BEYOND CORPORATE MODERNISM

Grace Ong Yan guest-edited and contributed to the DocomomoUS newsletter, "Beyond Corporate Modernism."  Contributing editors and essays included Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen on Kevin Roche, Stuart Leslie on Aerospace Modernism, Meredith Bzdak on I.M. Pei & Partners' design for the Johnson and Johnson Headquarters, and Angela Pedrao on Marcel Breuer's IBM headquarters in Boca Raton.  Ong Yan also contributed the essay, "Soft-Selling Aluminum: Minor Yamasaki's Reynolds Metals Sale Headquarters."   

Corporate modernism was one of the greatest achievements of American architecture.  In its prime examples, including Pietro Belluschi’s Equitable Building and SOM’s Lever House, modern architecture and its image served as brands— unique and identifying designs— for many corporations well into the post-World War II era.  Modern architecture symbolized not only the power and prestige, but also the progressive spirit that corporations sought to convey to the world.  

From the last years of the 1950s to the early 1980s, corporate modernism changed in a myriad of important ways.  In some instances, it became more expressive—sculpturally, formally and structurally— with ornament resurfacing during this time.  In other ways, architects continued to emphasize minimalism, and in yet other ways, corporate modernism’s expression was mute and denied symbolism. To be clear, this newsletter is not about postmodern corporate headquarters like the memorable AT&T (Philip Johnson) or Institute for Scientific Information (Venturi Scott Brown) corporate headquarters, but the fascinating, and at times elusive, evolution of modern architecture for corporate clients in the decades before postmodernism. 

The five outstanding essays in this newsletter present various stages of “Beyond Corporate Modernism.” From intensifying corporate modernism’s overtly symbolic nature to its later unraveling, all of these case studies offer rich insights into the importance of corporate modernism after what we tend to think of as its quintessential historical moment.

We start in 1959 in Southfield, Michigan with the Reynolds Metals regional sales headquarters, where Minoru Yamasaki designed a spectacular showcase of aluminum for his client.  In “Soft-selling Aluminum: Minoru Yamasaki’s Reynolds Metals sales headquarters,” Grace Ong Yan shows how Yamasaki’s ornamental “new formalism” reinvigorated corporate modernism by conspicuously displaying the corporate client’s identity, and at the same time, presented a provocative challenge to modernism.  The next essay highlights a series of west coast corporate headquarters described as “aerospace modernism.” In “Southern California’s Aerospace Modernism,” Stuart Leslie recounts the histories of several corporate headquarters for aerospace corporations, designed by William Pereira, Charles Luckman, and Albert C. Martin, Jr. What began as a space-age architecture of desire, ends with brutalist expression, designed, as Leslie puts it, “with a Vietnam War era bunker mentality of the military-industrial complex.” 

By the late 1960s, corporate modernism took on a fluid, sculptural-structural expression with Marcel Breuer’s IBM corporate office in Boca Raton, Florida. In “Big Blue and the Concrete Wave: IBM Corporate Office in Boca Raton,” Angela Pedrao explains how Breuer’s design “raised eyebrows with the heavy boldness of the use of concrete.” From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, postmodern architecture for corporate headquarters was at its height.  Despite postmodernism’s influence, modernism continued to evolve and maintain its relevance. The work of I.M. Pei offers insight into corporate modernism during this period. In Meredith Bzdak’s essay, “Learning from our Late-Modern Legacy,” she details the complex’s minimal, refined surface and sculptural form of I.M. Pei & Partners’ design for the Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The final study focuses on architect, Kevin Roche, the successor, with John Dinkeloo, of Eero Saarinen’s practice. As Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen writes in “Kevin Roche—The Favorite Architect of Corporate America,” Roche’s cBeyond Corporate Modernismorporate work, demonstrated by the College Life Insurance Company and Union Carbide headquarters, in Indianapolis, Indiana and Danbury, Connecticut, stands as an example of a new headquarters paradigm that had shifted away and even against symbolism and corporate image. 

By exploring the architecture “beyond corporate modernism,” this newsletter has brought together some much-needed research.  My hope is that this collection of exceptional essays will instigate proactive preservation and further scholarship of this important body of architectural work. 

                                                                                                 Grace Ong Yan, guest editor