Building on tradition
It takes a certain chutzpah to argue that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is underrated. The firm is, after all, a colossus of world architecture with well over 10,000 projects to its credit, including several of the most iconic modernist buildings of the 20th century: New York's Lever House and Chicago's Inland Steel, John Hancock Center and Sears Tower. And after flirting with bankruptcy in the early 1990s, SOM is back with a vengeance, with high-profile projects in the United States, China and the Middle East, including Manhattan's Freedom Tower and the United Arab Emirates' Burj Dubai, set to be the tallest building in the world; the Chicago office is now helping to plan the city's bid for the 2016 Olympics. One of SOM's founders, Nathaniel Owings, wasn't far off the mark when he called it "the King Kong of architectural dynasties." * But none of this quite dispels the sense that when the story of American architecture's development is told, SOM, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, gets short shrift. If they discuss the firm at all, the history books tend to mention the Lever House and, sometimes, the Hancock, but not much else. »See FIRM, Page 12D
"We've missed the boat on SOM," says Nicholas Adams, an architectural historian at Vassar College and author of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: The Experiment Since 1936, out this year from the Italian publisher Electa. "We have not appreciated how important a firm this was, or how it modeled the large architectural practice for us. You can go through a whole series of building types -- the high-rise, the baseball stadium, the modernist airport -- and SOM was there first. It's been a great generator of ideas, almost like a research university -- putting concepts about computerization, structure and materials into practice when nobody else could. The public at large simply hasn't given them the credit they're due."
There are several reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that the King Kong of American architecture firms has always made a tempting target. Even during SOM's golden age from the 1950s through the '70s, some critics complained about the firm's allegedly sycophantic relationship with the modernist master Mies van der Rohe, its money-grubbing, its penchant for giganticism, and above all its sameness and lack of regard for local context. "An SOM building, like an Edsel or a Toastmaster, can function almost anywhere in the United States," the San Francisco-based critic Allan Temko snarked, "and in much of the rest of the world, as well, in any size or model."
Another reason for SOM's relatively low critical standing is the organizational structure that has made it unique: its status as a large partnership in which in-house designers, engineers and project managers work in close collaboration. Although its elite designers -- Gordon Bunshaft, Bruce Graham, Walter Netsch, Chuck Bassett and, most recently, Adrian Smith and David Childs -- achieved a measure of individual fame, SOM traditionally has marketed not its stars but, instead, its strength as a collective of experts all under one roof. Pick any horse at SOM, the message has always been, and you've got yourself a winner.
But especially in the age of the "starchitect," this facelessness has put the firm at a disadvantage with both clients and chroniclers of the art. "The firm definitely has had a bad rap," says Chicago architect Jim DeStefano, who was with SOM for 27 years before leaving to open his own shop. "It's not a single-practitioner firm, like Helmut Jahn's or Cesar Pelli's or Norman Foster's, so it just doesn't get the recognition."
It should -- both for SOM's past contributions and its potential to help shape the future of American architecture. After 70 innovative, often fractious years as the nation's leading exponent of modernism, SOM stands at a possibly decisive turning point. Now in the midst of a leadership shift from Smith, Childs and their generation of designers to a new group of younger partners, the firm may be poised to lead the charge toward sustainability as a guiding principle of 21st-century architectural design.
Although SOM often was viewed by outsiders as a monolithic institution with a single, "corporate" design aesthetic, in fact it pursued several different directions simultaneously, as the case of Netsch and Graham, the Chicago office's two major figures for decades, demonstrates.
In a firm more famous for its results than its philosophy, Netsch developed his own complex system of design known as Field Theory, often applying it to smaller-scale and/or educational projects such as the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Graham, more of an entrepreneur, was drawn to monumental projects, especially tall towers designed in collaboration with structural engineer Fazlur Khan. The most impressive of these -- the tapering, X-braced John Hancock Center (1965-1970) at 875 N. Michigan and Sears Tower (1970-73) at 233 S. Wacker, still the tallest building in the nation -- bookend the Chicago skyline to this day.
As the popularity of modernism gave way to postmodernism in the late 1970s, SOM began its transition into contextualism, adapting its designs to other locations and cultures throughout the world. The Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (1975-81) resembled a village of tents; Smith's Rowes Wharf in Boston (1982-86) and Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, China (1992-99) took cues from the Beantown waterfront and Buddhist pagodas, respectively.
