Aesthetics of Indeterminacy: The Architecture of Conglomerates

By the early 1970s, concern about rise and prominence of large conglomerate corporations had fully saturated economic discourse in United States. As products a brief yet powerful merger mania during 1960s, industrial organizations began to restructure economy by aggressively merging with acquiring firms disparate industries geographies order obtain what business executives referred as ‘geopolitical’ power. With hundreds diverse subsidiaries, many these military-sponsored conglomerates — from Union Carbide Litton Industries Teledyne demanded new laboratories office buildings that seemed defy modernist tendencies material standardization, reproducibility, homogeneity, since rates directions their future growth were indeterminable. The produced for between 1960s 1980s have been described urban geographers historians aesthetic epitomes postmodernism, they often designed highly reflective, hermetic surfaces protruded, curved, folded simultaneously revealing concealing late capitalist logics undergirded them. This article considers how conglomeration was viewed geopolitical act challenges existing histories theories which reduce conditions abstract representations economics. Instead, draws on architects César Pelli Anthony Lumsden reveal responses particular practices structures business, including imperialist acts ‘acquiring’ people, land, other businesses.