In 1961, Eero Saarinen’s Thomas J Watson Research Center opened as IBM’s main research campus in the rural setting of Yorktown Heights – about 35 miles north of Manhattan. At this point in tech and computing history, Silicon Valley, as it is known today, did not yet exist, nor did any patch of land signify the singular home of computing innovation. Instead, major computer companies based themselves sporadically around North America, often close to or in established industrial cities. IBM and modernist architecture master Saarinen moved away from the grit of the urban core, designing a campus that was built, quite literally, out of the wooded hills of Westchester County, New York.
Tour the new IBM Research offices
In the years when the Yorktown Heights campus was conceived, IBM assembled a cohort of architects and designers, including, aside from Saarinen, Eliot Noyes, Paul Rand, and Ray and Charles Eames, to shape what would become central to their brand: an inextricable relationship between design and technology. Today, 65 years after its opening, IBM Research creative director Mark Podlaseck describes how these figures helped 'form this consciousness of IBM being a design-centric company'. He describes how the centre 'is connected to this history of modernism', and a 'historical movement of embracing the future in a humanistic way'.
The new Think Lab – designed by Universal Design Studio and Map Project Office in close collaboration with IBM Research – builds on this humanism. Saarinen originally created a place that was, by its very form, embracing. Semi-circular in plan, it spread across hundreds of acres with frontage that was, and still is, fully glazed. Internally, repeating corridors linked office and laboratory spaces, provoking serendipitous meetings. Researchers immersed in focused technical explorations were deliberately given an environment that aided contact – a place where they could meet with both nature and people intuitively.
This human experience extends to the centre’s latest interventions. In its most pragmatic sense, Think Lab is a technology-first project, designed to house the new systems of IBM’s quantum-centric supercomputing architecture – which combines quantum and classical computing. The design, however, forgoes rigidly separating equipment from research spaces and laboratories, instead fusing them into a whole experience.
Within the centre, IBM’s quantum computing systems sit within a holistic environment. As Universal Design Studio’s Satoshi Isono puts it, the idea has been to create an integrated centre that moves away from the ‘showroom’ format. 'We put everything into one space,' Isono says, highlighting an approach that builds on Saarinen’s own original intention for connectedness.
Today, that connection comes through new layers of tactility. The original 1960s campus was imbued with its surrounding texture and topography – its walls made of natural stone collected from its site. 'Materiality is very much aligned with the original architecture,' Isono explains, having undertaken deep research into the original scheme.
'Mark and I made several visits to Yale University, where Saarinen’s archive is kept, to look at material specifications and samples, photography from the time, hand drawings, blueprints, and so on. We weren’t trying to reinstate the space, but we kept existing proven build materials.' Additional materials within the new scheme echo the character found in situ; both past – the natural stone and original concrete – and future – the materials of the machines themselves.
Think Lab is a private space, with visitors only entering by invitation. Yet even as a non-public centre, it is defined by openness and a desire to imprint the fullness of the work it incubates. Isono talks about its immediacy, and how visitors can 'really get in front of the technology.' Podlaseck emphasises the creation of a whole experience, of inviting people to feel the technology, not merely gaze at it.
The space has been designed to engage visually, haptically and even sonically – tailored acoustic design balances the sound mix of both ambient infrastructure and the machines themselves, all while musical notes float through the air, radiating from a spinning analogue record player. Combined, these moves belong to a place designed to communicate technologies that are, to many, difficult to see or grasp. In many ways, Think Lab extends Saarinen’s original intention: to create a place of discovery, of nature, community, and of the sweeping innovation that can exist within both.
