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  • Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes by Louise A. Mozingo
  • Sara Stevens
Louise A. Mozingo. Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 327 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-01543-1, $32.95 (hardcover).

Skyscrapers are easy symbols for capitalism, accumulating in the handy shape of a bar graph on the horizon. By contrast, the postwar American suburban corporate campus—a large, verdant lawn, a grouping of low-rise modernist office buildings, a tastefully discrete expanse of parking—suggests a different relationship between daily life and economic activity, between production and consumption, between city and country. It has yet to be interpreted by scholars but nonetheless represents an important historical moment. Not only does the suburban corporate campus provide a building form [End Page 903] that pairs with and illustrates managerial capitalism but it offers new insights that reveal the contours of a late-capitalist cultural economy.

Scholar and landscape architect Louise A. Mozingo’s book, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Campuses, studies the appearance of this new building format in the postwar American context and describes three different types: the corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park. Connecting economic history with design history, she describes early case studies that became models deployed from ca. 1940 forward, from different regions in the USA and migrating abroad as a marker of global capital. In doing so, she joins a promising trend of historians of capitalism who combine a study of labor history, corporate strategy, and cultural production. Most significantly, the book contributes to discussions in suburban history that question the stereotype of the bedroom community and the relationship between downtowns and peripheries. In tracking a national, and eventually a global, phenomenon, Pastoral Capitalism narrates how suburban places acquired economic dominance in metropolitan regions and how design and aesthetics made that achievement possible.

The book begins by establishing the economic and cultural context that gave rise to the suburban corporate campus. In setting the postwar scene, Mozingo describes the apex of the American corporation and the outlines of managerial capitalism that contributed to this new architectural expression. The book is particularly adept at establishing a complicated urban context: she does not suggest that suburbs were monolithic places, nor does she attempt to place the suburban corporate campus as shattering our stereotype of the suburban bedroom community. Aware of the more recent moves in suburban history (as metropolitan, diverse, and uneven), Mozingo contrasts the history of industrial suburban development and white-collar office buildings set in elite suburbs. In other words, it is not just city versus suburb, but downtowns and a variety of suburbs all in competition for new development. Similarly, she builds on the many interpretations of the pastoral idea in the USA, including the goodness and morality of greenery, and its capacity to distract viewers from the downsides to this variety of capitalist expansion—race, gender, and economic inequality, and environmental degradation.

The second chapter explains why corporations were interested in moving operations out of downtowns and into suburbs, and what forces were at work in these relocations. Here, labor relations and the history of industrial capitalism and factories are retold with special attention to the rise of research divisions, the growth of civil defense, and missteps in welfare capitalism that eased the path toward the [End Page 904] construction of large offices for white-collar workers in suburban locations. The “white flight” of cubicles is recast as a quest for white female office workers—all part of preserving the prestige of office work for elite whites and reinforcing social distinction.

The three types of corporate campuses unfold chronologically. The first, the corporate campus, appears around the Second World War, and coincides with changes in the nature of scientific industrial research. With close attention to landscape designs, Mozingo describes four case studies that culminate with the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, from 1956. Widely publicized, the Tech Center was determinedly modernist and put corporate messaging on point with architecture and landscape. It combined the pragmatic and the prestigious and pushed the decentralization of cities. As a coordinated goal of corporate policy, the suburbanization of office...

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