The early history of the SOM firm and the special pattern of its organization have several times been well written up – in the 1950 exhibition catalogue; in Business Week for December 4, 1954; in the Swiss architectural magazine Bauen & Wohnen for April 1957; and in Fortune for January 1958 – and even oftener commented on more briefly. That early history may be summarized here; the pattern of organization is presented elsewhere in this book. Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings came together early in the 1930's when Skidmore was working as designer for the 1933 Chicago Exposition. Their formal partnership dates from 1936, and John O. Merrill from an engineering office joined them in 1939 as a limited partner. By this time the firm was active both in the Middle West and in the East, the New York office having been opened by Skidmore as early as 1937.

But it was, paradoxically, the War which brought them their first really large piece of work and established a government connection which has since played its part in bringing them several Navy commissions and the vast Air Force Academy job. That first large project was of wholly exceptional nature, the creation from scratch of the city of Oak Ridge in Tennessee for the Manhattan Project. This had considerable urbanistic significance, even though wartime conditions of production made impossible the inclusion of notable individual structures. Moreover, the experience it provided, with the necessary expansion of the office force (finally up to some 450 men), laid the organizational foundation for undertaking the extensive and varied private commissions that came their way in increasing numbers when the building curve turned upward two or three years after the War was over. It was in 1949, in fact, that the firm ceased to be a dual partnership in the old sense when Merrill, Brown, Bunshaft, Cutler and Severinghaus were brought in as full partners. Still more full or general partners have been added from time to time since, as well as other grades of associate partners and participating associates. Moreover, in addition to the original Chicago office, the New York office and the Oak Ridge office, there are today offices in San Francisco and in Portland, Oregon.

The complexity of the organization and its geographical decentralization are balanced, as they could perhaps only be with present-day means of air transportation, by much travel on the part of the partners and other members. Thus the firm, for all its Chicago origin, has long been truly national; and it is proper to consider its production as a whole rather than as the work of separate offices, much less of particular individuals. Yet the Chicago origin of the firm is not wholly irrelevant. Giedion certainly exaggerated when he wrote in Bauen & Wohnen in 1957; "From Chicago flows the life-blood of American architecture. No architecture either in Europe or elsewhere in America developed so closely in accord with the time or had such courage to tackle new problems as in Chicago between 1883 and 1893... After 1893 Chicago went into a deep sleep. Houses by Frank Lloyd Wright grew as if by magic in the environs of Chicago at the beginning of the century, but they stood alone... Nothing of any value to the history of architecture was produced between the end of the Chicago School in 1893, (sic!) and the advent in 1939 of Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology." It is a serious injustice to the two "Chicago Schools", the earlier concerned chiefly with big business buildings and the later with domestic work, both active down at least to 1910, to imply that the vital period of Chicago architecture was over by 1893, five or six years before Sullivan's Gage and Carson, Pirie & Scott buildings were designed or Wright's mature career had even begun.

Even in the dull years of the 'teens and 'twenties there were still several major exceptions: Wright built his Midway Gardens in 1913; the Tribune Tower competition of 1922 brought forth the remarkable project of Gropius and Meyer; and Wright would have executed his National Life Insurance skyscraper project of 1925-26 but for the very early onset in Chicago of the national depression of that decade. Thanks in good part to Skidmore and Owings, moreover, the Chicago Exposition of 1933 was the first (except for that at Stockholm in 1930 which was entirely the work of Asplund) to achieve a consistent, if not perhaps especially distinguished, standard of modern design throughout. The Chicago heritage of SOM is less from the great skyscraper designer Sullivan, however, or even from such more practical men as Jenney and Holabird & Roche, than from the inventor and developer of the large architectural office – the "plan factory", if you will – Daniel Burnham; that, and their ability to persuade clients (in the actual words of Burnham) to "make no little plans". The urbanistic preoccupations of the firm also are certainly in the line of descent from Burnham. It is a good deal more accurate to say that no worthy large-scale planning was undertaken by architects in Chicago between the Burnham Plan and the commissioning of SOM's Lake Meadows housing development by the New York Life Insurance Company in 1949 (except, of course, for Mies's relatively modest campus plan for Armour – later Illinois – Institute of Technology of 1939-40) than to picture Chicago as devoid of all architectural vitality after the decade 1883-93.

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