Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  The Seagram Building—the original “black box.” Ezra Stoller, ESTO

  The interiors of the building had been designed chiefly by Philip Johnson, one of Mies’s greatest promoters in the United States (he had helped Mies secure the commission by speaking with Phyllis Lambert, the architecturally astute and informed daughter of Seagram’s president). Johnson had followed a curious trajectory since mounting the International Style exhibit in 1932. He had quit his job and attempted to become a populist opponent of the New Deal; he also indulged a fondness for Nazism to an extraordinary degree, traveling to Germany and following the Wehrmacht to Poland. “We saw Warsaw burn,” he wrote in a cheerful letter. “It was a stirring spectacle.”70 Returning to architecture after the United States entered the war, he was publicly sorry for his actions, as of course he had to be. He retained, however, a unique attitude toward the style he had promoted, his rebellious sense of taste imbuing Mies’s classical modernism with emotional force and theatricality. An art collector, Johnson had designed reception and conference areas to display priceless art: Mirós, Picassos, Rodins.71 He had conceived of the spectacular lighting for the building, and had insisted on a venetian-blind system that permitted only three positions, in order to display the blazing interior at night. Johnson also designed the Four Seasons restaurant that occupied one of the building’s wings: rich with wood walls and overhung with shimmering Richard Lippold sculptures, it instantly became the city’s premier spot for power brokers—the theater of corporate power at the base of American business’s architectural expression.

  Though the building had used inordinately expensive materials, making it still richer and statelier than any of its rivals (its bronze mullions could be polished only with lemon oil), Seagram brought to completion the possibilities of standardization inherent in the modernist skyscraper. Somewhat inadvertently it spawned the first of the innumerable “black boxes” that would take over the business districts of American cities everywhere. “What makes Mies such a great architect is that he is so easy to copy,” Johnson is supposed to have quipped some years after Seagram. Critics would claim a special place for buildings like Lever and Seagram, arguing that their breakthroughs had little to do with the inferiority of the copies built by speculators and designed by engineers rather than architects. But for the sidewalk viewer, these “original” buildings often look the same as all the rest, like icebergs melting into an undifferentiated sea of glass. Seagram was a monument, a technical masterpiece, and an aestheticizing of what was fundamentally an architecture of corporate bureaucracy. Ultimately, it was an office building, and it spawned office buildings like it—the speculative returns on offices along Park Avenue promising more revenue than apartments. “New York’s midtown has many places with intensive daytime use that go ominously dead at night,” Jane Jacobs would point out.72 Refracting the sentiment against the black boxes, the director Stanley Kubrick in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey used a Seagram-like black monolith as the symbol of a future in which men would be controlled by their machines. Already by 1960, Mies was said to be curiously contrite. When asked by Arthur Drexler, then the curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, how he spent his day, Mies responded, “We get up in the morning, and we sit on the edge of the bed and we think ‘What the hell went wrong?’ ”73

  A middle manager’s office in the Seagram Building (1958). Ezra Stoller, ESTO

  5

  ORGANIZATION MEN AND WOMEN

  Success in industry and commerce requires a lot of stamina, yet industrial and commercial activity is essentially unheroic in the knight’s sense—no flourishing of swords about it, not much physical prowess, no chance to gallop the armored horse into the enemy, preferably a heretic or heathen— and the ideology that glorifies the idea of fighting for fighting’s sake and of victory for victory’s sake understandably withers in the office among all the columns of figures.

  —JOSEPH SCHUMPETER, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy1

  If you wanted to see signs of the paroxysms of affluence that seized the United States after World War II, there were few better places to look than the country’s offices. Looking back at the offices of mid-century America, you might think the office worker had reached the pinnacle of comfort and prestige. What had started as a dank cavern, with towers of files crowded everywhere like dark stalagmites, had by the 1950s become clean and blindingly lit from within. Around the serried rows of L-shaped desks in the steno pool were offices partitioned by glass; these were filled with couches, desks made of mahogany and sometimes topped with marble, lounge chairs, and ottomans, all done up by the very best names in American design—Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, George Nelson. Inspired by the wilder reaches of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art (or, maybe, vice versa), bolder colors began to spread around offices, from the sea-green or whiskey-dark glass panels of the curtain wall to the pastel baby blues and salmon pinks of the partition doors. Air-conditioning blasted newly wide offices into an icy temperateness.

  The luxury never stopped. Take the elevator up to the executive suites on the top floors, and you would find an extraordinary lavishing of care and detail, snugly insulating the top brass from the ricocheting clacking of the typewriter pools below. The film Executive Suite (1954), about the struggle for power facing a furniture manufacturer following the death of its CEO, dramatized this difference precisely: when a visitor to the company stops on the steno floor to let someone step into the elevator, we are overwhelmed by a wave of typewriter noise and a roar of conversation; when he arrives at the top floor, the corresponding silence is surreal. He enters a carpeted space decorated in neo-Gothic arches and columns, as solemn as a monastery. Devotion to business had become a sort of religion.

