Architect’s Newspaper Ι June 15, 2023
As a young architect with SOM in 1972, Richard Tomlinson saw something special in the Baxter International suburban office campus, which was already underway when he joined the firm. “It was conceived as a dynamic campus that made flexibility a fundamental principle,” he told AN. “What fascinated me about Baxter was its application of flexibility principles from high-rise office buildings for corporate and commercial clients to a campus environment.” It wasn’t one of his assigned projects, but he took it on as a “hobby” anyway. “I basically volunteered to help out after hours, weekends, whatever the firm needed, and I did that with Baxter,” Tomlinson recalled. After the 600,000-square-foot development for the medical equipment giant opened in 1975, he stayed on, working with the client through an expansion in the ’80s and beyond, making it one of his longest-term clients at SOM, from which he retired in 2014.
Located in Deerfield, Illinois, along Chicago’s suburban North Shore, the 101-acre campus demonstrates a level of thought and rigor not often applied to suburban office parks. Its unmistakable star is its Central Facilities Building, with two lighthouse-scaled masts hoisting up a cable-stayed steel roof, leaving room for massive column-free spans below in the complex’s social hub. Beyond, a series of nearly identical office pavilions and an executive center dot the landscape in a closely ordered, cellular arrangement that radiates out from three central parking garages.
Like SOM’s John Hancock Center, Baxter was the product of Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan’s legendary synthesis of architecture and engineering. Though it’s hardly as famous, it displays some of the same legible persuasiveness through its quick lesson in form and tectonics, delivered with just a glance. “It’s one of Bruce Graham’s tours-de-force,” Tomlinson said. “It took a very particular attitude about the land—it was seen as a campus in the prairie—to save as much of the groundscape as possible.” Graham said the cable-stayed structure “created a grand space that appears as a very gentle capture of the endless expanse of the Middle West.”
But weakened by supply chain congestion, rising costs, and poor financial performance, Baxter is laying off thousands of workers, selling off parts of its business, and closing the book on its campus, making the company vulnerable to a much less “gentle capture” in the days ahead. In January, Baxter announced its plans to sell the campus to Bridge Industrial, has been petitioning the Deerfield city government for permission to tear down SOM’s suburban titan and build in its place a 1.3-million- square-foot warehouse and shipping hub. But after months of resistance from local residents—hundreds who showed up to public planning meetings to voice their opposition—Bridge has withdrawn their plans to redevelop the office park as of June 7.
While residents focused their concerns around increased truck traffic and other industrial disturbances that the park would introduce into their suburban neighborhood, preservationists also told AN that the Baxter campus is worthy of preservation: and that it must be considered in the context of its designers’ wider body of work. “It’s a confluence between significant architects exploring how you think in new ways about work,” said Iker Gil, editor-in-chief of the Chicago-based design journal MAS Context. “How do you design for [flexibility] and also how do you bring structural innovation that you might see at the Sears Tower into this suburban development?”
Beyond the building’s historical legacy and creators, the Baxter campus’s modular flexibility makes it ideal for adaptive reuse, said Tomlinson. Baxter’s repeated office pavilion floor plates can be subdivided intuitively, as they are designed for tenant spaces to expand and contract as needed. “You could imagine each one of those modules conceptually being like a floor of the Inland Steel Building,” Tomlinson offered. Additionally, SOM designed a modular five-foot wall partition system and uniform electric and telephone floor ducts that are easily accessible beneath modular carpet tiles, allowing tenants to plug-and-play workstations easily. Tomlinson and his colleagues also designed the interiors, furnishings, and MEP systems. “It was a total design,” he said.
Baxter’s site plan is unique, with parking confined to garages—at first two, then another was added in 1984—instead of enveloping the site in a moat of asphalt, as many other suburban office parks do. It’s also distinguished by its internal circulation routes: The buildings are connected by a web of second-floor skywalks and a network of underground tunnels.
The buildings are arch-rationalist and rectilinear, and made of white-painted steel or aluminum with stainless steel trim. Only the masts of the Central Facilities Building break up this low horizon. This campus center point sits up on a cleft earthen berm, with its main entrance at ground level. The two masts rest on 80-foot caissons, made of cast concrete, 6-by-6 at their base and rising 35 feet above the roof. Forty-eight cables span out from the top of the masts. Tensioned cables below the roof reduce the floating movement of the roof from 3 inches to 1.5 inches. Inside is a 700-person cafeteria, lobby, auditorium, and training center. In its heyday, planter boxes and the natural light streaming in from multistory glass walls created a sense of communion with the surrounding landscape of ponds and prairie.
