UNION CARBIDE TAKES TO THE WOODS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85B01152R000600780134-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 4, 2008
• Sequence Number: 134
• Publication Date: December 13, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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executives scramble among them as their
fortunes change. But in Carbide's new
headquarters an executive can move up or
down the corporate ladder without leaving
his office.
As pleased as Carbide is to be on the cut-
ting edge of office innovation, the move
has been much more expensive than the
company anticipated. The final cost will be
more than $230 million, which includes
about $190 million for the building and
$40 million for relocation. According to
some reports, the total is well over twice
what Carbide, which managed the con-
struction, had budgeted for the job.
In retrospect, Carbide could not have
timed the sale of its previous home, a 52-
story skyscraper on New York's Park Ave-
nue, more poorly. In 1977, near the nadir
of the city's financial crisis and therefore a
trough in the real estate market, Carbide
agreed to sell the building to Manufactur-
ers Hanover Trust Co. for $110 million, or
$92 a square foot. Manufacturers Hanover
held on to its own Park Avenue headquar-
ters, a much smaller building, until 1981
and then sold it for $161 million, a whop-
ping $333 a square foot.
And the move, which has stretched out
over 2% years, is being completed when
The chemical company abandons
Park Avenue for a corporate commune. The
building's terrific, the timing terrible.
HEADQUARTERS
Union Carbide Takes
to the Woods
by WALTER McQUADE
F~'om tlft air Union Carbide's new head-
quarters' in Danbury, Connecticut, looks
like an enotmous&displaced Aztec frog
..'sunning i if Kud New England foliage.
Inside iff equally striking. Here is an of-
fice building that addresses the ancient
question of which executive deserves the
grander office, as compared with his or her
superiors, inferiors, and peers. Union Car-
bide's answer. no one; well, almost no one.
The orientally intricate architecture of the
building gives each of Union Carbide's
2,358 executives and specialists the same
size office-182 square feet, typically 131/2
feet by 131/2 feet-with two or more win-
dows looking out on the sylvan view. A
few executives are more equal than others,
however. The chairman, president, and 15
other senior managers have as many as 3%
of these snug rooms.
Executive scramble
The building may well be a pivotal one
in design for corporations, which in recent
years have increasingly enclosed their
staffs within rooms made of movable par-
titions that are constantly reshuffled like
playing cards. Offices are expanded or
contracted, refurnished and repainted;
Research associate: Alison Rea
Carbide, like the rest of the chemical in-
dustry, has been suffering from the reces-
sion. Earnings dropped 49% in the third
quarter, and several thousand workers
have been laid off at plants around the
country. Under the circumstances Carbide
has not felt much like celebrating its arrival
in Danbury. Few photographers have been
allowed on the premises. Union Carbide
explains that the visitors' entrance is not
quite finished nor is the landscaping com-
plete. This is the first time pictures of the
highly significant building have been pub-
lished in a national magazine.
Despite the problems, the structure is
likely to become a mecca for managers
who need big new headquarters and for ar-
chitects too. Typical of the building's deli-
cate design is the way the behemoth is
based on the earth. Its sinuous bend con-
forms to the shape of the open meadow on
which it was built, riding the slope of the
meadow rather than flattening it. At the
northwest end the offices sit on short con-
crete columns. As the building stretches
and the ground falls away, the columns get
longer, repeating the shapes of the tree
trunks. The windows are shaded by dark
glass canopies to soften the summer sun-
light; the aluminum walls are sandblasted
Carbide's 3,200 workers drive into the core of the new building on 19 lanes of roadway
and then take short walks to their offices, which are in the 15 pods radiating from the
center. When the building is finished, automobiles will not be allowed to park outside
and mar the rustic landscape like those cars at center left.
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pant's taste: traditional, transitional, Scandinavian, or modern. tions, chose transitional, with an Oriental rug.
to match the color of the concrete, a fastid-
ious touch rare in such a large building.
Carbide's former chairman, William S.
Sneath, decided to shift the company out
of the city in 1976. He gave the familiar
explanation that many companies offer
when they leave: it was becoming in-
creasingly difficult to persuade the prom-
ising young employees in the far-flung
Carbide empire to move to expensive,
congested, clamorous, crime-ridden New
York. Carbide settled on a forest in Dan-
bury, 70 miles north of the city. Once the
hat capital of the country, Danbury has
fallen on hard times in recent years.
American men have been wearing hats
less since the 1940s, and hat factories
have closed; Danbury's other renowned
institution, the Danbury Fair, folded its
tents for good this year, its 112th. Mayor
James Dyer was delighted to have Car-
bide come into the forest. The company
will pay $3.2 million in real estate taxes
Marshall C. Lewis (above), director of corporate communica-
this year, close to 9% of the town's budget.
