Paul Rudolph's spectacular Burroughs Wellcome Headquarters — a History

Paul Rudolph’s Burroughs Wellcome headquarters & research center in Durham, N.C. Image courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, photograph by G. E. Kidder Smith

Out of a half-century career of creative and prolific work, Rudolph’s Burroughs Wellcome headquarters & research center stands out as one of his finest works. We’re now fighting to save this magnificent example of the convergence of corporate & scientific vision and architectural talent—and we thought it would be useful to share an outline of it’s history, purpose, and features.

A SITE FOR GROWTH: THE RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK

The Burroughs Wellcome building (shown circled here), at 3030 East Cornwallis Road, in Durham, N.C.’s Research Triangle Park. Only a portion of this celebrated research development is shown here, but even in this partial view, one can see some of Burroughs Wellcome’s distinguished neighbors—among them: IBM, Cree, Toshiba, RTI, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, and the National Humanities Center. Image courtesy of Google Maps.

A closer aerial view of the Burroughs Wellcome complex. Shown here is its current state, after a Rudolph-designed addition to the building (that had been located to the lower-left) had been demolished by the current owner. Landscape features, designed by Rudolph, have also been removed from the site. Image courtesy of Google Maps.

Founded in 1959, Durham, North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park is one of the most prominent research developments in the US. This is where hundreds of distinguished firms and organizations located their headquarters and research centers—and it is here that Burroughs Wellcome placed their US headquarters and laboratories.

They chose Paul Rudolph as their architect, and the project commenced design work in his office in 1969, and was completed and dedicated in 1972.

Burroughs Wellcome was designed for growth: the initial, main body of the building, was followed by several additions—in 1976, 1978, and 1982—all designed by Rudolph. His work in 1982 also included a master plan for the overall site.

The story of Durham’s Research Triangle Park is comprehensively told in Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy by Alex Cummings, PhD—and this fascinating study includes coverage of the Burroughs Wellcome building.

THE BUILDING: ITS PURPOSE, HISTORY, AND FEATURES

• In February 1969, pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome purchases a little over 66 acres of rolling woodland in Durahm, North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. The company is a subsidiary of The Wellcome Foundation Ltd., based in the UK.

• The client requests of Paul Rudolph a design that will be shaped to its needs, yet remain architecturally distinctive.

Burroughs Wellcome’s symbol is a unicorn—and Rudolph wanted to have a statue of a unicorn at the building’’s entry (it’s even shown on his architectural model for the building). When it did not work out to do include the statue, Rudolph came up with a creative alternative: a flagpole that would evoke the Burroughs Wellcome symbol, by being angled to match the unicorn’s horn.

• Flexibility is a primary goal: each major area in Rudolph’s plan—laboratories, administration, and support services—are capable of being expanded by linear addition. To allow for this, Rudolph leaves the expansible ends of the building expressed as a pattern of flattened hexagons, so that the elements can be extended horizontally without disturbing the building’s visual order.

• The building program includes 312,303 square feet of research laboratory and administrative space, including: 140 labs, a library, auditorium, cafeteria, and support activity spaces for 400 workers.

• In plan, the building forms a giant “S”, with opposing arms that form a main entry court and a large service yard. Reception, cafeteria, library, auditorium, and administrative offices flank the entry court. Laboratories, research offices, and testing facilities surround the service yard.

• The building exterior (and parts of the interior) is finished with a limestone aggregate which is sprayed-in-place, into to a plastic binder. [Rudolph used the same textured finish in several subsequent projects.] This exposed aggregate finish was used on 140,000 square feet of exterior walls and 90,000 square feet of interior walls. Rudolph estimated the finish required 20,000,000 stones to complete!

• The building’s structure is an eccentrically loaded trapezoidal steel frame, with columns inclined at 22.5 degrees. Rudolph’s original slant of the design was changed at the request of the building’s structural system. This is the sort of practical accommodation that an architect who’d been long in practice, like Rudolph, would be used to receiving and accommodating.

• The building is dedicated on Friday, April 7th 1972.

• A collectors medallion is issued to celebrate the dedication which features a rendering of the building on one side, and a unicorn (the company’s logo) on the other side.

The ground-breaking ceremony marking the commencement of construction of the Burroughs Wellcome building in Durham’s Research Triangle Park. Paul Rudolph is at the right.

At completion, a commemorative medal was issued for the 1972 dedication.

• As part of the dedication ceremony, Rudolph gives a walking tour of the building. He writes a description of the building saying, “the building is conceived as a man-made extension of the ridge upon which it is built. The building is terraced, each floor being smaller that the one below it. Its placement allows people to enter from below walking through a courtyard and porch into the lobby.”

• The building interior and exterior are used as part of the set for the 1983 science fiction film Brainstorm starring Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood. 

