Part of my 1983 interview trip to Bell Labs (Allentown, Piscataway, MH, Holmdel, I recall) was at Holmdel, and the engineers there had little good to say about the building.

My host apologized for the Holmdel offices.

Holmdel, designed by a World Famous Architect, with Big Ideas, reminds me of an old rule: invariably, the ugliest building on campus is the architecture college. That certainly is true at UCB, but applies to many universities I've seen.

ron

p.s. I was visiting the Empire right before dissolution, and they had to explain the yellow tapes in Allentown that were going up in the hallways, marking the future BellCore/ATT boundaries. At that time, 1983, more semiconductors were made in PA, by Western Electric, than anywhere. The Bell System had a voracious appetite for hardware.

p.p.s. Nope, didn't go there. One of my hosts gave me good advice: "don't come here, just go get your PhD." So I did.

On Sat, Mar 8, 2025 at 1:22 PM Peter Weinberger (温博格) via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

Rob is overly generous about the space. But great work did happen there.

On Sat, Mar 8, 2025 at 4:08 PM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As someone who worked there occasionally, I can say that it's an
> amazing building but from a workplace perspective full of
> architectural ideas that simply do not work in practice. No office has
> a window - the outer walkways take all the windows, and all the
> offices face a transverse corridor. (In a later ridiculously expensive
> expansion for a building Saarinen said could never be expanded, they
> gave the president's office a window on the end. You might have seen
> it in the show.) Only artificial light therefore.The huge central
> atrium is cool but of course its floor was soon filled with cubicles,
> ruining the effect and eventually requiring a netting over it to stop
> people throwing things on the workers below. And so on. Great work
> happened there but the building, externally at least a straightened TJ
> Watson, was a failure in my amateur opinion.
>
> What a dreary workplace it was.
>
> But the approach is nice, at least until the geese took over and
> became serious menaces to arrivals.
>
> It's a fitting locale for the show. No use of the geese though. Maybe
> they've moved on.
>
> I will say that with that (I think) opening shot of series of the
> water tower, I shrieked.
>
> -rob
>
> On Sun, Mar 9, 2025 at 2:47 AM Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Gift article about Holmdel facility...
> >
> > Bell Works, the setting of the hit serial for Apple TV+, is now a tourist attraction, drawing fans to the architectural wonder.
> >
> > https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/realestate/severance-lumon-industries-building-bell-labs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2U4.9nGx.iMzMqZbSep6U&smid=em-share