Legendary architect Eero Saarinen’s Bell Labs headquarters in Holmdel, New Jersey, which sat empty for almost a decade after the phone company’s successors abandoned it, is showing
The tenants have agreed to take a total of about 40,000 square feet (3,700 square meters) inside the secluded glass box surrounded by woods and suburban homes, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) south of Manhattan. The largest and latest of the leases is with Acacia Communications Inc., a designer of cloud-based communications services, which will have about 26,000 square feet at the property, now called Bell Works. The other two tenants are Nvidia Corp., which is developing software for self-driving cars, and McCann Systems LLC, which advises businesses on their use of audiovisual technology.
With the three deals, about a tenth of the about 1 million square feet set aside for office space at the building off the Garden State Parkway have been leased following years of uncertainty that the property could ever be revived. While Bell Works has a long way to go, Ralph Zucker, who’s owned the building since 2013, said he’s on the way to creating a self-contained “urban box in a suburban location.” The project has been “swimming against the tide” of New Jersey’s vacant suburban corporate campuses with its Saarinen design and legacy, Zucker said.
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