The contribution of SOM, then, not only their own direct contribution but the broader results of the International emulation of their methods of working and their kind of design – a contribution still potential, still only immanent for the most part both here and abroad – must be measured against the greatest needs of this third quarter of the twentieth century. Although their most conspicuous works have perforce been fitted into the inherited urban scene, with only some slight amelioration of the immediate neighborhood by the introduction of open plazas at the base and crisper outlines at the top, they have provided many of the most important and useful architectural ingredients of the later 20th-century city that we may hope, within the next decades, will gradually come into existence. In their own urbanistic schemes, especially in their various plans for Chicago, they have gone further, working themselves not only as architects but as planners.

To the Museum of Modern Art's citation in the catalogue of the 1950 SOM exhibition – that the firm "produces imaginative, serviceable and sophisticated architecture deserving of special attention" – one may add, more than a decade later, the considered statement that what was then, in considerable part, but a generous hypothesis has now been revealed as true prophecy. Still further, there is good reason once more to offer a new hypothesis, which may well prove as prophetic, that there is much that will be worthy of the second half of this century still to be achieved by the members of a firm that is still (in the words of the 1950 catalogue) "animated by two disciplines, which they all share – the discipline of modern architecture and the discipline of American organizational methods," disciplines which are increasingly accepted throughout the Western World.

Henry Russell Hitchcock, December 27, 1961