"Industrial Versailles" - Eero Saarinen's corporate campuses for GM, IBM, and AT&T

Eero Saarinen may be a familiar name to architectural historians for his de signs for Dulles Airport, the St. Louis Arch, and other late modernist land marks. Yet his biggest commissions were for corporate research laboratories for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories. In 1951 Fortune sent a pho tographer to document GM's sprawling "research campus." just beginning to t ake shape in suburban Detroit. The photographs capture what the editors cal led "a new and serene integration" of modern architecture and modem science and engineering. The GM Technical Center (1956), the IBM Thomas Watson Res earch Center (1961), and Bell Laboratories at Holmdel (1962) symbolized a p ostwar ideology of corporate research that emphasized basic research and to ok the university as the appropriate model for organizing science, But as t he people who worked in and managed these laboratories over the following d ecades would learn the hard way, R&D, in the sense of turning scientific in quiry into product and profit, does not necessarily thrive in an "Industria l Versailles."