Landscapes of co-option: soft power and the environmental turn in corporate America

If soft power, which emerged as a new paradigm of world politics at the closing of the cold war, can be considered as an attempt to affect political outcomes through a careful design of environments, then certain threads in architectural thinking, namely those relating to environmental manipulation, can be seen as early articulations of similar ideas on different scales of operation. The 1971 Weyerhaeuser headquarters, designed by SOM and Sasaki, is scrutinized as a radical materialization of such concepts, in which every aspect, from the microscopic to the atmospheric, was controlled and mediated through a soft, precise and totalizing environment.