News and notes from Reston (tm).

Monday, September 12, 2011

Flashback Monday: Office Space

brutalist office.jpg
This brutalist vision of concrete and weird brochure spot color was how Reston's industrial and office parks were envisioned by planners in the early 1960s, way before ground was broken and the first monkey was infected with Ebola. Half Zen garden, half Supermax, all awesome!

Office detail.jpgWe love this detail of some hard-working employee, busy figuring out how to strap bombs to dolphins do some accounting or something. So many questions, though: Is he inside or outside? Is he wearing a hat? Do the constant footsteps of people going up and down the stairs bother him? Given his open-office location in a high-traffic area, are people constantly stealing his red stapler? And what, exactly, is that diamond-shaped thing hanging above him, ready to impale him like some earth-toned Sword of Damocles?

And then there's this:

Weird sign.jpg

Love the turret thingy this sign is suspended above. Too bad we ultimately wound up getting a Macaroni Grill instead of one of these fine eateries.

Posted by Restonian at 10:02 AM

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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousSeptember 12, 2011 at 8:49 PM

    It's the land of diamond-shaped people. The thing on the stairs is a diamond co-worker working on a stapler-stealing scheme with the mysterious guy in the doorway.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousSeptember 13, 2011 at 8:25 AM

    It all looks a little creepy to me. What were they smoking back then?

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousSeptember 13, 2011 at 11:01 AM

    Love the turret. A perfect meeting place for the Knights of the Mauve Table.

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  4. South Lakes DivaSeptember 13, 2011 at 12:36 PM

    Remember, this was designed during the middle of the Cold War. Maybe the turret is actually a radar tower to warn Reston of incoming Soviet bombers. Cannot have the dastardly Commies destroying a bastion of American suburbia!

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousSeptember 13, 2011 at 9:19 PM

    Anon 8:49 gave me chills... I looked at this awful set of drawings several times, but my amusement at the diamond-shaped overlord (a guy wearing one of those BASE jumper glide suits, perhaps?) caused me to completely overlook the menacing shadow in the doorway. That is unpleasant. It would not encourage me to invest in this futurist nightmarish city/town/HOA/whatever it would become.

    This is, ultimately, an advertisement to encourage business owners to lease space, right? Cold architecture, love it or hate it, but the bizarre humanoids surely kept a few investors and entrepreneurs away. Thanks for saving the day, Mobil!

    ReplyDelete
  6. roadworrierSeptember 25, 2011 at 11:10 AM

    The weird UFO-looking thing at the bottom appears to be a White Castle restaurant, above which stands a doppelganger for the Porsche Museum (Stuttgart, Germany).

    ReplyDelete

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