From the outside, the Baxter campus “has a medical sterility to it,” said Preservation Futures historic preservationist Elizabeth Blasius, who wrote about the Baxter for MAS Context. While these aesthetic qualities might not win scads of adherents on their own, they are emblematic of the complex’s midcentury vintage as a car-focused, tightly controlled, hermetically sealed, edge-city compound where interaction with the surrounding landscape and context consists mostly of distant gazes. Commuters to Baxter were subject to every one of Tomlinson and SOM’s whims as they moved from their car to the parking garage, tunnels, and skywalks leading to their offices. Considered today, these planning and design features clarify some reasons why suburban office parks of this era are a largely untested frontier of historic preservation.
The limits of this kind of car-dependent development are well understood today. It’s a carbon and land-use necessity to ask that reuse schemes loosen some of these bounds and attract a more diverse array of uses to lessen car dependence. Along these lines, one solution Blasius points toward is adapting Baxter into a “metroburb,” a multiuse campus featuring restaurants, retail, and businesses of many sizes. A former AT&T campus called Bell Works in nearby suburban Hoffman Estates and designed by Lohan Associates in 1990 is one such example. Another is Eero Saarinen’s Bell Labs complex in New Jersey, which features a food court, clothing boutiques, an escape room, virtual reality center, Montessori pre-school, hair salon, four gym and fitness centers, and a basketball court, as well as commercial office and event spaces. In Hoffman Estates, new townhouses are being built at Bell Works, pivoting the development toward a live-work urban microcosm, potentially lessening reliance on cars.
With its mix of social and event spaces, Tomlinson suggests that Baxter could become a community college or hotel and that its modularity and size mean it could be subleased to several different organizations. When it was new, local organizations that had nothing to do with Baxter could rent the Central Facilities Building for events, and today you can get married at the former Bell Labs. “It’s not hard to think of opportunities for it,” said Tomlinson. “The design is not so particular that it can only be one thing.”
Preservation nonprofit Landmarks Illinois placed the Baxter Campus on its 2023 list of the Most Endangered Places in Illinois, and advocacy manager Kendra Parzen played up the carbon savings of avoiding new building. But she also said that there’s a bias against appreciating and preserving suburban architecture: “We have a harder time conceptualizing that important works of architecture can be located in suburbs.”
The City of Deerfield received 42 letters in opposition to Bridge Industrial’s plan from April 27 to May 5, many of which cited concerns over traffic, noise, and pollution. One person wrote in to express this succinctly and tersely: “Do we want this to be Deerfield’s new reputation? The truck pit stop of the North Shore?” (Only Parzen’s comments, filed in another letter, mentioned the historic value of the existing campus.) Some cited health concerns for children with respiratory ailments, and others mentioned the pledge the city made in January to reduce transportation emissions by 55 percent by 2030. Nearly 5,000 people have signed a petition against the development. Writing in MAS Context, Blasius points toward Amazon’s abysmal and careless worker safety record as reason to question the expansion of shipping hubs.
During an at times raucous Deerfield Plan Commission meeting on May 11, people held up signs opposing the plan and jeered at Bridge Industrial team members and consultants as they made their pitch. The Bridge team reported that traffic at the complex would likely be less than when the Baxter campus was at peak occupancy and downplayed air pollution risks. Commissioners questioned why a valuation expert’s report on the impact on home prices resulting from the construction of a similar logistics hub didn’t take into account the value of homes before the industrial facilities were built. (The median home price in Deerfield is nearly $500,000, and the median household income is $169,000.) They also questioned why Bridge Industrial surveyed traffic levels on the site during a holiday weekend. At another planning commission meeting scheduled for June 8, local homeowners and their representatives were preparing to present their opposition. But since Bridge’s withdrawal of their redevelopment plans as of June 7—the day before—the meeting has now been cancelled.
A lack of discussion of historic preservation at this stage doesn’t bother Blasius. “Approaching a building like Baxter just from a historic preservation perspective is sort of an uphill battle,” she said. “There isn’t historic context to build a case for why these are important, architecturally significant, and worthy of landmarking. You have to create the case for why it’s architecturally significant from the ground up. Here’s a great opportunity for preservation to capture these different audiences and get together toward a common goal.”