  Executive suites crowning skyscrapers weren’t the only symbol of a powerful America; the office didn’t just expand vertically. In those years, many companies began to follow thousands of white Americans out of the cities toward the greener pastures of suburbia. At the peak of American industrial strength—by the late 1940s the country’s businesses controlled 60 percent of global industrial production—relocating to the suburbs seemed to offer a way for business, and the office workers who made up business, to cope with rapid growth and change, much as the organic motifs in Chicago skyscrapers had mollified the potential coldness of business architecture. Downtowns had also steadily lost their appeal to businesses. Cities had been overrun by cars, and offices by congestion; the size of corporate staff had doubled between 1942 and 1952, but there was no corresponding increase in office space. General Foods, in 1921, leased space in a single Manhattan office building. By 1945, its thirteen hundred staff members occupied multiple floors over three separate buildings, an extremely inefficient arrangement. Three years later, it was scouting for new locations in the suburbs.2

  Some less sanguine reasons prompted the corporate exodus. Many white Americans were alarmed by more and more people of color moving into their cities. “New York is becoming an increasingly Negro and Puerto Rican city,” Fortune reported. “Some companies are reluctant to hire a large proportion of Negro and Puerto Rican help.”3 What corporations wanted instead were white, educated, middle-class women—who, they believed, were increasingly easy to find in suburbs. So, too, did the presence of urban industry, with its contingents of unionized workers, begin to frighten the executives. Fortune suggested that corporations were moving to the suburbs “in the hope that this will reduce friction … between unionized workers and unorganized office personnel.”4 And there was one more fear peculiar to the climate of the postwar era: the threat of nuclear war. Especially after 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb and American civil defense spending and research increased accordingly, central business districts were seen as dangerous. Each executive of a corporation seeking an escape from New York to Westchester County privately revealed in a survey “that, among other things, [he] wanted to avoid target areas.”5 The city, increasingly perceived to be dirty and c
rowded, beset by labor agitation and race riots, had lost its charm. Far from the gray and beige towers of downtown one could find green hills and false lakes—“nature” (as well as an easier-to-enforce ethnic, class, and gender uniformity). The suburbs were signs of health, contemplation, repose—in a word, security. Green, in mid-century America, was good.

  Among the earliest examples of the suburban office park—and still, in the memory of many, a model—was AT&T’s Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It had been driven out of downtown chiefly because of the nature of its particular research, especially into acoustics, which needed more quiet than New York’s downtown could offer. In hunting for new space, AT&T overcame the objections of suburban residents by presenting the civilized credentials of their managers. They cemented a new zoning law that would allow for “laboratories devoted to research, design and/or experimentation”—the first such law in the country and one that opened up the suburbs for more such corporate campuses. Not just a few observers felt that Bell resembled the bucolic pastures of universities like nearby Princeton. “At Bell Labs, Industrial Research Looks like Bright College Years,” ran the headline of a 1954 BusinessWeek article.6 And like many American universities, it was isolated and surrounded by gates. The buildings were low and boxy; fenced in by greenery and a heavily secured entrance, its researchers faced no distractions except from the inside.

  Unlike on a university campus, however, all the various buildings were connected via long corridors. As a result, everyone was deliberately placed in the way of everyone else. Labs were separated from offices; in order to return to their office, or to get to the cafeteria, physicists ran into chemists who ran into mathematicians who ran into developers.7 Here was the origin of what later generations of designers would call a “serendipitous encounter”—unexpected collisions between people on otherwise totally different sides of a company, thanks to the soft coercion and subtle manipulations of architecture (a precursor as well to the “nudge” effect prevalent in behavioral economics). Still, the designers of Bell Labs took into account (as many offices today do not) the other side of this coin—space for quiet, self-directed thought. At Bell Labs, pay and job security were divorced from productivity—the goal was to invent, not to meet an arbitrary deadline—and the work space was accordingly apportioned between social and private areas. Even generous common areas enjoyed floor-to-ceiling windows, for views of the artificial landscape; it was space for individual contemplation as well as for socializing and casual discussion.8 And Bell Labs engaged in a stronger kind of coercion as well, in ensuring rigorous entry requirements for people who worked in the lab: as BusinessWeek put it, “All this freedom, this almost relaxed freedom, seems a little at odds in the family of Mother Bell whose business communications empire is the largest nonfinancial company in the world … Partly the Freedom is illusory. The lab has firm plans and knows precisely what it wants … Over the years men have been meticulously selected and precisely trained. Men chosen to fit the mold will fall into the desired pattern without any pressure from the mold itself.”9 The quiet pastoral research facility, with its “relaxed” and “illusory” freedom, eventually bore fruit: by 1948, scientists in its offices had invented the transistor and the “bit” (the unit of electronic information), two fundamental pieces of technology that merit the otherwise overused term “revolutionary.”

