Last updated: February 17, 2023
Place
Bell Laboratories--Holmdel
Photograph by Cindy Hamilton, courtesy of the New Jersey State Historic Preservation Office
Quick Facts
Location:
101 Crawfords Corner Road, Holmdel Township, New Jersey
Significance:
Architecture, Landscape Architecture
Designation:
Listed in the National Register – Reference number 16000223
MANAGED BY:
Private, some areas open to public
Listed in the National Register on June 26, 2017, the Bell Laboratories-Holmdel, NJ is significant for the architectural design work of Eero Saarinen and Associates and the corporate campus landscape design by Hideo Sasaki of Sasaki, Walker and Associates. Constructed between 1959 and 1966, Bell Laboratories-Holmdel marks a deliberate shift toward a modernist design befitting the modern research housed within. The property is characteristic of the midcentury move toward suburban landscaped campuses for corporate headquarters and research sites. From 1959 to 2007, the building functioned as a research and development facility for Bell Laboratories and its successor Alcatel-Lucent. Bell Laboratories-Holmdel gained significance as a key research and development facility for Bell Laboratories, which spearheaded significant breakthroughs in twentieth-century science. Over the course of the twentieth century, and in its various organizational incarnations, the company was responsible for innovative work related to radio astronomy, the transistor, lasers, and physics. Between 1982 and 1985, Eero Saarinen’s partners, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, oversaw the design and construction of additions to the building’s east and west ends, which maintain the configuration, volume, massing, circulation pattern, and material palette of the original structure.