8 Mar
2025
8 Mar
'25
9:17 p.m.
Rob Pike writes:
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
A couple of other Holmdel anecdotes. I fortunately was at Murray Hill
but occasionally had to go down to Holmdel.
When they first built the building the didn't think to use anti-reflective
glass. They had to replace it because they were blinding motorists on the
Garden State Parkway every day at sunset.
If you were a latecomer to Holmdel you might wonder why they put so much
money into that huge planter full of artificial plants in the atrium. It
wasn't always that way. It used to have real plants and real dirt. But
Roy, who's last name I can't remember, went up to the top floor balcony
with a bespoke pea shooter and fired pot seeds into the planter which took.
End of dirt.
Unless my aging memory is confusing it with Whippany, I think that one of
the cool things about the site was using the fountains at air conditioning
chillers.
Jon