The Office as Architectural Touchstone (2008)

I worked for IBM Research for a decade, from 2011 to 2021. Of that, 8.5 years were in the Yorktown Heights building mentioned in this article. The building is still in good condition, and it really is a great physical location for research.

The building is a long semi-circle, and only three stories. The exterior windows - front and back - are shared hallways. Offices and meeting rooms are in short hallways that connect the front to back. This means that offices and meeting rooms don't have windows, but I never minded that. I got plenty of natural light from the short hallway, and I loved being able to look outside when I walked around the building. And because there's effectively two main hallways per floor, you run into colleagues all the time. The private offices were small but cozy. Three people could comfortably have a conversation in someone's office; once it grew to four, you generally found a meeting room.

I used to do all of my focus work in my cozy private office. Now, I tend to do my focus work at home, and going to the office is for talking to people.

As someone who grew up in the suburbs, I liked that it was in the suburbs. But I think that's a hard sell for a lot of younger folks now. I knew people who lived in NYC and would commute up to the suburbs, but that was usually an arrangement that would last only a year or two. They would either leave the company, or stay and move up the suburbs.

This site is the birthplace of Radio Astronomy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Jansky

This article is from 2008 so what the bleep happened to this office?