Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM) 
Total Projects from Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM): 9
There are nearly 2,000 architects working in Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill offices all over the world. The firm has carried out over 10,000 architectural, engineering, interior-design and planning projects in its long history. These staggering statistics tell you almost all you need to know about this office.Formed in 1936, SOM is almost single-handedly responsible for a model of practice that provides accommodation for the globalized corpor¬ation, wherever that might be in the world. It has produced buildings that remain unforgettable landmarks - the US's tallest building, the Sears Tower in Chicago (1974), springs to mind as an example - whatever their quality as pieces of architecture.
Rather than focusing on the ego of a single, named architect, SOM was founded as a collective of designers. This idea was perhaps laudable but did not work. If you know that SOM designed the famous, elegant, Miesian Lever House in New York (1952) or the Beinecke Library at Yale University (1963), then you probably know that the partner in charge was Gordon Bunshaft, the most prominent creative force behind SOM in the 1950s and 1960s and winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1988. Likewise, you might even know that it was Walter Netsch who designed the Colorado Springs Air Force Chapel (1962), and Bruce Graham who was responsible for the classic cross-braced skyscraper that is the John Hancock Center in Chicago (1970). Suddenly, the anonymity of the SOM initials starts to fracture.
Today this paradox continues. A firm the size of SOM cannot pos¬sibly maintain stylistic consistency, but it is clear that certain SOM offices produce far better buildings than others. David Childs of the New York office has been an outspoken voice in the efforts to reconstruct the World Trade Center site, as well as being the author of the plan to resurrect New York's Penn Station. Roger Duffy, design partner at the New York office, is the progenitor of the best of the work coming out of SOM at the moment. This includes the spectacular flat roof of Changi International Airport in Singapore (2003), with its 2,000 skylights, and the Libeskind-esque Training Facility for the Kuwaiti State Police (2003). Duffy himself has claimed that not identifying individuals with their work led to a 'shield of anonymity that permitted a decline in quality' in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Despite SOM's staggering commercial success, there are some in-disputable dogs in their portfolio, such as the corporate Postmodernism of the Quaker Oats Building in Chicago (1986) and the sub-Cesar Pelli extruded section of the Lutheran Brotherhood Building in Minneapolis (1983). However, the classics are all there. Lever House is perhaps rivalled only by Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York as the most elegant of 1950s skyscrapers. The Beinecke Library, which had the most expensive facade ever constructed when it was completed in 1963, made of thin alabaster panels in a concrete honeycomb structure, stands today in the heart of the retro architectural melange of Yale University, a mys¬terious object illuminated internally by dappled light - a truly fantastic architectural experience. SOM's body of work is a palimpsest of main-stream architectural history.
website: www.som.com
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