Equally significant, although perhaps less publicized, has been the development of the rather extensive land holdings around office buildings erected outside cities. For Connecticut General in rural Bloomfield, Connecticut, over the years of its construction from 1954 to 1957, they created the equivalent of an 18th-century English park with a lake, carefully considered planting, and even monumental sculpture set at the top of a rising slope. At the Upjohn Company office building outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, commissioned in 1957 and built 1959-61, the shaping and planting of the surrounding terrain and even the landscape work in the many interior courts was all but completed months before the building itself was finished and occupied.
While certain approaches are common to these landscape problems, there is a notable and appropriate difference between the carefully ordered asymmetry of the planting in small interior courts and the broader, more naturalistic handling of outlying portions of the site beyond the terraces and pools which provide, as in 20th-century houses, outdoor living – if not outdoor working – spaces. But even though there is a recognizable "SOM style" in this field and the permanent staff includes trained landscape architects, this is an area of the firm's activity in which they have not hesitated to employ such distinguished outside consultants as Church, Kiley, Noguchi and Sasaki. There has, increasingly, come to be an SOM style for interiors also, although complete internal control in this department was not consistently taken over by the firm until a few years ago. The results certainly compare more than favorably with the earlier interiors at Connecticut General or, a fortiori, at Lever House for which SOM did not have direct responsibility. As with the most characteristic sort of exterior design of the firm, the interior design in most of the buildings of the last few years is parallel to, rather than derivative from, the Miesian. But the very large number of such interiors they have had to produce has led to considerable hierarchical variation, particularly in materials, from the luxury of executive suites to the bread-and-butter vocabulary of ordinary offices floors.
Especially notable in their more luxurious interiors has been the incorporation of works of painting and sculpture, both commissioned items designed for particular situations in lobbies, banking rooms, and restaurants and items bought in quantity to hang on the walls of reception rooms and individual offices. It is not irrelevant that several partners are themselves active and knowledgeable collectors of contemporary art; but so are several other rival architects who have had on the whole considerably less success in converting clients to their own tastes or in persuading them, regardless of personal taste, to spend corporation money on such often controversial extras. But it has been a fortunate circumstance that several of SOM's most important clients, from John Emery of the Terrace-Plaza Hotel to Leigh Block of Inland Steel, Jack Heinz of Heinz Research Center and David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, have been themselves avid collectors and hence very ready to collaborate on such programmes. These prominent men have thus enthusiastically set the pace for other clients who might not otherwise have been so readily persuaded in this direction.
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