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As Swanke Hayden Connell's
Richard Carlson, AIA, toured the facilities of IBM with CEO Louis V Gerstner, Jr. (for whom SHCA had previously designed headquarters for American Express and RJR/Nabisco), it was clear to both what message the proposed new headquarters should convey. "The facilities didn't communicate that it was a computer company," says Carlson. "We both felt that the architecture should better support what they do."
Three years later, Gerstner and 600 IBM employees are happily ensconced in a living monument to both IBM's prodigious history and its promising future. Set expertly on the ridge of a ravine on the company's wooded Armonk, New York, campus, the new razor-sharp 280,000square-foot building by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) has the shape of a lightning bolt and a stainlesssteel shimmer to match. The utter seamlessness of exterior to interior is a credit to the design team: both firms call this collaboration one of the most successful and rewarding that either has experienced.
Months before the architecture competition was announced, IBM and SHCA were setting goals for the new building. The designers "got involved with the technology, and the history of calculation," says Carlson. "It would be important to show technology to their many visitors in a fun way." IBM was incorporated in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co.: poring through its warehouses resulted in a priceless collection of machines dating to the 1600s, from cheese graters to mainframe computers, that would ultimately be displayed throughout the new building.
SHCA project manager Cynthia Kracauer...