Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes by Louise A. Mozingo (review)

Dotting the suburban periphery, ubiquitous and unremarkable, suburban office parks and campuses were for many years the neglected stepchildren of suburban historiography. In the past decade, a literature has blossomed that considers a wide range of peri-urban places, revealing a diversity in suburban demographics and land use that belies the cultural stereotypes of suburbs as residential enclaves of the white middle class, as well as demonstrating the catalytic roles suburban places played in American politics, economics, and culture through the past century. Most of this scholarship has, however, focused on the residential and commercial spaces of American suburbia. Industrial landscapes—particularly the white-collar corporate spaces that proliferated from the postwar era forward—have been relatively understudied. Extant works have addressed only particular examples or time periods, focusing less on design than on institutional and organizational structure; definition and classification of these spaces has mostly been left to their developers and corporate tenants, leaving us with a chaotic and imprecise nomenclature that skews toward the grandiose.

Louise A. Mozingo’s sweeping and impressive study remedies this deficit, providing a narrative that traces the evolution of the landscapes of corporate suburbia from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first. She wades through the thicket of “research parks” and “campuses,” identifies seminal and influential examples, and proposes a more precise and historically grounded typology. In doing so, she shows the connective intellectual tissue between iconic facilities like Bell laboratories and the software parks and office campuses that now proliferate across both the industrialized world and in emerging economies. Mozingo conveys these connections not only through architecture and landscape design but also through corporations’ persistent adherence to the idea that pastoral wrapping greatly benefits corporate image making.

Buildings and landscapes are Mozingo’s focus throughout Pastoral Capitalism, and her nimbly written narrative presents a sobering history of an urbanism seeded not by planners or politicians but by a relatively small cohort of large American companies. The book begins with a broader examination of the forces pushing and pulling American corporations to the suburbs in the immediate postwar years. Her explication of these origins shows that corporate suburbia’s low profile is no accident: in order to deflect affluent communities’ objections to the entry of industry into their residential enclaves, the early developers of suburban corporate facilities used sleek, low-slung architecture and extensive landscaping and setbacks. As she observes, “the pastoral envelope of suburban corporate landscapes ensured environmental conformity that was inevitably linked to the social homogeneity that these communities so carefully defended” (35).

Although the costs of suburban relocation were high, corporate leaders quickly learned that these places could serve valuable public relations purposes as well as attract and retain a skilled workforce. Mozingo goes beyond the familiar research-based corporations to examine firms like connecticut General insurance and General Foods, demonstrating that the suburban exodus of companies had a great deal to do with the huge growth in female white-collar clerical staff. Here and throughout this richly illustrated book, multiple images (many drawn from corporate promotional materials) show how both gender dynamics and class aspirations became embedded in landscape form and function.

From there, the book moves mostly chronologically through Mozingo’s different typologies. First she addresses “corporate campuses”—facilities designed to house the white-collar research activities of individual corporations—of which Bell Laboratories’ 1942 Murray Hill facility is the exemplar. The author expands on earlier studies by paying particular attention to built environments and the architects who designed them. The form reached its modernist apex in 1955 with the General Motors Technical Center outside Detroit, which “transformed the precepts of the corporate campus into an emblem of American business” (72) and helped make the reputation of its designers, Eliel Saarinen and Thomas Church.

The second type, the “corporate estate,” emerged in the 1950s and was distinguished from the “campus” in that it housed the...