The Last Images of Burroughs-Wellcome
Last month, confronted with continued confinement in my apartment as another New England winter combined with an out-of-control pandemic, yet possessed of the privilege to be able to work from anywhere, I packed my car a week before Christmas for a 22-hour drive south, to a small house I rented in Florida until March.
The fastest way to drive from New England to Florida is along Interstate 95. The first day’s worth of the 24-hour journey is the auto spine of the northeastern megalopolis, as I-95 ribbons from Boston through Providence, then Connecticut, the Bronx, New Jersey, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington and Richmond. Eight hours of congested roadway but visually interesting scenery—passing right by Breuer’s Pirelli Building, currently being converted into a hotel, and the skyline of Manhattan from the George Washington Bridge.
After S-curving through the center of Virginia’s capital, the landscape becomes monotonous for the next eight hours, without bisecting a major city until reaching Jacksonville. Just south of Richmond, a second highway, Interstate-85, splits off toward Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina then re-connects with I-95 further south.
I have twice successfully negotiated with my family to take this diversion, specifically in order to try to visit Paul Rudolph’s Burroughs-Wellcome building in the suburban Research Triangle office park, northwest of Raleigh-Durham. The first time, a decade ago, I had never seen the building before but was desperate to visit. I blogged about that experience on my old blogspot (“Burroughs Unwelcome”)—relating how a polite GlaxoSmithKline receptionist kindly informed me that I was not permitted to take photographs, and then I was chased out of the parking lot by a security guard. I was only able to take a single snap of the building at that time, below.
Ten years later, I strenuously negotiated to make this second, identical detour on the same route south, not just to make a not-particularly-convenient, unlikely-to-succeed second attempt to tour the building, but because Burroughs-Wellcome is in the process of being torn down.
The demolition of Burroughs-Wellcome is a painful blow to modern architectural heritage. This forlorn and frustrating loss was eloquently articulated by Kate Wagner. The failure of this particular preservation effort has left the modern preservationist movement not just saddened but devastatingly bruised: unlike a private home or a public government facility, here a wealthy corporation is tossing away—zeroing out, as Wagner rightly frames it— an important, unique and beautiful masterpiece, that was created specifically to accommodate the same purpose for which the company still requires space and intends to use the site, and despite the architect’s thoughtful design, intentionally made flexible for future change and expansion. As Wagner states, the stark valuelessness of the architecture itself in the owner’s calculus leaves a particular sting in the wound of those who cherish the building.
It is curious to love a building, especially a place never visited. Where does this affection come from? Although I’m approximately a decade older than Wagner, like her, I had become obsessed with Burroughs-Wellcome years ago, not through any direct experience with the architecture itself—an authorized-access-only Big Pharma research facility in a remote, off-limits office park—but with the images of it that became readily available on the internet, especially with the advent of blogging and social media.
Specifically, Rudolph’s incredible section drawing which slices through the pyramidal profile of the building, tunneling into the multistory lobby with a mesmerizing single-point perspective, like the millennium falcon jumping inyo hyperspace, a kineticism belied by the serene details such as the conference room swivel chairs, resting on the gently sloping carpet of corporate campus lawn.
One of the best-known of the plethora of Rudolph’s hypnotic architectural drawings, a detail of the powerful, sprawling landscape pencilwork graced the cover of the 1981 publication by Yukio Futagawa chronicling Rudolph’s draughtsmanship. The image would later resurface to prominence in the digital and social era of tumblr and pintrest.
The arresting allure of the building so engendered by this section is compounded by the contemporary photographs of the exterior and interior of the building, particularly the color photographs of renown architectural documentarian G.E. Kidder Smith, which were produced at the time of the building’s completion. Perhaps the most astonishing of Smith’s photos is upward view of the building’s lobby.
