Parks of Sprawl: The Corporate Landscape

The Spread of the Office Park

3 Typologies
The suburbanization of the corporate office was manifested through three distinct typologies, the office park, the corporate campus, and the corporate estate.  For this project, I will focus on the office park as it pertains to the specific case of the Ford Motor Company's Fairlane Development in Dearborn, Michigan, and have adopted Mozingo’s definition of the office park (below).

“The office park is the speculative, developer-response to the environmental preferences first seen in the corporate campus and the corporate estate…. Developers of office parks establish a consistent scheme of gateways, street design, signs, planting design, and architecture, similar to the ‘package’ residential suburb.  Individual buildings, architecturally generic, are each surrounded by their own pool of parking.  Landscaped open space is limited to roadways and ornamental frontage along the always adjacent highway.  Developers of office parks always struggle between maximizing square footage and maximizing landscape image.”1

A Brief History
Current Trends
back