Business park

A business park or office park is an area of land in which many office buildings are grouped together. All of the work that goes on is commercial, not large-scale industrial nor residential. The first office park opened in Mountain Brook, Alabama, in the early 1950s to avoid racial tension in city centers.[1]

These are popular in many suburban locations, where development is cheaper because of the lower land costs and the lower building costs for building wider, not necessarily higher. Some businesses prefer the larger floorplates as more efficient, reducing time lost moving between floors. They are also often located near motorways or main roads for easy access.

Criticism

The impact of these areas on the urban fabric has been criticized:

  • Spaces escape the control of the built realm: voids between fragments of unconnected residential schemes, gaps between urbanized zones, abandoned farmland, etc. A new approach to spacial organization arises with the ease that characterizes any new consumer good, an approach which questions the conventional references of urbanism: the so-called 'commercial, industrial, business and theme park'.
  • The urbanized park originally sprang from the hybridization of the garden-city and Anglo-Saxon university campus models. It adopted the former's low-rise buildings and attention to free spaces as a way of shaping the environment, and the latter's autonomous constructions. In sum, parks are thematic precincts of autonomous architectural set pieces arranged around parking lots and communal services, and are situated at the most accessible points of the metropolitan road network.
  • (José María Ezquiaga (November–December 1998). "The City: Folds and Pieces". AV Monographs. 74: 4–11. )

List of major business parks

Suburban office parks like this in the Boca Corporate Center & Campus in Boca Raton, Florida, United States, are usually lushly landscaped so that a peaceful workspace is created

See also

References

  1. ↑ Zak, Dan (20 July 2015). "The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town". The Washington Post. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
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