Buildings onscreen

Observations on the two vibiest pieces of architectural entertainment in our times

I am famously behind the zeitgeist when it comes to mainlining movies and television, so forgive me if this feels like yesterday’s news. (In the case of The Brutalist, literally yesterday.) But I was chatting with my pal Eric Petschek, one of the sharpest-eyed, hardest-working photographers today, on the topic of the former Bell Labs in New Jersey and we had a few things to say. For Eric, the image is the message, and he’s kindly let me republish two sets of photos he took at the Eero Saarinen-designed corporate headquarters in New Jersey. This place is now incredibly famous, and not just because the large-scale restoration project by Alexander Gorlin (shot by Eric!) was on the cover of Architectural Record in 2020.

We are referring, of course, to Severance. Whether or not you’ve seen the show, sit with the following photos and consider what this building in this setting was meant to communicate to its midcentury office workers.

Bell Works, post-restoration by Alexander Gorlin Architects, photographed in 2020 by Eric Petschek.

The concept of a corporate campus—which was arguably perfected by architect Eero Saarinen, here in collaboration with his associates Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo and partners like Sasaki Walker & Associates—conveyed belief in the enterprise. The investment required to construct such an environment was not insignificant, and it was deployed strategically to “draw in the competitive labor market of the booming postwar economy and [create] a consolidated image [of a] a global corporation.” Even on a very basic level, to imagine having these views, and access to these surroundings and materials eight hours a day… It’s so wildly different than our present-day experience of work—which is diffuse, happening everywhere, nowhere specific, and all the time. That polar distance from our present reality at least partially explains our cultural fetishization of these office spaces. No?

Of course, a nice office isn’t rendered neutral good in the face of the patriarchy, class-based hierarchy, or corporate interests (which Severance skewers to extreme effect). But environmentally and experientially speaking, what’s the better alternative? A WFH chair stipend? Zoom? A middle seat in economy class? A co-working space? No thanks. I’ll take the gray granite built-in seating, black mirrored glass, soaring atrium, and acres upon acres of lake-dotted pastoral landscape.

Gallery: Bell Labs, photographed by Eric Petschek for August Journal, 2018

Eric in fact photographed Bell Labs twice: the first was in its pre-renovation state for August Journal’s New Jersey issue, images above.

A spread from Metropolis Magazine’s December 2013 cover story on preserving midcentury modern buildings for present-day usage.

This place is photographer catnip! Chris Payne paid a visit in 2014—before even a whiff of restoration—and the images are as intriguing as you’d expect. Background on Bell Labs and the entire photo set published on National Geographic.

Severance’s set designer Jeremy Hindle has cited both Jacques Tati's 1967 film Playtime and an actual building, the John Deere corporate headquarters in Moline, Illinois, as references. John Deere, another Saarinen project, was carried out by Saarinen’s successor Kevin Roche and is similar in scale to Bell Labs, though markedly different in materiality and tone. Deere is earthy and brawny, as befits a tractor manufacturer, and sports the first-ever use of CorTen steel. Antithetical to the Miesian feeling of Bell, Deere’s “exposed rivets and I-beams employed like a wooden balloon frame recall the anti-International Style advocated by Peter and Alison Smithson.”

Deere & Company Headquarters, Moline, Illinois, photographed by Balthazar Korab in 1964. All images via Library of Congress.

Random aside: I spent some times in the archives of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum archive in November, where I found mention of the John Deere HQ in a series of letters between Alexander Girard and O’Keeffe and Girard to Kevin Roche. In 1964, the year the building was completed, Girard was pitching Roche on hiring O’Keeffe for a mural commission on the project. The letters described a concept for the mural: her cloud series, which “capture[d] the endless expanses of clouds she had observed from airplane windows during trips all over the world.” Her clouds currently reside in their most monumental form on an 8x24 feet canvas at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In any case, her fee of $60,000* for two walls—“about a quarter of what she normally would charge”—was too much for Deere president William Hewitt, and the commission never came to fruition. (Girard, for his part, did complete a 180-foot installation entailing an object collage of Deere historical ephemera.)