In the late 1980s and early '90s, a downturn in the business climate for developers hit SOM hard. "It mostly affected commercial real estate, and we were the big boys in commercial real estate," Smith recalls. "We almost lost the firm then." Several veteran partners left, further weakening the firm. Between May 1991 and June 1992, the Chicago office dropped from about 540 people to about 180; in what became known as the Halloween Massacre of 1991, 150 employees were let go at once.
But the firm regathered itself, and in 1996 was named the American Institute of Architects' national Firm of the Year. Now with the Freedom Tower, Trump Tower, Burj Dubai and other projects under its belt, SOM is back on top; the Chicago office, ensconced in recently redesigned headquarters in the Santa Fe Building, is now up to fighting strength of about 325 employees. ("With the power of the computer really having come of age," Smith explains, "we do more work with 325 people than we could have done with 750 a decade ago.")
And through it all, SOM has been an envelope-pushing innovator, aiming to take good ideas and make them better. "It's a matter of using the materials and technologies of the day to come up with the most efficient, beautiful, cost-effective form," says former Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey, now SOM's director of media and governmental affairs. "The idea has always been to push the ball down the field a little further, design-wise and structure-wise -- to do just a little more."
"It began with Nat Owings, who loved the fact that Bruce and Walter were vying for authority in the Chicago office," recalls architect Stanley Tigerman, who worked at SOM in the late 1950s. "It kept them on their toes, but the two of them beat each other up with stunning regularity. And you were either on Bruce's side or Walter's side -- there was no in-between. It's a good firm, but I didn't like working there. Too political."
Adams agrees. "It certainly was a snake pit in the time of Netsch and Graham, and that was part of the experiment: You have people working in the shadows at SOM, but you also have those people who want to stand out from the group. You need them all, but how do you make them get along?"
It's a problem that continues to bedevil SOM even now. "There's a lot of ego involved," Smith says. "Especially when you have two strong egos, sometimes there's a battling for turf or position within the firm. That happens to this day. It's been a battleground."
He knows from personal experience. Three and a half years ago, a conflict between the New York and Chicago offices over the elevation of two new partners, Ross Wimer and Peter Ruggiero -- both associated with Childs in New York -- led to Smith's being forced into the status of a "consulting" design partner. That means that although he maintains a full workload as a designer -- he's busier than ever, in fact, with Burj Dubai and Chicago's Trump Tower now under construction and new projects in China and Las Vegas in the works -- he no longer participates in the running of SOM's business affairs.
"On the one hand, from the firm's perspective, it's very important to have generational turnover," says Smith, 62. "The reason we've survived for 70 years is that the turnovers have allowed for the regeneration of the firm. I've always known it was coming; I just didn't expect it to come so early."
Tom Kerwin, at 43 one of the Chicago office's youngest partners, explains Smith's transition in terms of an organizational changing of the guard. "Adrian is a great man and still a huge rainmaker for the firm," says Kerwin, past president of AIA Chicago and the firm's point man for the 2016 Olympics. "But I think we're looking for ways to keep senior architects like Adrian, who are really in the prime of their careers, active and engaged, but also to allow a younger generation of people within the firm to grow and take on more of a leadership role. It doesn't mean we don't seek their guidance and counsel, but it's not dictated to us."
As for the continuing conflict, he says, "It breeds new ideas and new perspectives, and it keeps the firm alive -- we wouldn't survive without it. You're not invited to the table to agree with everybody. The key is to make it constructive, not destructive."
"The same way SOM was at the forefront of taking modernism from the theoretical to the practical by explaining it in a way that made sense to developers, the firm finds itself in the same relationship to sustainability," Bey says. "We can show how sustainable design can allow buildings to theoretically begin to pay for themselves."
Kerwin is equally enthusiastic. "SOM is not going to have a policy that all our projects have to be sustainable, but buildings generate the bulk of carbon emissions around the world, and we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels," he says. "I personally believe that if we do not embrace sustainability as a key driver for us, we're not being socially responsible."
Even so, some aren't sure it's going to happen, at least not on a consistent basis. Wimer, for one, sees sustainability as "an important part of our agenda, but one that depends so much on the locale and the climate of the project. It's not so much sustainability I would hang my hat on, but rather design excellence."
