I did enjoy the building. Rather a lot of interesting stuff was thought up there and it was humbling.
I like that the hallway was on the outside and hallways radiated out (and everyone had offices with frosted glass). It was a pain running pipes though as standard bend didn't quite work for that radius.
There were also I.M. Pei's pyramids in Somers which led to some really ridiculous triangular rooms in the corners. The IBM building at 590 Madison is also quite striking architecturally.
The conference center in the Palisades in NY was also quite striking. Not so much because of specific architectural features but of how it blended into the landscape and was populated with all sorts of old IBM equipment as displays. (It was also populated with Token Ring long after that went non-mainstream with the result that the rooms had signs warning you not to plug in your Ethernet jacks or your network connection would be fried.)
I’m not a nostalgic person, but for some reason I wish irrationally that that Murray Hill building could be preserved as is. I read so much about of it in the history of computing, and just like (from the pictures) the building interior itself so much I just feel like I missed out on some thing not to have been there myself.
I was lucky enough to work at Microsoft in building 2, one of 8 matching buildings from the mid-80s, and it absolutely felt special at the time. In my imagination, it had some of the same vibe as Bell Labs did in its heyday. I was on the Visual Studio team, and great things were happening. I knew it. I also knew that team was special.
No one else in Visual Studio seemed that interested – they were just too busy and I think maybe too young to get it.
Buildings 1-8 were demolished few years ago, but I had been gone from the company for decades by that time. I did grieve a bit.
I’m not a nostalgic person, but for some reason I wish irrationally that that Murray Hill building could be preserved as is. I read so much about of it in the history of computing, and just like (from the pictures) the building interior itself so much I just feel like I missed out on some thing not to have been there myself.
I was lucky enough to work at Microsoft in building 2, one of 8 matching buildings from the mid-80s, and it absolutely felt special at the time. In my imagination, it had some of the same vibe as Bell Labs did in its heyday. I was on the Visual Studio team, and great things were happening. I knew it. I also knew that team was special.
No one else in Visual Studio seemed that interested – they were just too busy and I think maybe too young to get it.
Buildings 1-8 were demolished few years ago, but I had been gone from the company for decades by that time. I did grieve a bit.
> Reminds me of the Tyrell Corporation building in Blade Runner.
Reminds me of the building Tyrell and Elliot look at in Mr Robot, the "belly of the beast" building. Maybe that's because the two are the same building :)
> As it was built to house telephone switching equipment, the average floor height is 18 feet (5.5 meters), considerably taller than in an average high-rise. The floors are also unusually strong, designed to carry 200 to 300 pound per square foot (10–15 kPa) live loads.
Good conditions to retrofit a data/processing center
The description of the building and it's brutalist architecture are also remniscient of the machine building described in The Difference Engine (Gibson).
As you approach it, it looks like an airport. (Dulles, specifically.) I work at the Hawthorne location, so I don't see the imposing architecture everyday. But, we do have a similar board of IBM Fellows, and I often pause at it on my out at the end of the day. It is humbling and inspiring.
Really nice. One I wish was in there was the Control Data building on Moffet Park Drive. Became Radius building when CD left, then a few other tenants before being torn down and replaced with the MPD Google campus.
A fantastic article from the last time this topic came up: https://failedarchitecture.com/2014/06/a-year-in-the-metabol... It goes over the history of the tower, the experience of the author living there, and has better shots of the interiors featuring a variety of tenants.
> can go there today and visit it in London. It's a popular tourist destination.
There's a museum/gift shop there now.
The pictures that I can find now online look a lot more residential than what I remember from 2000 or so. I remember that it was a granite-slab front office building with a pla
The "Telephone Company" in its day took its job seriously. Nothing was slap-dash, not even the spaces where its equipment resided, and its telephone operators worked.
They mention the Monadnock Building, which has no steel skeleton. You can still rent an office in that [1].
It's a beautiful building. I seem to remember seeing window air-conditioners, because it's too old to install central air. Yet people still want to be there.
It's a bit a lot of things. I can't find when the building was built, but I'm guessing the 60s/70s, so pretty much the height of brutalist architecture. Basically, very hard geometric forms, heavy on repetition, lots of concrete. There's a lot of that type of stuff sitting around, especially on university campuses.
It appears to be have been actually designed for use as a telephone switching center, for which windows actually are mostly useless. Should take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street, another telephone exchange in NYC. It is literally a window-less skyscraper.
A few years ago I spent a while staring at the building because I had a hotel room on a night floor in the Marquis Times Square and it was right there in front of me. It looks like a typical concrete skyscraper but with no windows. At the time I figured it was a telecoms facility, architected in the local style of Manhattan. Some Googling and reading on the 'pedia confirmed that analysis.
There are similar, if not quite so large, buildings in all large cities. There's one in Chicago. There's even one in Silicon Valley, on the North side of Central, near to Bowers.
I spent time there on a few occasions. It is an interesting building in that it is huge, but somehow it still feels kind of comfortable and localized. Kind of like a shopping mall but without the walls, but the walls aren't necessary.
The park on the roof is phenomenal. There are thousands of people working below you and you'd never know it, it's more like just being on a hill near the bay.
I like that the hallway was on the outside and hallways radiated out (and everyone had offices with frosted glass). It was a pain running pipes though as standard bend didn't quite work for that radius.
https://picryl.com/media/ibm-thomas-j-watson-research-center...
https://picryl.com/media/ibm-thomas-j-watson-research-center...
The library was a trip too. It was like what they thought the future of furniture was in the the 1960s. It was all in excellent shape.
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