Five O’Clock Somewhere: A Heterotopic Inquiry into the Office Park Landscape

It’s one of the most familiar landscapes in suburban America. Homogenized, multi-story buildings surrounding seas of asphalt that are dotted with carefully arranged flora. This is where Corporate America lives. This is the office park. As a landscape, it is expansive yet private. The site itself is an intersection of complex and contradictory functions that represent a variety of superimposed meanings. In experiencing it as a place, we can analyze how those functions reflect our values as citizens, workers and officers of a Capitalist society where economy collides with form. Five O’Clock Somewhere, my handcrafted 8’x10’ wool rug, is a creative interpretation of the intersection of these values, forms and contradictions in regard to Foucault’s principles of the heterotopia. 

The corporate office park as a heterotopia encapsulates a distinct spatial arrangement that reflects and reinforces social and economic values within its landscape. The parking is vast and plentiful, the lawns and hedges are manicured, the reservoirs are bursting with fountains. These sprawls of land are privately operated and specifically made to represent themselves as friendly, pleasant places to make a living. The architects of these spaces are extremely intentional in every facet of their operation: pathways for cars and people are controlled, and each shrub is placed with aesthetics, efficiency, and expenditure in mind. They do often look like parks; the combination of carefully placed hills and ranges can give the illusion of soft, naturally formed shapes of land. These intentional curves soften the hard edge of urban concrete and are meant to create a kind of comfort for the people that have to visit them every day for work. 

Foucault describes the heterotopia as an ‘other’ space that exists simultaneously within and outside of societal norms. 

“The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater bring onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space…” (Foucault 6)

The corporate office park is an elegant example of our values as a capitalist society and private power colliding with our desires for placation in the context of work and labor. A heterotopia exhibits a multiplicity of meanings and functions, often challenging the ordered and normative structures of society. Five O’Clock Somewhere engages in discourse with Foucault’s heterotopic principles, inviting viewers to reconsider the norms and values enshrined within the depicted private space juxtaposed with fabricated, organized nature. The concept of privatization is essential to this rug project, which is itself a consumable product that can be moved from one place to another. Foucault describes in his third principle the specific ways in which the rug and the garden combine together to create a heterotopic place:

“We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a small pace still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space).” (Foucault 6)

The exercise of translating a real, three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional design, which is then re-interpreted and crafted into a three-dimensional object, reinforces the complexity of a landscape with heterotopic characteristics. The garden at the center of the parking lot is designed with the facade of calm but the intention to disguise its mollifying intentions. The lawn striping (that distinctive criss-crossing pattern that can be achieved through intentional mowing methods) that surrounds the reservoir is a nod to the high-level manicure often seen in office park landscaping. The technique itself is one that carries two conflicting purposes: grass health and improving curb-appeal.

Despite having the appearance of being wide open and natural, office parks are only meant for the people that work within the buildings within the boundaries of private property. They are not open to the public, and sometimes hired security is there to ensure that this fundamental requisite is reinforced. They are spaces of control and normalization, where corporate ideals of productivity, efficiency and orderliness prevail. Most of these spaces lack sidewalks or easy accessibility to outside pathways or roadways, so the likelihood of strangers wandering around the landscape is slim. Their vastness enhances the lack of casual public accessibility; suburban areas in America are largely not meant to be accessible by any other form of transit than a car. The car itself is a pivotal element to the view-ability of this landscape. Each viewpoint is crafted with the car in mind; the mode of transportation is essential to both its functional navigation and aesthetic appreciation. The complexity of the relationship between form and function is reflected within the medium choice for Five O’Clock Somewhere: a utilitarian object–a rug to be traversed, transported and examined as a movable place. The design itself is pushed further into abstraction, as the design layout is reminiscent of typical geometric rug patterns and structural layouts.

Persian garden rugs have a few particular characteristics worth noting in regard to place and space, but the charbagh, meaning “four gardens” in Persian, is core to the fundamental, quadrilateral layout of the design. The charbagh is defined by its axial pathways and intersections to the garden center–often a water source–which, as Ruggles notes in his book Islamic Gardens and Landscapes, “act as a powerful method for organization and domestication of the landscape, itself a symbol of political territory” (Ruggles 1). This geometric structure is reflected in architecture such as the Taj Mahal in India and the historic Charbagh Avenue in Iran. The Persian garden rug is a cultural reflection of social values through the religious symbolism of division of space, representing the division of power, resources, and wealth. In the same way that Foucault describes the heterotopia as a mirror, the garden rug exists as an unreal, real place that can give us a joint experience of the shadow behind what is represented and the object itself. The doubling of the fountains in the centric reservoir illustrated in Five O’Clock Somewhere is a nod to the mirror as a symbol of reveal through repetition. 

