Certain characteristics are of the essence of the work of a large bureaucratic organization; and for all their private, non-governmental status SOM is as much an enlightened architectural bureaucracy as the Architect's Department of the London County Council, which probably alone in the world in the 1950's rivalled SOM in the size of its staff, the complexity of its undertakings, and the quality of its production. (The set-up that is producing Brasilia is something else again, being so largely dominated by a single designer, Oscar Niemeyer.) Rigid standards can first be established by such organizations, then maintained and improved, until finally they come to be taken wholly for granted. This was true of the production of the J.H. Mansart office under Louis XIV and in varying degree in other similar situations in earlier and later periods. But, as such historical analogies mostly suggest, after a certain period of time – centuries, perhaps, in the remote past, a generation or so in the 17th or 18th centuries, but doubtless decades or even shorter periods today – a law of diminishing returns seems to apply. The answer, of course, is that there must always be positive development as well as ever greater refinement if continuing architectural production is to retain vitality. In this respect, obviously, the architect-designer who works alone (or at least maintains personal control of his office force) has the advantage over even the moderate-sized firm, much less any giant bureaucratic organization. Wright in his later years could twist and turn, starting a new school of design with every other building. There are plenty of others, moreover, who now seek – alas, without his infinite capacity for invention – to emulate his variousness, with the result that many of the boldest works of the present mid-century years both here and abroad, for all their almost hysterical vitality, seem only tentative, raw primitives of architectures that are left behind almost as soon as they are imagined.

Fortunately the relative looseness of the SOM organization, the importance of designers in its hierarchy, and the inclusion of engineers in the firm have encouraged a greater degree of experimentation than might have been expected. More imitations of Lever House have been built by other architects, here and abroad, then by SOM themselves; and their work, considered as a whole, did not freeze into fixed channels even to the extent of Mies's over the same period. At Inland Steel the main structural members were brought outside the curtain walls of the narrow slab, leaving the 56-foot wide interiors entirely unobstructed; visually, at least, this has been repeated at the Chase Manhattan Bank, commissioned in 1955 and built 1957-61, although in that much thicker slab additional interior piers were also required. Harris Trust, Union Carbide and Crown Zellerbach, all three begun in 1957 and completed in 1959 and 1960 respectively in Chicago, in New York, and in San Francisco, do not diverge far from established SOM models. Yet Union Carbide and Harris Trust may have been somewhat influenced by Miesian work in the same cities – the Seagram Building of 1956-58 in New York and the Lake Shore apartments of 1950-52 in Chicago. Crown Zellerbach is set in a large plaza of triangular shape and that plaza is enlivened with a circular banking pavilion, not to speak of the variations of ground level that give isolation and importance to a splendidly open entrance lobby beneath the tall curtain-walled slab.

If, on the one hand, the last few years have seen the completion of what is perhaps the ultimate in refinement of proportion and elegance of materials in the cladding of the steel-framed Pepsi-Cola Building in New York, commissioned in 1956 and built 1958-59, other large office buildings designed for construction in ferroconcrete and not steel – several of them already built in American cities and another underway abroad in Brussels – mark notable departures from what still seems to have been the main SOM line running from Lever House to Chase Manhattan or Harris Trust.

In the Banque Lambert for Brussels, commissioned in 1959 and to be completed in 1962, the John Hancock Building in New Orleans (1960-62), and the Hartford Building in Chicago of 1959-61 the concrete structural skeleton is carried well outside the wall-plane. These buildings, perhaps, should still be considered tentative; but both with ferroconcrete and with steel similarly "out-rigged" types of construction are being used for skyscrapers in Houston, in Kansas City, and in Chicago. For the executive offices of United Air Lines in Des Plaines near Chicago, to be completed in 1962, still a different sort of concrete construction is being exploited, with tremendously wide spans – 60 by 66 feet – made possible by post-tensioning. All these are evidence of an attitude towards structure and towards design that is anything but static. Technically, the chances of success are considerable, since the conjoined abilities of the members and staffs of the firm are so great; esthetically, the result cannot be so clearly foreseen, not merely because experiment is likely to be more difficult for those who have already had great success along an established line, but also because of the curious new climate of architectural opinion which tends to put a higher value on the continual experimentation of an Aalto or a Kahn – not to say the willful variousness of a Saarinen or a Yamasaki – than on that cumulative achievement of mastery which is usually attained only by accepting a particular discipline over a considerable period of years.

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