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(a)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-bu…

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

I visited PARC a few times and found it salubrious. The culture was peculiar (not necessarily in a bad way, but I didn't understand yet how SV worked (literally)), but the building was cosy and the people seemed happy. I sometimes wonder whether the reverence we give to architects is fully earned. -rob On Sun, Mar 9, 2025 at 10:07 AM George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote: > > Steve Deering spoke fondly of the PARC building, it's possible some radical architectural ideas work? If i recall the sense of his words it was democratising, communal in spirit. > > G

On Mar 8, 2025, at 7:52 PM, Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: I visited PARC a few times and found it salubrious. The culture was peculiar (not necessarily in a bad way, but I didn't understand yet how SV worked (literally)), but the building was cosy and the people seemed happy.

I was at PARC in 1984, working with Dan Ingalls. I mentioned I was surprised that Smalltalk had no concurrency†, that the UI (let alone the system) was completely single-threaded. Only the window with focus could execute any code. Dan being Dan, he immediately got to work making a form of concurrency happen, followed by a delightful orgy of researches playing with the new toy. I loved it. Because: sometimes in isolation you miss important things going on in the outside world.