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Last week I went on a tour of the headquarters of a defunct blood testing company. My team at work will have the strange honor(?) of moving our offices here in about a month. The location was once the site of the Wall Street Journal's regional distribution center, until the printing plant shut down in 2011. The WSJ's 45-year-old building was demolished in 2012.
In 2014, the new owners hired Clive Wilkinson to build their headquarters on this site. The building was completed in 2015 but was only in use until mid-2017, when some bad press from the same WSJ caused investors and customers to begin distancing themselves from the company:
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Soundtube motion detector
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Morphing wall orbs.
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Curtis Schneider decontamination slip -- this person was very concerned about quality control!
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Upstairs wet lab space was kept locked behind a gat to protect super secret blood testing intellectual property that didn't even exist.
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[last edit 1/28/2019 6:27 AM by plexiglas - edited 1 times]
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This seems to be a real estate tour.
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The quiet cubes in #25 are cool - I've never seen those before....
Give abandonment a reason for its sacrificial reclamation to nature. Love it. Remember it. Take a picture. Share it. Leave the decay to nature.
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Posted by Mr. Bitey
The quiet cubes in #25 are cool - I've never seen those before....
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Me either. Strange and functional.
Just when I thought I was out... they pulled me back in.
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That room in #17 looks like a classroom, but miniaturized. Do you know what it was for? Seems like there's quite a bit of money in furniture that someone could flip!
AARXNJAMES.COM |
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I was wondering when this one would appear. Love the capture of #25
Stealth: adj. designed in accordance with technology that makes detection difficult. Wraith: n. A wisp or faint trace of something |
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Posted by dtewsacrificial
This seems to be a real estate tour.
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but, but, uh it still counts as URBEX right ??? 
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number 4 is the fibonacci spirale!!
http://www.flickr....rescueme1060/sets/
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Very cool. Lots to look at.
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Posted by dtewsacrificial
This seems to be a real estate tour.
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Haha, it basically was! That's why I made this post public. There were still a few things laying around that disgruntled scientists had left behind though so I thought I'd share the photos here.
It's also interesting local weirdness if you've read any articles about the downfall of Theranos and all of the science that wasn't actually being done in this building. The company was valued at almost $10 billion when this building was being constructed. It's all just so surreal to me.
[last edit 1/30/2019 4:02 AM by plexiglas - edited 3 times]
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I just started reading the book "Bad Blood" yesterday, talking about this very office. Thanks a lot for sharing!
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I was wondering who was going to take the property. My first job was located in the old building demolished for this one and I guess I got my current position as a direct result of people wanting to avoid a repeat of that Theranos shit. I am so glad they turned me down 5 years ago.
Any angry notes lying around?
Bad Blood is a good book. Some amazing drama played out in those walls worthy of a Soap:
The lab he inherited was divided into two parts: a room on the building’s second floor that was filled with commercial diagnostic equipment, and a second room beneath it where research was being conducted. The upstairs room was the federally certified part of the lab, the one Beam was responsible for. Balwani and Holmes viewed its conventional machines as dinosaurs that would soon be rendered extinct by Theranos’s revolutionary technology, so they called it “Jurassic Park.” They called the downstairs room “Normandy” in reference to the D-day landings during World War II. The proprietary Theranos devices it contained would take the lab industry by storm, like the Allied troops who braved hails of machine-gun fire on Normandy’s beaches to liberate Europe from Nazi occupation...
Still visibly angry, Holmes told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Balwani put it more bluntly: Anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should “get the fuck out.”
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This is awesome, I was just watching the doc about Ms. Holmes the other day. Must be weird working in that building, pretty cool nonetheless.
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Holy shit! Looks barely different than in the documentary. Well, of course, everything's gone, but I mean, damn that's eerie. What a weird scam.
The #1 rule about poking things with sticks is never use your finger. |
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Posted by Clostridium
I was wondering who was going to take the property. My first job was located in the old building demolished for this one and I guess I got my current position as a direct result of people wanting to avoid a repeat of that Theranos shit. I am so glad they turned me down 5 years ago.
Any angry notes lying around?
Bad Blood is a good book. Some amazing drama played out in those walls worthy of a Soap:
The lab he inherited was divided into two parts: a room on the building’s second floor that was filled with commercial diagnostic equipment, and a second room beneath it where research was being conducted. The upstairs room was the federally certified part of the lab, the one Beam was responsible for. Balwani and Holmes viewed its conventional machines as dinosaurs that would soon be rendered extinct by Theranos’s revolutionary technology, so they called it “Jurassic Park.” They called the downstairs room “Normandy” in reference to the D-day landings during World War II. The proprietary Theranos devices it contained would take the lab industry by storm, like the Allied troops who braved hails of machine-gun fire on Normandy’s beaches to liberate Europe from Nazi occupation...
Still visibly angry, Holmes told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Balwani put it more bluntly: Anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should “get the fuck out.”
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Oh cool, you worked in the old WSJ building? Do you know if anyone explored it right before it was demolished in 2012? I had no idea that this was going on at the time so I didn't even check.
A couple of months ago I took more photos, mostly in the mysterious basement area since the documentaries don't show it. Everything that I photographed is now a hardhat zone and blocked off for demolition. The entire kitchen area in my original post was demolished last week to make space for wet labs, so it's going quick.
Most of the rooms in the basement were locked, but I have a feeling that they were already emptied of any goodies by the staff who did the initial building cleanup anyway. Still interesting to see Normandy:
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Ethics
