I find office parks fascinating and creepy, and inherently off-putting; I feel the same about highways. Both of them go hand in hand as specific fabulations of capitalism. My interest in office parks and highways is equal parts intrigue and disgust, wrapped in a love of mid-century modern. It started initially because I got to visit a few office parks for an old job. I transitioned from working as a photographer and perma-freelancer to full time tech employee in 2015, when I worked for IBM Watson as a design researcher.
Office parks feel strange, in a way that feels both specific and difficult to describe, perhaps because they feel as planned as theme parks and also extremely banal as a regular office. Every single office park I’ve visited, regardless of the company and location, all have an inherent sameness, like airports or bus terminals. IBM’s office parks on the outside looked quite different, but inside were all the same: the same furniture, the same art and the same IBM branded Sharpies. Some office parks were new buildings, adjacent to other office parks, like Austin, sitting on the outskirts of town but surrounded by Shake Shacks and other chain restaurants. Some were in high rises (though, I guess that’s just technically a building), and some were older, mid-century modern style buildings built in the ’60s near small little townships and villages surrounded by pebbled walkways that were en vogue in the 70s, and trees and trees and trees. People were there, too, but like every office park we didn’t really speak to each other, just a nod and hello while we went on our way.
Part of what I find intriguing, and off-putting about office parks is the separation and isolation they have from actual communities. That’s also what is unsettling about Lumen’s set design; the company within the TV show Severance. I watch Severance with a kind of obsessive nostalgia, and feel simultaneous creepiness and comfort given my history of working in office parks. That’s part of the perversion. Office parks are strange, and office parks up in the Northeast seem older, vintage, and their now ‘outdated’ design lends to the kind of horror movie ethos as untouched relic, still replete with pastoral capitalism. The architectural design of office park buildings, particularly Severance’s which is filmed at Bell Labs, designed by Eero Saarinen in the late 1950, felt of that era. Juxtaposed to Hulu’s also creepy miniseries on technology, Devs, with its forest-like maze of a campus, floor to ceiling windows, and all the accruement expected of a FAANG company, both settings are deeply unsettling and creepy but in their own specific ways.
Watching Severance and Archive 81 (RIP- canceled before it’s time), I was transported immediately back to my 2015. So much of the IBM lore is rooted in design (even if that’s not directly apparent from the outsider) and its office parks are a part of that lore. As an IBM-er (as we were called), I got to visit a few different campuses on business trips. The design of the offices, including the amenities, is one way to entice employees to join a company, but equally important, the design of the office helps reinforce the lore of the company itself.
This was particularly true with IBM. Inside the company when you’re being onboarded and inducted, design is revered in the job materials (at least, the materials I, as a designer, were given), and the design of the office is similar to any other tech company. Free and low cost snacks abound, bright colors but with a minimal aesthetic. There’s a kind of specific through-line of design that you see physically and then within the design materials you access as an employee, be it presentation templates, the typography used in employee only documents, and the look and feel of the products. It’s a kind of meticulous intentionality, and this was also prevalent within the on-boarding, but this kind of meticulous intentionality was mirrored in Severance as well.
I traveled up to Armonk campus from New York via train, during my first week onboarding. The campus sat back, hidden behind a winding road and blanket of trees. Inside, I sat with business executives, hardware designers and research scientists, none of whom I would see again during my tenure at IBM. We signed documents, got keycards and watched the same 15 minute video on the history of IBM (leaving out WWII). We were told how important design was, that Ray and Charles Eames designed an IBM pavilion for the 1964’s World’s Fair, and created numerous design exhibitions for the company. Eames chairs were frequently spotted at different office parks, and the work of Paul Rand, Saarinen and the Eames are still frequently referenced in current IBM design materials. These kinds of tactics worked as a part of on-boarding, and as a form of induction, inclusion and seduction. At the time, I found this intoxicating. Designers want to know that design matters. And that includes the office perks, and the office parks. IBM’s office in New York had a Jeff Koons balloon sculpture in the lobby. Not my style, but it still served to underscore this truism: design matters here, and no cost would be spared when it came to making that clear.
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