LOCATING WORKPLACE

Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: The MIT Press, 2011) ("By the mid-twentieth century the trenchant correlation of greenness with goodness held sway in American culture. The introduction of corporate landscapes into the pastoral suburbs usefully subsumed the capitalist enterprise into the pastoral suburb's implied moral order. After all, the broad public viewed the new phalanx of giant corporations as suspect, even threatening. As the business historian Alfred Chandler put it, the majority of Americans found the 'concentrated economic power such enterprises wielded violated basic democratic values.' heir acceptance as part of the pastoral landscape embodied Leo Marx's assertion that the American pastoral ideal mediated 'the moral ambiguity, the intertwining of constructive and destructive consequences, which are generated by technological progress' and thus quelled skepticism in the moment, if not beyond. In this time, the appropriation of the pastoral landscape by American business became a useful trope for corporate capitalism." Id. at 11. From the bookjacket: "By the end of the twentieth century, America's suburbs contained more office space than its central cities. Many of these corporate workplaces were surrounded, somewhat incongruously, by verdant vista of broad lawns and leafy trees. In Pastoral Capitalism, Louise Mozingo describes the evolution of those central (but often ignored) features of postwar urbanism in the context of the modern capitalist enterprise." A central concept in this book is that of 'managerial capitalism,' with its need(/) for a design that reinforced, while at the same time appearing to soften, the hierarchical managerial structure of the the American corporation. It will be interesting to see how, in this more knowledge based capitalist economy--which must value innovation and creativity (which almost by definition go against the grain of hierarchy as the new overthrows the established at a fair brisk pace--corporate offices will be designed. It would seem that the pastoral model is inappropriate, and the more urban (campus) model increasingly preferred. More work will be done in the local coffee shot with Wi-Fi connection, than in some suburban office complex. Young, high-skilled minds will want the excitement of the urban environment, and the they will want their work and non-work lives to be more closely integrated both physically and psychological. The suburban setting will be a disconnect for them.).