A big black box
Interesting article in today’s Asbury Park Press about the Bell Labs building in Holmdel, where I worked for several years, which Lucent has recently decided to offer for sale. The building was designed by seminal modernist architect Eero Saarinen (who, interestingly, also designed the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, where my father worked as a young man), and according to the article in the Press, was home of some interesting architectural innovations. I always had mixed feeling about the building myself; there’s only one window office in the entire building, carved out in the 1970s for Bell Labs president Ian Ross up on the sixth floor (as designed, there weren’t any). The offices could feel kind of impersonal; I preferred some of the other buildings AT&T (pre-trivestiture) had in the area as a result. But at least there were individual offices, something that Lucent started to do away with in the late 1990s before the bubble burst. But it’s also a very impressive building.
I always felt that the siting of the building was brilliant. It’s hidden by trees until you reach the entrance by the giant transistor, at which point it appears off in the distance, a huge black monolith. As designed, the fountain in front of the building added to the mystique, shrouding the building in mist at first glance. It made for a very imposing first impression, much like the boss with a long office with a door at one end and a desk at the other, the sort of thing that makes for a long, awe-inspiring entrance. They don’t run the fountain these days, and haven’t for several years. The approach to the building is long enough that there was long an informal "game" where people would try to get their cars up to 100 mph on the approach. At least once in my years there, a car failed to negotiate the turn at the end of the approach and wound up in the fountain. And yet, for all the solidity the building projects from far away, once you get close to it, it almost disappears into the landscape and sky because of the mirrored glass. That’s a neat trick.
AT&T bought the Holmdel property in the 1920s. Before the iconic building was constructed in the early 1960s, the property had smaller buildings on it. One important scientific breakthrough there in those days was the development by Karl Jansky of the science of radioastronomy. A few years ago, a Bell Labs scientist researched through the archives and found exactly where Jansky’s pioneering research was done. Today, there’s a small replica of his antenna standing on the exact location of the original. Not far from the Holmdel building stands a much smaller building, home of the radio telescope where the first proof of the Big Bang was heard, some residual static from the expansion that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson couldn’t explain away any other way. You can hear a recording of the remnants of the Big Bang there.
There’s a lot of important scientific history involved with Bell Labs’ presence in Holmdel. I would be sorry to see it end. I’m pleased to see in the Press article that the town of Holmdel has no intention of letting homes be built on the property; 427 acres in the middle of Holmdel, one of the toniest communities in Monmouth County, would hold an awful lot of McMansions.
Posted at 11:26 PM
Man, I would have liked to have seen those photos. Poop on MediaInsights.com for stealing your photographs. :(
Posted by sis at 7:56 AM, July 18, 2005 [Link]