Liberal Talk Radio

Fascinating to see the techies at Engadget get all weepy over the demise of New Jersey’s Bell Labs.

Bell Labs was the host of an amazing array of scientific output in the latter half of the 20th century. But after Ma Bell (AT&T) spun off Lucent Technologies, the R&D department shrunk and shrunk. Now, the main Saarinen-designed research park in Holmdel, NJ, is about to get the axe. (Yes, you stinky wookies, this is why you recognize the name “Holmdel.”)

So why do I find this all fascinating? It’s a rare opportunity to see future-obsessed techies so concerned about the past. It seems the past becomes more valuable when it’s your past. No doubt there’ll be more and more of these types of buildings scheduled for the wrecking ball as time goes by, not to mention other items of information-age nostalgia, like, say, the original copper wire telephone networks. Do we save them all? What’s genuinely historic, what’s kitsch, and what’s just useless junk? There’s clearly no one easy answer.

This also makes me even more convinced that Modernist-style architecture, especially Brutalism, will be looked upon more favorably in the future. The 1960s-era buildings that gave birth to punch-card computing and high-fidelity audio will seem just as quaint and bucolic in 50 years as the 19th century farmhouses and brownstones that we seek to preserve today.