mozingo's research.
After the war, flush with capital, corporations needed more space to house the growing bureaucracies necessary to run their ever-more decentralized organizations. Top research and development scientists demanded work environments that resembled universities. And with the advent of the Cold War, American corporations worried they'd become targets if they remained in cities. Moving to the suburbs offered ready solutions.
But Mozingo argues that the designs of these new corporate developments reflected more than purely logistical concerns.
Pepsico World Headquarters, Purchase, N.Y.
Photo by Louise Mozingo
During the Great Depression, corporations had an image problem, she says. Americans caught in the grip of economic crisis came to see big business as domineering, paternalistic, and less than democratic. The towering fortress-like skyscrapers and imposing urban factories occupied by most companies at the time helped reinforce these negative perceptions.
To rehabilitate the public's view of themselves, corporations looked to what Mozingo calls the lawn culture of the suburbs. Companies like General Foods and Bell swathed their new headquarters in greenery, with ponds and twisting driveways inspired by the great public parks of the nineteenth century. The pastoral mode carried with it connotations of both prestige and approachability.
But the friendly green façade masked a darker reality.
The corporate campus, corporate estate, and office park, Mozingo writes in a recent essay, "were the means by which the leaders of postwar capitalism fled the urban core: a vivid abandonment of the city center by the powerful, self-interested parties that keep cities going." Top management could isolate itself from labor and use pleasant landscaping to deflect attention from the "ugly results of managerial capitalism."
Among those ugly results, to hear Mozingo tell it, are the office parks of today.
A trained professional landscape architect herself, Mozingo admits an admiration for the willow-draped grounds of the John Deere, Inc., corporate estate in Moline, Ill. (The company's departure left downtown Moline decimated, she says.) PepsiCo World Headquarters in Purchase, N.Y., assembled a world-class contemporary sculpture garden on its property.
But the majority of look-alike office parks today indicate the complacency of corporate America and the landscape architecture profession.
"It's the same reason that the single family house has become the norm. We're creatures who are interested in familiar elements," says Mozingo, who's never worked in an office park and says she wouldn't want to. "Now it's just the standard. Particularly in tech companies, you don't work in anything else."
Still, she says, the era of the office park may soon come to an end. If it does, the change is as much likely to be the result of economic pressures as any new creative designs. As energy and land costs rise, office parks become more costly. And a new generation of creative professionals seems less excited about suburban life than their parents who raised them there.
What will the new office park look like? Mozingo says she hopes companies learn to condense, to build in the spaces between existing structures rather than pioneering new land. They should start, she says, by building on the parking lots.
"There's a lot of 'between' there," she says.
Nevertheless, she has no plans to take a crack at designing the office park of the future.
"My task is not to propose what the next office park is," she says. "My task is to understand why the office park is."
– Marcus Wohlsen