About Longaberger Basket Building
Most companies put their logo on a building. Longaberger turned the entire building into the product.
Completed in 1997, the company’s former Newark headquarters is a seven-story office building shaped like one of Longaberger’s familiar woven market baskets. The structure reproduces the basket’s flared sides, horizontal bands, dark trim, and especially its pair of gigantic handles arching high above the roof.
The architecture was not a decorative shell wrapped around a conventional office block. The basket form dictated the identity of the entire headquarters, turning a functional corporate building into one of America’s largest examples of mimetic architecture. The Library of Congress describes it as roughly 160 times larger than the basket that inspired it.
Longaberger vacated the building in 2016, and ownership and access have changed since then. The property should be treated as private unless an authorized public event or tour is specifically announced. From lawful public viewpoints, however, the building remains difficult to comprehend as anything other than an enormous picnic basket that somehow acquired seven floors of office space.