Although Rudolph’s drawing centers on this same space, it is a minor detail of the whole sectional composition. Smith’s photo shows the trapezoidal complexity of the multistory volume, each jut of cream-white balcony and slope of reception desk set against an eye-watering field of red carpeting, a shock of disco-fabulous flair amid flawless architectural perfection. There’s just nothing else like it in all of architecture.
It was the power of this visual media—the experience of them—that made me love that building and led me to suburban North Carolina. While the new owner of the building had authorized a group architecture tour years ago, the site continued to be off-limits to the general public even when vacant, and even after it was announced that demolition had been granted last September.
With second-hand reports of photographers’ failed attempts to approach what was by now a construction site, combined with my unsuccessful and pretty negative experience on my first attempt back in 2010, I was a bit worried that I was pointlessly making a 9 hour drive into a 10 hour drive for no reason. I had seen nothing on Twitter or Instagram updating how much of the building was still standing, or how close or far away the construction fence was.
It had been drizzling as we peeled off I-85 and soon reached the mannered, swooping parkways of Research Triangle Park, an idyll of American Pastoral Capitalism. The rain slowed and it wasn’t cold, the grass was still green and the neat thickets of Carolina pine bordered the streets lent to the atmosphere of bucolic affluence.
We entered the driveway of 3030 East Cornwallis Road and drove in until we reached a gat. I had no idea what to expect. A security guard came out, and was very friendly—I wasn’t her first such request. She said we couldn’t get inside, but I could walk along the perimeter chain-link fencing and take as many photos as I wanted. I was relieved and happy that I wasn’t chased off the property altogether and that I could take any photographs at all.
The building was about 100 yards away, rising on its promontory among construction equipment, electrical generators, and dumpsters, and bounded by a strand of evergreens. The perennial cliche of likening unusual architecture to a UFO is particularly tempting here; a facile description enhanced by the otherworldly building’s angular exposed struts sliding off its sloping sides, like the extended landing skids of a spacecraft.
Yet in that moment, finally seeing the huge pyramidal form, solitarily summiting up from its temperate American surmount, I more immediately registered an affinity to ancient and monumental Mesoamerican pyramids.
Like the remnant of a Mayan temple, the building’s sprayed-limestone aggregate paneling was no longer the flawless alabaster of Smith’s photographs, or even the yellowing hue of the aging presentation drawings. Darkened by the wet weather, the exterior was a sandy brown, looking dirty. Jackhammers had already chipped off much of this cladding. Like archaeological remains, the surface was no longer smoothly plated. The building was now itself a ruin.
There wasn’t much I could do. I stared, looking at something for the last time. I snapped a photo every few feet along the flimsy temporary chainlink fence, wedging the zoom lens in between the metal diamond lattice, the twisted wires occasionally occupying the edges of the photos, intruding to further enforce the building’s powerful diagonality. It was fulfilling—a satisfying result of the effort—even as it was impotent. Aware of being passively monitored by the guard, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome, and anyway there was only so much of a differentiation in each photo that I could achieve from essentially one angle. After a few minutes, we got back in the car to cover as much ground as we could before the late December afternoon would turn to darkness.
I felt both a triumph that I had seen the building at all, and the utter helplessness of letting it go, the full realization that I could never stand inside its faceted lobby; the knowledge that one more beloved architectural gem was erased.
I was left with what I had always had—immediate access to a trove of visual records of the building. In that sense I had more than I ever had before, as I now possessed my own set of photographs—likely among the last architectural photos ever to be taken of the Burroughs-Wellcome. But beyond a cache of jpgs, no deeper than a single pixel, and my memory of briefly standing behind that fence, staring at its mosaic of trapezoidal volumes, there was nothing else to obtain, there was nothing else to do.
The building was still there for the moment still there last month, still recognizable, as the process of obliteration took a weekend pause. It is still there today a month later, the machines picking its one-of-a-kind structure apart. Unlike an archaeological landmark, it will not be resuscitated or protected for the future. Like an ancient pyramid, and like so much of Rudolph’s architecture, it is a relic of a lost civilization, a society that has passed.