The design of Five O’Clock Somewhere uses the same quadrilateral structure referenced in its layout: corporate offices occupy the four corners of the landscape, represented as flattened three-dimensional objects in a projected space. This visual compression allows a variable experience of the landscape from different vantage points as viewers transverse the landscape of the actual rug itself. The play around scale offers an incongruous experience of place–one that is both real and rooted in the immediate object, and one that is representative of an impossible physical stance through a birds-eye view. The spatial arrangement of the depicted landscape is not merely a representation but a commentary on power dynamics that exist within heterotopic environments. The central reservoir, framed by office buildings, takes on a hierarchical significance. Once a symbol of natural abundance, the water feature is now controlled and contained, reflecting the manipulation of nature to suit capitalistic needs. From river dams to oil rigs, capitalist ideology encourages the manipulation of wild spaces to suit productivity and profitable production. The surrounding parking lots, emphasizing convenience and accessibility, underscore the utilitarian priorities that often prevail in corporate spaces. The spatial symbolism speaks to the power structures inherent in these environments, shaping the daily experiences of those who inhabit and navigate them. 

The rug’s central reservoir, encircled by parking lots and office buildings, becomes a focal point for unraveling the heterotopic nature of the depicted fictional space. The reservoir, a symbol of tranquility and abundance in traditional Persian gardens, is reframed within the corporate context. Here, it becomes a controlled water feature, reflecting the commodification of nature within the enclosed corporate realms. The various elements within the privatized landscape are intentionally chosen for their ability to mitigate negative effects while operating as points of visual interest. A building that hosts hundreds of employees must also host their vehicles. The vehicles require adequate parking, but the asphalt necessitates solutions for water runoff. Expansive grassy areas offer natural solutions for water, but the shallow roots can only hold so much water, so reservoirs become crucial for containment. Bodies of water must remain agitated to avoid excessive growth of algae and insects, so fountains are incorporated to keep the surface continually in motion. None of these elements are romantic in nature, but are essential to their effectiveness. The parking lots surrounding the reservoir signify the dominance of convenience and efficiency over the natural elements, embodying the corporate ethos that prioritizes functionality over the semblance of equity. 

Within its fictional space, Five O’Clock Somewhere illustrates a landscape almost entirely devoid of human presence, instead bringing the infrastructure to the forefront. The parking lot, while vast, is almost empty, containing only a few dark cars. The sparseness of the space highlights the visual pattern of the parking lines and its overall structure as a flattened, uninhabited scene. The emptiness of this place that is so intended to be full, is reflective of a post-pandemic moment in our present history. With the push towards work-from-home positions, these physical places are indeed becoming less necessary. Our social priorities are in a moment of transition regarding our expectations of the work environment and what we can expect to gain from it. The architecture of the workplace is in flux and the infrastructure designed to contain it will inevitably be a part of this shift towards ineptness. The buildings represented in Five O’Clock Somewhere–mostly dark–host a handful of illuminated windows, suggesting a few late-night employees may still be working on site after hours. The surrounding border design depicts a nighttime silhouette of buildings in the distance, signaling vacancy–even hinting at their impending obsolescence.

Five O’Clock Somewhere is a creative inquiry into the philosophical intersection of craft, capital and utility. There is a complex relationship between spatial symbolism and the art of creating space that fulfills both utilitarian and aesthetic concerns. My hope is that this project offers a subtly humorous–but entirely deliberate–reflection on the realities and absurdities of these socio-cultural landscapes. This piece exists as an extraction of shapes and symbols while operating as an object and place itself. The real landscape of the corporate office park and the rug as a reflection of it, are a mirror to one another as contradicting realities–a true example of heterotopic values and principles. 

References

Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias." Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité, October 1984.

Ruggles, D. Fairchild. Islamic Gardens and Landscapes. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, p. 39.