IBM Headquarters Armonk, New York

IBM’s corporate headquarters is in Armonk, New York, just a few miles from the Westchester County airport, in rolling, wooded, mostly affluent residential countryside, peppered with golf courses. The company moved its headquarters here from Manhattan in 1964, to land it had purchased in the 1950s, a former apple orchard, surrounded by woods. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill built a formal modernist rectangle with an open atrium in the middle, now known as the North Castle building, next to a parking lot, for the 900 or so executives and secretaries commuting to work. In 1997, a new headquarters was built a few hundred yards away, a zig–zagging postmodern building, with lots of glass, open floor plans, and an irregular footprint aligned with the terrain, surrounded by woods. It intentionally represented a departure from the uniform corridors of identical offices at the North Castle building, the old IBM modernism which had brought the company to hard times by the mid 1990s. IBM remains one of the largest companies in the world, with around 380,000 employees working in 175 countries. Also on the property is the Learning Center, a training center with a few hotel-style residence buildings, next to the corporate headquarters. The Armonk campus is private place, with a number of gated entrances, and screened off from public view by rolling terrain and trees.