SOM Announces Release of
SOM Journal 5

Journal celebrates 5th anniversary with expanded focus and inception of editorial board

The partners of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), the renowned architecture, engineering, interiors and planning firm, today announced the release of SOM Journal 5 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2008). In a continuing series that highlights the conceptual undercurrents being developed at SOM, the Journal presents a selection of recent SOM projects chosen by an external interdisciplinary jury. The process of review by jury and its documentation of criticism without participation or influence from any member of the firm is an endeavor unique to SOM. This is the fifth installment of the annual publication.

SOM Journal 5 enters new territory with the inception of an editorial board that includes Francesco Dal Co, the publisher and editorial director of Casabella, Kenneth Frampton, author and Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, and Juhani Pallasmaa, the Finnish author, architect and professor. Accomplished through the careful selection of essay writers and topics, the board’s goal was to create a broader, more dynamic journal that focuses on the globalized architectural world as it relates to environmental concerns, corporate architecture, as well as reflecting on the important historical past of SOM. The board commissioned the following essays: Myron Goldsmith: Keating Hall at IIT by Nicholas Adams, Structure as Focus by Mutsuro Sasaki, Sustaining Architecture During a Revolution by Susannah Hagan, and Art, Soul of the Corporation by Joan Ockman.

The board was also responsible for the selection of jurors, further removing SOM from the process of assessing its own work. In a departure from previous journals where a transcript of the jury proceedings was published, the board instead asked each juror to contribute a critical essay summarizing their view of the 74 submitted projects from the various SOM offices. The jurors chosen to offer their criticism in this issue were Sean Godsell, architect (Melbourne); Marc Mimram, engineer (Paris); Mary Miss, artist (New York); and Charles Waldheim, professor (Toronto). The jury proceedings were held October 11 and 12, 2007 at Alvar Aalto’s historical Maison Louis Carré in Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, France.

As editor of the Journal, Juhani Pallasmaa, in his introductory essay, summarizes the board’s overall perception of the submitted work, the process of review and the place SOM finds itself in today’s architectural climate:

In the architectural development of the past two decades or so, form has been forcefully detached from its essential architectural dependencies and given an exorbitant position. However, architecture is fundamentally an art of mediation. It mediates between different contexts, periods of history, cultural institutions, tradition and invention, society and individuals, material and spiritual. Yet, today’s formalistic buildings frequently appear autistic, devoid of wider cultural meaning, and incapable of establishing an existential foothold. In my opinion, an architectural “reformation” is inevitable, and the critical contributions in this SOM Journal 5 confirm this view.