Cashen and Katz Skidmore, Owings & Merrill CHAPTER 312 WhiteSkidmore, chapter Owings title & Integrated networks Merrillpractice: culture of white Architects Building on the legacy of technological and architectural Fredrik Nilsson, aldj kasdjf lsdkjf sdfk sdlfj sdlkfj sdlfj innovation sdlfj dsdsdsj sdjf lsad Daniel Cashen and Neil Katz Since its foundation in 1936, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) inform key aspects of SOM’s current culture and practice. In recent has pushed the idea that architectural production thrives on years, the firm has leveraged the speed and flexibility afforded by collaboration. The firm has incubated historic alliances among technologically enhanced methods of communication, practitioners of varied expertise, leveraging the creative energy of experimenting with new combinations of software that allow for these interactions to keep the firm at the forefront of the industry. studio members of different disciplines to visualize and respond Over the decades, these moments of synchrony among SOM studio to each others’ workflows. In its search for new opportunities for members have yielded prolific results, from the development of the exchange and collaboration, the firm has consistently turned to glass curtain wall, the structural tube, and computer-aided design, fields and discourses adjacent to architecture – such as structural to iconic built works such as the Lever House in New York City, the engineering, computer science, information science, sustainability Sears Tower and Hancock Center in Chicago, and the Hajj Terminal engineering, and urban planning – to generate and guide at King Abdulaziz International Airport. With a more than 80-year architectural invention. legacy of innovation, SOM continues to strive to establish and improve industry standards and shape the twenty-first-century With its size and reputation, SOM is uniquely positioned to cityscape. The longevity of the firm attests to its efforts to conduct architectural research. While anchoring its research anticipate and respond to new demands from clients and, initiatives to the real-life constraints of actual projects, the firm importantly, to envision and initiate changes in the profession. has consistently made space in its practice for more open-ended experimentation. This chapter will first highlight episodes in the Despite having undergone shifts in size, leadership, and areas of firm’s history in which studio members chose to integrate the focus, SOM has consistently upheld one of Louis Skidmore and architectural design process in new ways to generate original Nathaniel Owings’s original imperatives: to hire talented individuals solutions and gains in knowledge. Moving to the present, the and encourage the exchange of ideas across disciplines and chapter will then outline ways in which the firm continues to levels of experience. The lateral growth of the firm – which has uncover opportunities for innovation by opening up pathways expanded to include services in interior design, digital design, MEP for the exchange of ideas, introducing new considerations and engineering, structural engineering, civil engineering, and urban types of information into the design process, and experimenting design and planning – has allowed for a remarkable concentration with new technology and methods of organization. Finally, it will of skills, knowledge, and research, generating new opportunities for consider some primary areas of research that hold the potential to interdisciplinary dialogue. While maintaining firm-wide standards of shape the future of the firm. practice, SOM continues to promote a spirit of enquiry, encouraging its studio members to invent new approaches and workflows. SOM’s commitment to uniting different perspectives began early A TRADITION OF INNOVATION on with efforts to diffuse traditional office hierarchy and promote dialogue between adjacent disciplines such as architecture and Given its long history, SOM has a unique imperative to respond structural engineering. This methodology has since evolved to to its own legacy. Already well known are the strides made in the 137 | Cashen and Katz midcentury, namely the firm’s contributions to the development of of a program known as Building Optimization Program (BOP), the modern skyscraper. SOM’s ethic of teamwork and distributed for instance, significantly reduced the time needed to process authorship yoked together extraordinary partnerships, such variable specifications for mechanical equipment such as elevators, as that between Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois, whose giving the firm a critical competitive advantage at the time. SOM creative rapport gave rise to the prototype of the glass-sheathed began taking on projects of unprecedented scale and complexity, office tower. Projects like the Lever House and the Pepsi-Cola leveraging the computer’s speed, precision, and capacity for building captivated popular imagination with their aesthetic of coordination to design projects such as the iconic Hajj Terminal weightlessness and transparency, influencing an entire generation at King Abdulaziz International Airport, celebrated for its scheme of American high-rise construction and marking SOM as a leader in of mass-multiplied, tensile-fabric modules, and the master plan modern design. for the King Abdulaziz University, a sprawling campus designed to accommodate 5,000 students. Convinced of the revolutionary SOM continued its search for new ways to promote innovation potential of their work, the Computer Group pursued independent in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the firm foregrounded the research in tandem with their agenda of responding to project- research initiatives of structural engineer Fazlur Khan. Khan’s based prompts, making strides in the development of architectural theoretical experiments with tubular structural systems emerged drafting and modeling software and effectively anticipating the out of academic settings at the University of Illinois, from which role of computers in contemporary architectural practice. he had two masters’ degrees and a PhD, and found fertile ground in SOM’s Chicago office, where his research flourished alongside the ambitions of SOM architects like Myron Goldsmith and Bruce Graham. With the completion of the John Hancock Center and SOM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY the Sears Tower in 1970 and 1974, which both clear a historically significant one hundred stories and bear the imprint of Khan’s Over the decades, SOM has consistently returned to its expressively rendered structural considerations, SOM announced foundational principles to guide the evolution of its practice. new possibilities for late-century supertall construction and Determined to stay on the frontlines of the industry, the firm elevated a method of working that rigorously integrated structural continues to explore the innovative potential of collaboration, engineering into the design process. interdisciplinary dialogue, and open-ended experimentation with new technology. Now with ten offices worldwide, SOM has upheld SOM’s growing reputation as an innovator in the industry made the its role as a leader in the industry by balancing the advantages of firm particularly receptive to experimenting with new technology. its global, multidisciplinary network with the focused, localized Also in the 1960s and 1970s, SOM made early forays into the activities of its individual offices. development of computer-aided design, which quickly proved valuable in the generation of structural analysis tools that were Recently, in efforts to maintain the experimental dynamism of embraced by Khan and his engineering team. The activity of the Computer Group, SOM has encouraged the formation of a an experimental research group known as the Computer Group more fluid network of research clusters now known as the Digital exemplifies a particularly productive effort within the firm to Design Group. Instead of sequestering research initiatives within a incorporate technological research into its practice. Through the designated research arm – which would then bear the responsibility 1970s and 1980s, members of the relatively small, dedicated of both developing and integrating their work with the rest of the group pushed to integrate the computer’s enhanced data-storing firm – SOM’s Digital Design Group inverts the organizing principle and analytical abilities into various phases of the design process. of its late-century predecessor, operating by openly inviting Through these initiatives, SOM was able to identify the potential members of different design studios within the firm to periodically of the computer to not only expedite necessary calculations but meet and present ideas that can be applied to multiple projects or also introduce new ways of representing and sharing information. used to seed independent research initiatives. Just as structural engineering came to be seen early on at SOM as a means of generating rather than simply realizing architectural Dispersed across multiple SOM offices, the various manifestations ideas, with concerted effort, computers gained credence at the of the Digital Design Group have gravitated toward different areas firm, and eventually in the industry, as a potential catalyst for of research, from initiatives that continue SOM’s longstanding architectural innovation. experimentation with structural engineering, to investigations that explore new approaches to designing buildings for contemporary In the spirit of earlier generations of SOM members, the Computer