• The building is originally known as the Burroughs-Wellcome Company Headquarters (and later the GlaxoSmithKline Building.)

• The original building has several additions, all designed by Paul Rudolph, including: a Main Building addition in 1976, a Toxicology/Experimental Pathology Building addition in 1978 and a South Building Expansion in 1982. Rudolph also was asked to create a new Masterplan for the site in 1982.

• The building is closed to the public for decades for security reasons, while pharmaceutical companies Glaxo, Glaxo Wellcome, and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) actively use it as offices and research laboratories. Employees are not permitted to take cameras into the facility, due to the sensitivity of the research being conducted.

• The building is renamed the Elion-Hitchings Building in 1988, honoring Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings - research chemists with Burroughs Wellcome who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir James Black. Their prize-winning research was done while they were working at the building.

• On April 21, 1989 four ACT UP activists barricade themselves inside an office in the building: they demand a cut in the price of AZT (at that time the most expensive medicine in history.)

• In 1995, Burroughs Wellcome and Glaxo merge to become Glaxo Wellcome, and a merger between that company and SmithKline Beecham establishes the company as GlaxoSmithKline. The company’s operations are then relocated another facility.

• In February 2010 the building is listed for sale.

• On June 30 2012, Glaxo sells its iconic Elion-Hitchings Building, two interconnected office building, ,and 140 acres of land for $17.5 million to United Therapeutics.

• On October 20 2012, the building is opened for a public tour, arranged by Triangle Modernist Houses (now USModernist) with United Therapeutics. A video of the event can be watched here.

• United Therapeutics demolishes part of the structure in 2014.

• On September 4, 2020 United Therapeutics is issued a demolition permit for the building from the City of Durham. Clear Site Industrial, LLC is listed as the demolition contractor.

SAVE THIS GREAT ARCHITECTURE

Losing Burroughs Wellcome would be a cultural disaster—a titanic loss to our country’s cultural heritage.

When a great building is destroyed, there are no second chances.

FOR NOW, THERE ARE TWO THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Sign the petition to save Burroughs Wellcome. You can sign it here.

• We’ll send you bulletins about the latest developments. To get them, please join our foundation’s mailing list: you’ll get all the updates, (as well as other Rudolphian news.)—you can sign up at the bottom of this page.

While Modern architecture has often been accused of being color-phobic (and primarily relying on a limited of primarily whites, grays, and beige), that was never true of Rudolph’s work. He could skillfully incorporate even the boldest colors—as shown here in a Burroughs Wellcome interior—which he used to enliven a building’s spaces. Photograph by Henry L. Kamphoefner

NOW UNDER THREAT: One of Paul Rudolph's most amazing designs— the Burroughs Wellcome HQ

Completed in 1972, the Burroughs Wellcome headquarters & research center shows Paul Rudolph at the height of his creative and problem-solving powers. Above, the main building is shown on the right, and the later extension (also by Rudolph) is on the left. Photo by Joseph W. Molitor. Image courtesy of Joseph W. Molitor architectural photographs collection, located in Columbia University, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Department of Drawings & Archives.

RESEARCH, ARCHITECTURE—AND THE THREAT TO A GREAT BUILDING

Durham, North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park is one of the most prominent research developments in the US. It’s here that distinguished firms and organizations have chosen to place their headquarters and research centers—and it has facilities for hundreds of organizatons, including: IBM, Cree, BASF, Cisco, Lenovo, Underwriters Laboratories, and the EPA.

Some have attempted to construct not only efficient buildings, but ones of architectural merit.—and of all of them, it is Paul Rudolph’s BURROUGHS WELLCOME HEADQUARTERS which stands out.

But now, that building is threatened with destruction. A controversial demolition permit has been issued, and the future of the this architectural masterpiece is in immediate jeopardy. We’ll be giving you updates about this—including how you can help save it. But to start, we thought it would be well worth it to tell you a bit about the building—especially why it’s significant.

The client said they wanted an architecturally distinctive building. They got what they asked for—and Rudolph’s ability to create memorable and forward-looking architecture extended to all the spaces of the Burroughs Wellcome building. This can be seen most vividly in the main entry lobby (which also shows Rudolph’s bold handling of color.). Image courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, photograph by G. E. Kidder Smith

A BUILDING dYNAMIC IN ITS TIME—AND FOR THE FUTURE

In a half-century career filled with architectural landmarks, gems, and masterworks, Burroughs Wellcome is on many people’s “top ten” list of Rudolph’s designs—and here are some reasons why it’s significant:

• It is one of Rudolph’s largest constructed projects: So one sees, substantively, how a brilliant designer worked out his ideas about siting, planning, spatial organization, interiors, and finishes in a comprehensive, large-scale way, and over a variety of conditions and spaces.