Maybe better this is visible to the public at a world-class museum instead of in a private building in the rural Midwest, BUT, woulda been cool. Sky above Clouds IV by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1965, via The Art Institute of Chicago.

*Do the conversion into today’s dollars, I dare you

As Roman Mars noted in the latest episode of 99% Invisible, it would be journalistic malpractice not to comment on The Brutalist and its nebulous relationship to actual architecture, including brutalism. The most obvious real-person corollary to the film’s protagonist, László Tóth, is Marcel Breuer*—though as well-noted by the critics: not really.

As for the architecture? You don’t see much, in truth—a model showing how the path of the sun would illuminate a cross on the community center’s altar, some slabs of concrete during construction, and some later drawings of buildings during a postscript set, amusingly, at the very first Venice Biennale in 1980. (Amusing because the entire point of the Biennale was to showcase international architecture after the modern movement. It was a devotedly Postmodern architectural exhibition featuring the likes of Charles Jencks and Aldo Rossi. The idea of lionizing Brutalism, a style that had peaked less than ten years prior… no.)

Regarding the work of Tóth’s shown at said Biennale, Edwin Heathcote writes:

It turns out that AI was used here too, to create a back catalogue, to save time for the production designers. Yet this is the climax, the moment we see what Tóth has bequeathed the world and most of it looks like, well, a multi-story parking garage for an early 1990s Minnesota mall. It is dire. Architectural Intelligence this is not.

There is a whole separate conversation to had about the film quality and cinematography. I’m no expert in this regard, but to me, it’s fun to pick up on visual reference points (such as Edward Burtynsky’s photos of the Carrara marble quarries—an obvious homage). And perhaps the VistaVision format is a gimmick, but I don’t know, if I’m committing to 3.5 hours of CINEMA, it better look amazing. And it did!

Let us also not forget that this film—epic in intention, and, despite its plot failings and quibbles over architectural history, epic in execution—cost a mere $10 million to make. (Megalopolis, the Coppola flop, cost $120M.) I heard from someone who met the production designer, Judy Becker, that the most expensive part of the set was shipping the Breuer-esque tubular steel furniture shown in part one from the US to Budapest.

• Bay Area landmark and erstwhile West Coast HQ for Birkenstock is for sale in Marin. It’s been unoccupied since 2020, and was originally designed by John Savage Bolles as a distribution center for publisher McGraw-Hill in 1962. [Editor’s note: New Ground Condition HQ????] There is some *excellent* detail on the construction details—”hyperbolic paraboloid curved roof with seven rows of 35 clamshell pyramids”—via the spray foam insulation installer here.

• I am really fascinated by the upcoming collaboration [update: it’s online] between Morris & Co. and Zara Home, given that a global fast fashion conglomerate is about as far from the Arts & Craft movement as it gets. But it has made me reconsider Zara Home… The collection styling has been excellent lately (they’ve worked with Ashley Helvey on creative direction, a sure sign) but the product quality? No idea. I’m tempted to order a few things from the latest “Editions” drop and find out.

• I feel like the real William Morris would approve of Jesse Parris-Lamb’s Grette ottoman, set on a dovetailed base in solid maple, painted in olive and upholstered in a fabric that blends fabric and geometric in non-retro, but distinctly Arts & Crafts, way.

• Robella Awake was on NPR’s Morning Edition earlier this month discussing his new book "A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects."

• A new mathematical proof for solving the “moving sofa” optimization problem [Quanta]

• The People’s Graphic Design Archive has digitized the full run of Mimi Zeiger’s IYKYK architecture ‘zine, loud paper [A/N]

• Congrats to the team behind San Francisco Review of Whatever, who just launched their first issue. The editorial lineup is perfectly Bay: tennis, why does San Francisco dress like that, the shape of clouds.

• Not design-related, but two things that landed this week in a maelstrom of atrocious news: a consideration of Andrea Dworkin upon the re-issue of her 1983 book Right-Wing Women, and this list of 30 “lonely but beautiful actions you can take right now which probably won't magically catalyze a mass movement but that are still wildly important.”

Next time on Ground Condition: quonset huts, the best new house at The Sea Ranch, and more.

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