The move is also a tax boon for many of
Carbide's employees. Those who moved to
Connecticut no longer have to pay onerous
income taxes to New York State and New
York City. Because Connecticut has no
state income tax, Carbide's accountants
pointed out to employees when the move
was announced, someone making $20,000
a year in 1976 would have saved $922, one
making $80,000 would have saved $5,837,
and a $200,000-a-year earner would have
been $11,600 ahead. Sneath's own situa-
tion was more complicated. He lived in
Greenwich, Connecticut, and paid a non-
resident tax to New York State and a com-
muter tax to New York City on his income,
which last year came to $781,176. His
maximum tax liability to New York State
and City was $80,993, although whatever
he paid would have reduced his income for
federal tax reckoning. As it worked out,
Sneath didn't get a break on his New York
taxes because of the move. He took early
retirement on January 1, 1982, at the age of
55, before the transfer to Connecticut was
completed.
To help employees sell their homes,
Carbide engaged Merrill Lynch's real es-
tate arm. Carbide also underwrote em-
ployees' moving expenses and offered to
pay for five years the difference in rentals
up to $100 a month between their old
apartments in Manhattan and equivalent
accommodations around Danbury. If the
former tenants wanted to buy houses, they
were eligible for grants of as much as
$6,000 to help with down payments.
Most impressive, Union Carbide agreed
to pay closing costs and mortgage charges
above .8%% for five years on new houses
bought by migrating employees; or, if
they held mortgages on old homes they
had to sell, to pay the difference between
those mortgages' interest charges and the
new ones they were to assume, also for
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In New York employees worked an eight-hour day with an hour
off for lunch. In Danbury the day is 8% hours with a half hour off
five years. One reason the-relocation costs
jumped high above budget was that Car-
bide had not anticipated the staggering
climb in interest rates. Carbide also volun-
teered to pay driver-training tuition for
-transferring employees who did not know
how to drive and to pay interest on the
first $6,000 of an auto loan. Severance pay-
ments, $1,200 at the minimum, were
made to those who did not transfer.
To design the new headquarters, Sneath
went to Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & As-
sociates. Roche is a renowned architect. In
1982 he won the $100,000 Pritzker Award,
architecture's equivalent of the Nobel
Prize. Born and educated in Ireland but a
U.S. citizen since 1964, he is a forceful in-
tellectual with a streak of Gaelic mirth be-
neath his gravity. Before Roche began de-
signing the building, he spent most of a
summer in the Union Carbide Building on
Park Avenue interviewing several hun-
dred employees about their needs and
for lunch in one of four cafeterias, like that above. Still, most
workers spend more, time at home because of shorter commutes.
wants. That building, by Skidmore Ow-
ings & Merrill, was itself much admired in
the 1960s. It was the tallest building con-
structed in Manhattan since the 1930s and
was one of the early skyscrapers to incor-
porate the movable partition. The size of
an office could be adjusted to the needs
and, more important, to the authority of
the occupant. An employee's rank on the
organizational chart dictated not only the
size of his office, but also the furnishings,
down to what was provided on an execu-
tive's desktop. "I was interviewing one
middle manager," Roche says, "and he
told me nervously, 'They came yesterday
and took away my water carafe!"'
"Offices were a symbol of prestige, not
of function," Roche says. "Moreover, this
created a bit of a problem for the manag-
ers, because furniture, finishes, and -offices
constantly had to be changed. They were
playing games with people who were try-
ing to get their jobs done."
The constant adjustments were costing
Carbide $1.5 million a year, even without
calculating lost time and efficiency during
moves and refurbishings. Roche also stud-
ied the clerical and secretarial areas and
decided they were uninhabitable. "Mod-
ern design is relentless on the lower
ranks," he says. "Secretaries, for example,
usually have to sit out in office traffic."
Convinced that all executives need ap-
proximately the same amount of space and
equipment regardless of their positions in
the pecking order, Roche began toying
with the possibility of a uniform office
size. Sneath liked the idea, and Roche put
it on the drawing board.
When it ordered furniture for the offices,
Union Carbide.again diverged from com-
mon practice. In the 1960s and 1970s many
corporations thought it important to pre-
sent a monolithic image, and many an ex-
ecutive, when his or her company relo-
cated from one building to another, ended
Continued
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170 FORTUNE aecember 13, 1982
up surrounded by a perhaps flawless, but
impersonal, arrangement of new desk, file
cabinets, and chairs, with artwork on the
walls preordained by a hired specialist. A
notorious example was New York's hand-
~ome granite CBS. Building on the Avenue
of the Americas at 53rd Street, where the
employees were discouraged from hang-
ing photographs of their families, dogs, or
yachts so as not to impair the immaculate
look of the building. At CBS just one ex-
ception to the aesthetic discipline was per-
mitted, and his name was William S. Pa-
ley. Chairman Paley brought his sculpture,
paintings, and burnished antique furni-
ture over from his old office on Madison
Avenue. In the anteroom.hangs a still life
painted by his mother. 1
Roche wanted Union Ciirbide's workers
to choose the furnishings for their offices
in Danbury. While the company was still
on Park Avenue, he requisitioned space
and had his assistants mock up, at full
Chairman Warren M. Anderson brought
along several pieces of well-used furni-
ture from his Park Avenue office. He de-
scribes his taste as "1939 modem."
scale, 15 offices furnished in arrangements
of four different styles described by the ar-
chitect as- traditional, transitional, mod-
em, and Scandinavian. Carbide executives
were invited to wander through and
choose their styles. "People didn't choose
what architects might choose-high-qle-
sign desks and chairs," Roche observes.
