Corporate Office Park

A complex of office buildings, often sited on a large tract of land near an arterial highway, outside dense urban concentration. Suburbanization of corporate headquarters evolved in the mid-twentieth century when corporations such as IBM, Weyerhaeuser, Pepsico, and Connecticut General moved their offices out of city centers and closer to the residences of their senior executives. The grounds were arranged as rolling parkland, often utilizing low-rise buildings. The site planning, automobile approaches, visitor entrances, employee parking lots, and service docks all exemplified the functionalism of mid-twentieth century Modernism. These park-like locations often provided settings for the display of corporate collections of large scale public art, and, in certain cases, display of large scale products such as the tractors at John Deere.