On SOM

I'd worked for Skidmore up until the War started. So, in 1947, I was 37 years old, and the United States was starting on a building boom, especially in New York. Clients wanted modern architecture, and here I was, at the right age, excited about modern, and fortunate enough to have joined Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1937 when it consisted of [Nat] Owings in Chicago and [Louis] Skidmore in New York with a couple of men. Skid had gotten work at the New York World's Fair of 1939. From there, the firm had no place to go but up.

Okay, I'll tell you how the firm started. We can wander around. Skidmore worked for Cram and Ferguson, an old Gothic firm in Boston, a big firm. At night he would go to the Boston Architectural Club, which was where draftsmen and people who were working could take design problems and the teachers from Harvard and MIT would come and review their work. Skid went there. So did Wally Harrison. It was a great institution, the Boston Architectural Club. It's still going. Winning a prize there could get you a year at MIT or Harvard. Skid won it and went to MIT. I think he went there for a couple of years. Then, when he'd been working for about eight years, he won the Rotch Traveling Fellowship and he went to Europe. While he was in Europe sitting on his butt in Deux Magots café, Raymond Hood was over there. It must have been around 1930. They got acquainted and Hood told Skid that when he came back he should see Hood, who was in charge of the Chicago World's Fair. When it first started, there was a man named General [Rufus] Dawes who was the administrator of it all. He hired only New York architects. The Board of Design of the Chicago World's Fair were all New York architects. I don't know why. Hood was the head man. So Skidmore came back and went out to Chicago and got a job. He was the design draftsman or junior designer for this board. Shortly after that, Mr. Dawes fired the whole damned New York group, and there was no architectural board. This little guy, Skidmore, reviewed all the designs that were presented by the various companies.

When Skidmore returned from Europe and got off the boat in New York, somebody took a picture. I had the picture, but I can't find It. He had a derby, a raccoon coat, a waxed moustache, which he kept all his life, and a cane. He was funny. This little guy with this waxed moustache sitting in some drafting room responsible for what other architects did for most of the buildings. I suppose the master plan must have been done before because he didn't do that. As a result, Skidmore got to know a lot of people at these commercial companies—Westinghouse, Heinz, all of those companies. After the Fair, they were going to do the Museum of Science and Industry. Skid was hired to study the one in Munich.

When Skid had been in Europe before, on the Rotch scholarship, he met a young lady named Eloise Owings. They came back together and she introduced him to her brother, Nat Owings, who was working as a draftsman for a big firm in New York that was doing the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Skid married Eloise. He went on to get the job from Hood, and then got Owings a job. Owings didn't work on the design of the World's Fair. He sold space to concessions. Yes, a salesman. He had nothing to do with design. He wasn't a designer. These are facts. You might wonder how I know all this, because it was before my time. When the firm started in New York, Skid liked to drink. He liked company, and we were a small group.

After they decided to become partners, they opened a little office and had nothing to do. Because Owings had a couple of friends, they did some interiors. All the stories go that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill opened in Chicago. They literally may have opened, but their success didn't started in Chicago. The firm legally became a partnership in 1936. They had a young lawyer named [Marshall] Gross Sampsell. He worked out the partnership for them. I mention him because he's the man who's responsible for the creation of what the firm became. Well, he was more than a legal guy. He was a great human being.

The firm didn't come alive in Chicago until about 1950 when they did the glass building for Inland Steel. Even for that one I had to come out there. The client insisted I be the designer of it. I went to a meeting, but I didn't design it. I appeared, and Walter Netsch eventually did it. I had no part in the design. I just went for eyewash. I didn't want to be in. At that time, they became confident in Walter Netsch, and that's all there is to it. I never went again. Never. Walter Netsch did that building. Bruce [Graham] had nothing to do with it.

We're now in around 1940, and federal public housing is starting up. There was a firm of architects in Chicago who were getting some of this public housing. So Owings got one of the people in that firm by the name of John Merrill to come and join Skidmore, Owings. And the firm became Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Merrill was with the firm that had done the second phase of the Chicago Club, and he was a very nice man. He had been to MIT. He was brought into the firm, as I understand it, to help get public housing in Chicago.

When history is written in future centuries, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill will probably not be the greatest creative architects of this century, but will be the most important of this century because they didn't anticipate, had nothing, no philosophy. Owings says he visualizes, but he had no more an idea of what it was—they had brains enough to go with the times and to be ahead of them in service. The firm had one basic thing—I think all the people involved were sound, logical thinkers. They were not dreamers. SOM exists today because they could service the needs of the building public. Half the jobs they get, nobody else could do. They don't have the organization to do it. SOM grew with the times. They were always there to grow. Also I mentioned to you this lawyer ... Gross Sampsell. He's the one that made the format of this partnership with associate partners and participants, which makes it a continuing, growing organization. The firm is hungry for talent. Talent moves up the ladder, and there's no head man. Nobody believes that, and as soon as Bruce [Graham] leaves, there'll never be another head man. It's a pyramid with a flat top, but it's a pyramid. They had a 50th anniversary in Chicago for all the people sharing in the profits. That includes partners, associate partners, and participants nationally. There were three hundred people there. That's why it succeeds. The firm is flexible.

Skid was a very easy-going guy, very bright and tricky enough to get work, but a very pleasant guy and if he had a few drinks, he was very cordial. He was never mean. He couldn't have been nicer to me and the four partners who grew up with him. Skid was the man who had the insight in finding people. Skid picked the first four partners. There were no partners from Chicago. Owings picked John Merrill.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill started in Chicago, but the growth was in New York. In fact, Skid used to say, and it was true, that anything new starts in New York and moves west ten years later. And he was absolutely right. The Chicago development of new office buildings was ten years later almost to the dot. Now, about Skidmore—why he left. I think Skidmore somebody wrote it besides me—and Nat, if they'd been in the same office, would not have survived personally. Nat was domineering and very bossy. Skid didn't want anybody to boss him, but also he was not trying to be bossy. What happened when the office was going and New York was really prospering, Nat would come—I knew nothing about it—there, and they'd have meetings, Skid and Nat. When he left, Skid would always be sort of mad and depressed. I think he tried to dictate stuff to Skid. He was a real extrovert. My feeling was that Skid hated Nat. Anyhow, Skid left for two reasons. He really didn't have much to do and I think he had a fear. In those days there was a certain amount of talk going around about 50-year-olds having heart attacks, and it's still true. I think he was delighted to get out of Owings's clutches. I think those were all the reasons why he retired.

Skid left fundamentally for two reasons. By that time we had been partners from 1949, and we were all—the four of us. None of them may have said it. I'm the only one who'll say it in a very brutal way. We stuck together on anything about money or anything about one or the other. I said we succeeded because we had a common enemy, and that common enemy was Skidmore and Owings. We were going to take over, goddamn it, and by the time Skid got ready to leave—we were aggressive people, each in our different way. Severinghaus in a gentle way, and so forth. Skid left and the last year before he left, he'd come in and he'd have nothing to do except read the Times, because we weren't going to him to ask him questions and we were running things. He wasn't going to meetings. He was in on Lever at the beginning, the first meetings up until those rough models. After that, the client never saw him. It was Bill Brown and myself. We were in our good years, you know.

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Louis Skidmore, Nathaniel Owings, and John Merrill