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∂HOM %2San Francisco Chronicle%1↓San Francisco, CA∞
To the Editor:

	Allen Temko's article on the architecture of IBM's Santa
Teresa Laboratory expresses his fashionable disdain for
computers and the people who work with them.  However, if one
regards architecture as encompassing the relation of a building
to the people who use it, he has missed.
the main architectural feature of the laboratory - its distance
from the rest of Bay Area science and technology.
location.

	The physical isolation of so many IBM locations expresses
that company's intellectual isolationism and combines with its
excessive secretiveness to create an internal
intellectual world substantially immune to outside influence.
When good ideas, as sometimes happens, originate outside IBM,
they are often dismissed until their lack loses sales.
In itself, this is no loss, but it is more serious that IBM's
thousands of gifted people make a smaller contribution to
scientific and technological progress than they otherwise would.

.sgn