"Industrial Versailles": Eero Saarinen's Corporate Campuses for GM, IBM, and AT&T

Abstract

Eero Saarinen may be familiar name to architectural historians for his designs for Dulles Airport, the St. Louis Arch, and other late modernist landmarks. Yet his biggest commissions were for corporate laboratories for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories. In 1951 Fortune sent photographer to document GM's sprawling research campus, just beginning to take shape in suburban Detroit. The photographs capture what the editors called a new and serene integration of modern architecture and modern science and engineering. The GM Technical Center (1956), the IBM Thomas Watson Research Center (1961), and Bell Laboratories at Holmdel (1962) symbolized postwar ideology of corporate that emphasized basic and took the university as the appropriate model for organizing science. But as the people who worked in and managed these laboratories over the following decades would learn the hard way, R&D, in the sense of turning scientific inquiry into product and profit, does not nece...