The 2016 Modern Healthcare Design Awards have recognized the Christ Hospital Joint and Spine Center—a health care leader in the Cincinnati region—as the winner of the Silver Award. The design of building is recognized for carefully considering the hospital’s patients, visitors, and caregivers, as well as the surrounding district of Mount Auburn in Cincinnati, Ohio. SOM worked with patients, … Continued
Luke Leung, SOM Director of Sustainable Engineering, has been selected by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) as a co-recipient of a 2016 Research Seed Funding grant. Working with Brent Stephens, Associate Professor of Architectural Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, Leung will conduct research into the vertical … Continued
A good library is more than a repository for books—it’s a community resource… Many of them function not just as singular temples to the written word, but community centers, auditoria, concert halls, and public gardens. All of them are works of art in themselves. Chicago’s new Chinatown library branch has no sharp edges. The pebble-shaped … Continued
In 1936 two architects—Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings, both from Indiana—set up a firm in Chicago, a city that would prove a fertile ground for their work. Three years on, John O. Merrill joined the firm, prompting a name change to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM). Now you can travel through all those 80 years … Continued
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Perkins+Will, Skanska USA, Webcor Builders, Jacobs, and STV top Building Design+Construction’s annual ranking of the nation’s largest transit sector AEC firms, as reported in the 2016 Giants 300 Report.
What’s the first thing we learn about evacuating tall buildings? Use the stairs, not the elevators, right? But in the post-Sept. 11th era, engineers, government regulators and skyscraper safety experts have reevaluated that conventional wisdom. The internal structure of many new buildings also better protect evacuation routes. For those who have watched tall buildings rise … Continued
Working with Oregon State University (OSU), Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has been busy testing its design for a timber tower. The time-lapse video below shows a section of the wood tower being submitted to 82,000 pounds of pressure. SOM has been working on the Timber Tower Research Project, funded by the Softwood Lumber Board (SLB) since … Continued
To commemorate Architectural Record’s 125th anniversary, our editors have chosen to honor 125 of the most important works of architecture built since the magazine’s founding in 1891. This was not an easy task. We started by polling a group of distinguished critics and scholars for nominations, but the final list is ours. While many inclusions … Continued
Having recently validated assumptions about floor-system capacities in its timber-and-concrete structural model for a 42-story residential building, architect-engineer Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is planning additional load tests, followed by fire tests, to nail down the viability of mass-timber-and-concrete high-rises. The tests are part of SOM’s Timber Tower Research Project, begun in late 2012, to develop … Continued
The Additive Manufacturing Integrated Energy (AMIE) demonstration project will arrive in Chicago in September. Traveling from its home at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, AMIE will be presented at the 2016 International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) as a part of the Emerging Technology Center, which serves as a showcase for current and near-future … Continued