An example of this principle is Wimer's own Infinity Tower, now under construction in Dubai. Although its cladding features perforated metal screens and recessed glazing that help protect the building's interior from the harsh desert sunlight, it's the tower's twisting form -- somewhat reminiscent of Santiago Calatrava's recent design for a tower on the Chicago lakefront -- that Wimer hangs his hat on.
"I think a lot of what drove SOM in the past was really a business mentality," he says. "You were making practical, efficient buildings for developers, and design as an objective wasn't always first on the checklist. We're trying to be sure that design excellence comes first."
Lest that sound too critical of the preceding generations, Wimer insists that he's part of the SOM continuum. "It's more of an evolution than a revolution," he says. "The firm has always had transitions from one group of leaders to another, and the desire is always to make those transitions as organic as possible. I really see the work I'm doing as building on the tradition here, Hancock and Sears and Inland Steel and those great icons of the past. I think you always look at those as touchstones, to see if what you're producing is worthy of the tradition of SOM."
1936 Founding in Chicago
1937 Aldis & Co., interior renovation project
1939 Planning and pavilions for the New York World's Fair (by then-new New York office)
1949 Planning and architecture for new town of Oak Ridge, Tenn., built for the Atomic Energy Commission
1952 Lever House
1958 Inland Steel »
1960 Banco de Bogota in Columbia
1963 Cadet Chapel at U.S. Air Force Academy
1965 University of Illinois Circle Campus
1970 John Hancock Center »
1974 Sears Tower »
1986 Onterie Place
1987 Masterplanning and architecture of London's Canary Warf begins
1989 NBC Tower on Cityfront Plaza
1992 USG Building at Franklin & Adams
1996 State Street Renovation
« 1998 Jin Mao Tower, China
2001 Chicago Central Area Plan
2005: GM Renaissance Center (largest rehab project in the world completed)
« 2006: ChemSunny Plaza, China
2009: Pearl River Tower, China (expected completion)
2009: Burj Dubai, United Arab Emirates (expected completion) »
Just in case you need a visual reminder of how important Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is in the history of Chicago architecture, join the crowds and visit the observation decks of Sears Tower and/or the John Hancock Center, both by the SOM team of Bruce Graham and Fazlur KhanFrom Sears, your eye turns into a compass spinning magnetic true north to Hancock, which looms with the industrial bluntness of a derrick and the tapering, primitive mystery of an obelisk. From Hancock, Sears -- an assembly of squared-off tubes jutting up at staggered intervals -- beckons like a proffered pack of Marlboros.
Off to the east, if you look hard enough, you might catch a glint of light off the dazzling metal surfaces of Inland Steel, its prominent piers slicing toward Monroe Street like rows of gleaming knives.
Though we tend to take them for granted, these iconic buildings gracing our streetscape and skyline are among the defining pleasures of life in Chicago. They also make, along with Gordon Bunshaft's much-heralded Lever House in New York and Walter Netsch's underappreciated Air Force Academy chapel in Colorado, an impressive case for SOM's status as one of the key architectural firms of the 20th century.
Add to these Bunshaft's National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia and Adrian Smith's Jin Mao Tower in China and you have a portrait of a firm that refused to remain stuck in the Miesian glass-box rut, experimenting with new forms for new contexts. Add the designs for Smith's Trump Tower in Chicago, David Childs' Freedom Tower in New York and Ross Wimer's Infinity Tower in Dubai, and you have a vision of an architectural practice striding into the terrorism-tinged future with its sense of drama and occasion firmly intact.
SOM's continued success depends, probably, on its willingness to engage creatively, as well as pragmatically, with what promises to be the primary architectural challenge of the 21st century: sustainability. It won't be enough, very likely, to design buildings in which energy-efficient, eco-friendly technologies are deployed either as afterthoughts or as the sole form-givers.
The trick will be to find ways of making the pragmatic goals of sustainability dovetail seamlessly with those of design aesthetics, and vice versa -- and, ideally, to make the distinction between the two seem to disappear. Gordon Gill's Pearl River Tower, designed in dialogue with Smith as a "zero energy" project in China, is a start in this direction, but as Gill has insisted, the building's streamlined visual appeal is essentially an accidental byproduct of its programmatic agenda. Will "form follows performance," as he styles it, produce aesthetically satisfying buildings? We'll have to wait and see.
In the meantime, here's a happy 70th birthday to SOM, still looking spry.
Kevin Nance