  Seeking the Bell effect (in 1958, by which point it employed forty-two hundred employees, Fortune called Bell Labs, with not too much hyperbole, “the world’s greatest industrial laboratory”),10 other companies began relocating to the suburbs. Even more iconic, architecturally, than Bell Labs was the headquarters for the insurance company Connecticut General designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), the highly organized and powerful firm that had built Lever House. It was perhaps the most considered and thoroughly planned building since Wright’s Larkin Building; there wouldn’t be an equivalent in the United States until the era of dot-com campuses. Set in three hundred rolling acres just outside Hartford, Connecticut, it consisted mainly of a long, expansive three-story office surrounded by a moat: a sort of white-collar castle. The floor was wide open, with demountable partitions easily sliding into the modular ceiling (and out of it, when people needed to be shifted around), which was itself illuminated panel by panel, an analogue to the pattern of the curtain wall. As if to point out the sheer American pluck even more strongly, the interior furnishings—from doors to lockers—were bright with red, white, yellow, orange, and blue patterning, suggestive of farmhouses and sunsets and the American flag. Every furniture product was scaled to a module; desks and partitions,chests and cabinets, were proportioned to line up perfectly and to be separated and recombined flexibly. Though the building imposed itself heavily on the surrounding landscape, reshaping it to its will, inside virtually nothing was permanent.

  Connecticut General: the pastoral corporation. Ezra Stoller, ESTO

  Behind the conception of the interior lay one of the most formidable architectural minds of the twentieth century, Florence Schust Knoll. Born in Michigan to a Swiss-immigrant father and an American mother, Knoll studied design and architecture with the great architects of the age, Eliel Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe among them. But her innovation—as intelligent as it was obvious—was to push architectural knowledge, otherwise limited to shaping the interior space, into planning interior space. In other words, Knoll planned a layout for a company as rigorously and thoroughly as architects responded to a client’s general needs for the building as a whole. The idea is elementary now, but before Knoll got into the furniture and planning business, there were hardly any furniture companies, let alone architecture firms, that considered the office as an entire organism. Businessmen often hired their wives’ interior decorators to handle their offices; furniture for the open floor came from a catalog and usually followed other precedents. Without conscious planning, conspicuously modern buildings on the outside often contained musty, stuffy, or unintentionally retro environments on the inside. Knoll changed all that. Together with her husband, Hans Knoll, she had become the most successful purveyor of the “Bauhaus approach” to interior design—namely, the idea (following the Bauhaus school of Weimar Germany) that superior design should be manufactured through industrial means for a wider public. She had achieved considerable success mass-producing modernist designs, such as Mies’s tilted, leather-backed Barcelona chair, as well as Eero Saarinen’s white, sinuous Womb chair with its sunken seat (which became doubly famous when it made it into one of Norman Rockwell’s portraits of “traditional” American life for the Saturday Evening Post). She had made it normal—even positively American—for companies to use the best in European modernist design in piecing together their offices.

  When she was hired to design the interior of the CBS Building in 1952, she formed the Knoll Planning Unit, which analyzed a client’s space requirements and took responsibility for handling furniture, mechanical equipment, colors, and fabrics, as well as general art and design for the office.11 Knoll’s signature move was to use the “paste-up” in presentations to clients. Usually a black cardboard sheet to which a designer could affix fabrics and swatches, the paste-up was a common tool in fashion and set design; Knoll translated these “feminine” arts into the male-dominated realm of architecture and design.12 (She insisted on referring to herself as a designer rather than an interior decorator—at once professionalizing her discipline and rendering its gendered connotations moot.) The paste-up made color and texture more vivid and tactile. The actual results were warm and domestic. Many observers would note that the lounge areas for her projects resembled comfortable modern living rooms. Knoll helped render modern office environments more human; her work was one of the elements that helped transform modernism itself from a European avant-garde tactic into the symbol of the new “concerned parent” style of American corporate capitalism.

  The partnership of Knoll and SOM had produced an office environment more bucolic and cozy than nearly any a
round, but it would take more, the executives of Connecticut General thought, to draw people out from urban settings to the “country.” To attract the mostly female staff away from New York, where the original headquarters were located and where most of the staff lived, the campus offered a bevy of amenities: swimming pools, sunbathing facilities, a snack and soda bar, shuffleboard courts, a Ping-Pong table, a card room, a game room, a lounge for noontime meditation, a lending library, services for dry cleaning and shoe repair, as well as flower and grocery delivery, twelve bowling alleys, two softball diamonds, four tennis courts, six horseshoe pits, and a large cafeteria offering cheap, sometimes free food.13 Like an off-site Katie Gibbs school, it offered classes in languages and singing—as well as (a bit less like a Katie Gibbs school) automobile repair, one of the most popular. A four-hundred-seat auditorium was available for amateur theatricals and musical performances. Buses carried people to and from train stations and even farther afield. Women accustomed to active urban lives began to lead substantially more sedentary ones; they reportedly began to gain weight in their first year. Calorie counts were accordingly posted for the meals.14 Even the biological lives of its workers had become a subject of keen interest to the corporation.