BlackBox Studio

BlackBox Studio is a team of architects, design professionals and other unique experts whose mission is to engage directly in all stages of the design process across all disciplines, leveraging the power of advanced computational design tools and methods to expose and explore new frontiers of conceptual thought and innovative form/space/place-making in the work of the SOM Chicago design studios and disciplines.

BlackBox Studio is differentiated from mainstream digital design resources in that the team is focused on contributing to and being a critical driver of the generative stages of the design process—as opposed to simply visualizing and documenting designs that have already been generated through a more conventional process.

Within the BlackBox Studio paradigm, each potential design scheme exists as one point in a field of possibilities bounded by parameters set by the architects, engineers, and other project stakeholders. The work of the group is firmly rooted in and a contemporary manifestation of the highly innovative rationalist tradition that has held a guiding philosophical position in the historical identity of SOM design since the firm's inception.