"Those seemed to be the least appealing. I
found out that most people don't want
anything to do with chairs created by fam-
ous designers."
Down with tradition
Even with a mockup, many of them
were unable to visualize the finished of-
fice, Roche continues. "For example," he
says, "a glass table-desk was not a popular
choice, yet when they saw one later in the
finished building a lot of people said they
wished they had chosen it. It was also in-
teresting that the traditional style with
paneled wooden desks and imitation peri-
od chairs was not popular at all. We are re-
peating this process for another client and
have eliminated, that style completely."
The most popular mode was transitional:
unadorned wooden desks and chairs.
"People also asked for a lot of storage
space," explains Roche.
In the Danbury offices no lighting fix-
tures are recessed into the ceiling. Instead
lamps are closer to a domestic scale. This
enabled the architect to use an eight-foot
four-inch ceiling. Low ceilings mean that
the building is smaller, a saving in both
construction and heating costs. Nor is
there any of the usual wall-to-wall carpet-
ing in the offices. An eight- by 12-foot rug
in the center of the room allows the border
.of the oak floor to show. Employees could
select artwork in styles from Currier and
Ives prints to exotic framed textiles. What-
ever style office the occupant chose, the
budget for furnishing each office was ex-
actly, the same, says Roche, except for
those 17 executives at the top.
And wonder of wonders, the windows
actually open, or at least can open. Roche
installed windows that pivot, convinced
that fresh air would not seriously disrupt
the building's air-conditioning system.
continued
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The fiberglass wall at left allows in daylight to illuminate the hall.
At ramp level the building looks as though it sprouted from a superhighway.
Carbide, which has to pay the heating and
cooling bills, isn't so sure. It keeps the win-
dows locked.
A final egalitarian touch to this pains-
taking design is the employees' parking-
900,000 square feet for 2,850 cars, which
occupies all four levels of the building's
center and is entered by a formidable 19
lanes of roadway. All employees will be
about the same distance from their cars, an
average of 150 feet, under cover.
There are so many offices at Carbide that
if they were lined up on both sides of a
hallway, it would be 2.6 miles long. In-
stead they were arranged in pods branch-
ing out from a central trunk of the im-
mense garage. One reason Carbide's new
headquarters has taken so long to com-
plete has been foundation problems for
these pods and the garage. The borings
that Carbide commissioned did not reveal
the true condition of the subsoil, which
turned out to be largely muck
Not all employees were as enthusiastic
about the move as Sneath. Though most
were seasoned commuters used to strug-
gling from the suburbs into Manhattan
and back each day, many lived west of the
city in New Jersey, or east on Long Island,
a long way from Danbury. In the end, 800
of the staff of 3,200 chose not to make
the move and left the company. These
included 60% of the clerical and secre-
tarial people and 20% of the managers
and technicians.
And some who have moved are not es-
pecially happy with their new surround-
ings. They miss the excitement and the op-
portunities of Manhattan. Says one, "You
can't just go? across the street and get
another job. The company has really
wrapped us up." Clinging to the city are
some 60 or 70 who still commute from
Manhattan to Danbury and back on two
company buses, a trip that takes almost
two hours each way.
A lingering skyline
One who refuses to liberate himself en-
tirely from New York's grasp is Sneath's
successor as chairman, Warren M. Ander-
son, 61, who was born and raised in
Brooklyn. Although he recently odght a
condominium in Greenwich, which is his
legal residence for tax purposes, Anderson
sometimes commutes to his Manhattan
apartment in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac.
Anderson says that he agreed all along
with Sneath that the move to Danbury was
right for the company, but he doesn't deny
that he misses at least some things about
the city, such as the walk to work in the
morning along Park Avenue. When he ar-
rived at the Danbury office his aides had
-hung pictures of the New York skyline
in his windows. Governor William A.
O'Neill of Connecticut came to call one
day and out of politeness Anderson ripped
down the pictures beforehand. Just as he
suspected, there were trees outside.
Anderson has come to feel more at
home in his 674-acre forest. Carbide's
building occupies only 2% of the land
and is not likely to intrude further. The
building is constructed so tautly that
there is no way to add a wing. That's
okay, Anderson says cheerily. Consider-
ing the state of the chemical industry, he
would just as soon have a building that
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