• A design for growth: Rudolph was concerned for the future—of cities, homes, education, and of individual buildings. He knew that, in very tangible ways, buildings are never finished, and must be flexible to accommodate the future. Rudolph designed Burroughs Wellcome with change and expansion in mind: its striking geometries and planning were designed for growth. In fact, this was not just one building, but a growing complex: the main building being designed in 1969; and with extensions added in 1976, 1978, and 1982—that latter date including work on a master plan for the site. [In architecture, as in other fields, there’s no greater compliment than “repeat business.”—and that Rudolph was repeatedly called back by the Burroughs Wellcome leadership shows that his work was practical and beneficial.]

• New paths in creating space: Even though he profoundly respected Mies and Gropius (and acknowledged their importance to him) Rudolph rejected their “universal space” concept—an approach to architectural planning which led to undifferentiated, bland, grid-like spaces: the kind found so often found in the office and educational building designs of his contemporaries. Like Wright, Rudolph sought to create spaces of variety and richness, ones which would allow for varying uses and inspiring experiences. Moreover, he saw that overlapping spaces had the potential to increase communication among a building’s users—a significant advantage in a building for research, corporate coordination, or education. Rudolph had previously, in his Yale Art & Architecture Building, shown how this can be done within a sculpturally handled rectilinear geometry. At Burroughs Wellcome, his oeuvre moves forward into the dynamic realm of angled forms and spaces—ones which simultaneously offer energy and a sense of stability. [This geometry is so striking that the building has been used as the setting for film and television: it was part of the set for the 1983 science fiction film Brainstorm (starring Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood), and was in several episodes of the TV series Revolution.]

• Humanizing materials: Much architectural work, even of the Modern “masters,” is composed with hard, surgically smooth planes. Rudolph was a pioneer in bringing vivid textures back onto the palette of modern architecture. At Burroughs Wellcome, Rudolph specified an exterior finish using a limestone aggregate which was sprayed in place into a plastic binder (and he used similar finishes in subsequent projects.) Such texturing humanizes a building, moving it away from the sterility of which other architects’ buildings are often accused.

• Careful siting and massing: Here, we’ll let the architect speak for himself:

This complex climbs up and down a beautiful ridge in the green hills of North Carolina and is architecturally an extension of its site. An “A frame” allows the greatest volume to be housed on the lower floors and yet connected to the smaller mechanical system at the apex of the building. The diagonal movement of interior space opens up magnificent opportunities. Anticipation of growth and change is implicit in the concept. — Paul Rudolph, in Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, 1970

• The opposite of blandness: So many corporate facilitates are dull boxes—uninspiring, and creating no impression of pride or identity. From the beginning, Burroughs Wellome’s leadership recognized the specialness of what they’d built—as evidenced in this statement from the company’s President:

This building is an exciting and ingenious combination of forms [in which] one discovers new and different qualities of forms and spaces . . . a splendid climate for scientific scholarship and for the exchange of ideas. — Fred A. Coe Jr., President of Burroughs Wellcome

• A comprehensive work of “wholeness": Rocco Leonardis, a practicing architect and scholar who had a long association with Rudolph, characterized the essential work of architects as “creating wholes.” At Burroughs Wellcome, site placement, structural elements, exterior shapes, viewing angles, steps and paths, interiors, finishes, details—and even the closets and the placement of the flagpole—all are carefully coordinated (especially within the overall diagonal geometry), creating a “total” work of great power and charm.

Rudolph maintained good relations with the company, and was called back—several times—to do further work on the complex. This is his perspective rendering of the dining area—a dynamic space which was constructed as part of the 1976 extension. That addition has been demolished, and now the main part of the building is under threat too. Image © the estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

Paul Rudolph himself greatly prized the design, as is clear from his using Burroughs Wellcome’s Headquarters building for the cover of the monograph on his celebrated drawings.

WILL THERE BE A FUTURE FOR THIS GREAT WORK?

Losing Burroughs Wellcome would be a cultural disaster—a titanic loss to this country’s cultural heritage.

We cannot let that happen—and when a building is demo’d, there are no second chances.

In upcoming posts, we’ll let you know more about the building. Even more important, we’ll keep you updated about the our efforts to save it from destruction—a fate that’s befallen too many of this great architect’s works, and which should not be allowed to happen again.

FOR NOW: THERE ARE TWO THINGS YOU CAN DO—

• Sign the petition to save Burroughs Wellcome. You can sign it here.

• We’ll send you bulletins about the latest developments. To get them, please join our foundation’s mailing list: you’ll get all updates, (as well as other Rudolphian news.)—you can sign up at the bottom of this page.

Rudolph’s full section drawing through the main headquarters building, indicating the dynamic spaces within—and the building’s relation to the site. Image © the estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation