Evolution by Design

The firm is in the process of reestablishing itself as a major force in the profession. What does the future hold for SOM?

David Childs: One way to shape the future of the firm is to learn from its past. When the firm was established, in 1936, it was an experiment to create a new model of practice. It was to be a collective, a group, a guild. The firm’s founders believed that great architects could conceive projects collectively and achieve technical and design brilliance within that model. The name Skidmore, Owings & Merrill quickly shifted to SOM, emphasizing the collaborative over the individual. We sustain our energy by working together in multidisciplinary groups. The future, to me, lies in retaining and fine-tuning the original model.

Craig Hartman: SOM isn’t a singular institution. It never has been. Its future will be colored largely by the people we hire, but also by the changing nature of the world around us.

Roger Duffy: As the world becomes more homogenized, things that have a unique quality become more attractive. It’s incumbent on us to make every commission unique. If we focus on excellence, enhancing our reputation, and making memorable statements that efficiently address the client’s needs, we will distinguish SOM once again. If we don’t, the firm will cease to exist because of competitive forces.

SOM has long been a meritocracy, in which talented young members of the firm can make significant contributions very early in their careers. How does the firm encourage and accommodate the emergence of new voices and ideas?

Jeffrey McCarthy: I think the studio system, as we interpret it in Chicago, is one of the ways we foster responsibility in our young colleagues. Each studio is responsible for a project from early schematics through completion. Unlike the departmentalized organizational structure that separates design and construction document groups, the studios at SOM operate like a collection of small firms that share a central resource.

Roger Duffy: The enormous size and scale of the projects we do require everybody to make a contribution to the process. The studio is set up to be non-hierarchical so that people are solving problems as they are simultaneously producing great architecture. Because of our team-based organization, we must be diligent in our hiring and promotion practices. We try to hire the best people right out of school, but I’m not sure the best people select SOM.

Philip Enquist: The studio system is designed to allow the best ideas to come forward, whether they come from the studio head, design partner, or a young person on the team.

Marshall Strabala: The studio system also helps us to identify young design talent and allows younger people and partners to have direct contact.

Craig Hartman: It sets the stage for an open dialogue between experienced architects and those who are up-and-coming. We pass on our own experiences to the next generation.

David Childs: I never know, frankly, who’s learning more from whom. I find myself working on projects in which the young people teach me a thing or two. If I were a young person today, I’d be tempted to go to the hottest master. But, in fact, the freedom extended to young architects at SOM is extraordinary compared to what a young designer would experience under the tutelage of a single-leader firm.

Mark Hayduk: I’ve only been at SOM for two years. I thought I was going to spend my days drawing bathroom details, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the firm does tap young people for their ideas. Everybody is given a chance to voice their opinions. The collaborative environment creates a little competition within the studio, but it also bonds people.

SOM is like a guild in which individual talent is extended through collaboration. How does the firm reconcile such a cooperative environment with the natural tendency of superior talent to dominate an organization? How does SOM pass on leadership roles within the organization?

Ross Wimer: SOM, as a guild, works best on big, complex projects where you need to operate as a multi-headed creature that has a single goal. I think it works best when there is a strong design talent who’s leading the team. It’s absolutely essential to make the guild work. People who have shown strong design and leadership skills have been able to move forward and use those talents to guide larger groups of people.

Roger Duffy: It is like a guild, but there’s always a person or persons at the end of the line that make the decisions for the project.

Brian Lee: Strong leadership is an outgrowth of the guildlike environment we have here. Some people may be very strong conceptually and may have great skills as a designer. Others might have good communication skills, being able to communicate ideas to peers and clients.

Jeff Holmes: The most talented people at SOM tend to inspire others, increasing the overall quality of production in the studios. As a result, the whole office grows.

David Childs: There is a very organized, careful process of searching out the next generation of talented architects, with the expectation that they will, in time, replace the current group of partners. I think there is a clear mandate to the partners to be stewards of an inherited trust. We have to hand off the trust in better condition, than we found it when we became partners.

Many of SOM’s early projects, iconic buildings such as Lever House and Pepsi-Cola, reflect a period of architectural production that was dominated by a single set of stylistic preferences. Over the last twenty years, however, there has been a proliferation of styles within the firm. Is there an effort to return to a more singular architectural expression?

Roger Duffy: I see the early iconic buildings not so much as being defined by a Miesian vocabulary, but as pieces of architectural research driven by technological developments. The language was a product of the technology. By the 1970s, it became a style that was replicated across the country. Hopefully, we can move away from seeing buildings as a style. Hopefully, we can begin to view architectural production a little more like research, as a technologically developed artifact, rather than a stylistic envelope that contains a program. I think there is a concerted effort to push the architecture in new directions. In the New York office, there is now more interest in understanding the experience and the perception of space and structure. This wasn’t evident ten or fifteen years ago. It’s a methodology more than an interest in pursuing a singular expression.

Adrian Smith: In the early years, SOM established an identity for corporate architecture in the United States with Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House. But between roughly 1950 and 1965, many different design directions were pursued by the firm. The work of Edward Bassett embodied elements of texture, though strictly speaking he was a modernist. His work was nothing like Bunshaft’s. Bruce Graham, at the same time, wasn’t dealing with skin, but with structure. Walter Netsch was investigating the unified field theory, which is a terribly abstract notion. Myron Goldsmith was the consummate modern architectural sculptor. We have a culture of diverse thought, which continues to this day.

Philip Enquist: If everything we design were to look the same we’d be finished. The world is too complex. Who wants another John Hancock Building or Sears Tower?

Leigh Breslau: It’s tricky, though. Some clients want to know exactly what there are buying. Many of the so-called star architects get much of their work based on their signature style. The question of celebrity, for making buildings that come from an identifiable hand, is a real dilemma for SOM. On a psychological level, there’s a struggle between accepting the premise that we are a team practice and an interest in gaining personal celebrity.

David Childs: There are, of course, some architects who very successfully design in a personal style. They express that style in every program whether it’s a museum, an airport, or a house. I wish them well, but we are about program, client, and community. Not about style.

SOM’s iconic projects can be characterized by an articulation of a rational diagram, a restrained demonstration of building technology, and an expressed integration of structure and aesthetics. These ideas seem to have been pursued less vigorously in the last two decades. What interrupted the evolution of these themes?

Brian Lee: The architecture that we are doing now is really an architecture of our time. I would imagine that the people who designed the early work would expect us to make our own architecture, not rely on the way they did things.

Tony Vacchione: Many of our commissions in the 1970s and 1980s came from developers. They wanted to put up three or four buildings at a time in different locations across the country. We got caught up in the plenitude of projects and simply cranked out the buildings.

Leigh Breslau: The truth is that clients often come to us because we have ‘bench power.’ We can push a building out the door faster than anyone else. We’re not given a minute to breathe. Great ideas take time to ferment. It would be nice to have that luxury, but we almost never get it. But we have not completely lost the ability to integrate building systems and their expressions. There are projects, like Exchange House in London, that embody these themes.

SOM has operated as a global practice for many years. What are the design challenges of operating in unfamiliar cultures?

Marshall Strabala: It’s easy to do a one-liner—a pagoda in China or a tea house in Japan. It’s harder to be sensitive to cultural differences. Typically, we have about fourteen months to design a project. There isn’t much time for research. We should have more time to talk the streets, talk to the people. It’s too easy to make a mistake, like we did in Korea. We wanted to landscape a project with willow trees. We thought they were beautiful, but it turns out that willow trees symbolize brothels in Korea. We had to find a different tree.

Leigh Breslau: Let me present a model that intrigues me, even though it’s not entirely applicable to large-scale work. The Greene brothers would live with their clients before they’d design a new house for them. They would discover in living with the family that they cherished a particular piece of art, for example, and they would design the rooms around that piece of art. They made an effort to understand their clients’ lives in a way that I envy. More often than not we don’t get the chance.

Philip Enquist: No, we don’t. Working in another country, the biggest challenge is to slow down long enough to listen.

Roger Duffy: It’s a challenge to design a great building that responds to unique geographic and climatic conditions, to a specific history and culture. We’ve had both successful and disastrous results. One success story is the Jeddah Airport in Saudi Arabia. It couldn’t have been built anywhere else in the world. And I think we have similar opportunities now. The Kuwait Police Academy in Kuwait City, for instance, is shaped by pre-Islamic desert influences. We went back in history to the way that people built in that part of the world before the spread of Islam in the 5th century. There were thousands of years of history before Islam that dealt with issues of hotness and coolness, light and dark spaces, shade and shadow, the sound of water, and the strength of natural light. The project is guided by these issues.

What is the firm’s reputation?

Jeffrey McCarthy: We have been accused of being the Queen Mary of architecture. If we are going to turn left we have to know it three miles in advance. There is a degree of inertia in a large firm, and it’s something we have to guard against. On the bright side, we have become much quicker on our feet in the last decade. We’re not as orthodox about our dogmas these days. We are realizing the potential of our diversity.

Roger Duffy: The firm’s reputation is that we are solid and reliable. I don’t like these characterizations, but they are accurate. If asked the question thirty years ago, the answer would have been that we are an excellent design firm. We have not been willing, until quite recently, to admit that we may have lost our focus. Our current work, however, has the potential to improve our reputation. Reputation, I believe, is tied to the talent of our people. Once we start enhancing our reputation by doing better work, it will be easier to attract more talented designers to the firm. One thing feeds off the other. There’s great energy in the firm now and I’m optimistic about improving our position in the architectural world.

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