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 ds dsdsj 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 , the engineering, computer science, information science, sustainability Sears Tower and Hancock Center in , 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

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midcentury, namely the firm’s contributions to the development of of a program known as Building Optimization Program (BOP), the modern . 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 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 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 hospitality, healthcare, transportation, education, offices, and Group was motivated to galvanize project-driven research into urban planning projects. In recent years, SOM has emphasized broader, industry-changing advances. The in-house development research and development in BIM and data documentation and

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Figure 12.1 Rendering of the 521-meter-tall Guiyang Cultural Plaza Tower in China. Image © SOM | ATCHAIN.

Figure 12.2 Integrated design diagrams for Guiyang Cultural Plaza Tower. Image © SOM.

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standardization, high performance design, computational design, forces with a diagonally braced structural tube system. The and visualization and simulation techniques, along with its structural engineering team sought to combine the advantages continued focus on structural engineering. Several recent projects of two existing structural concepts: the tapered diagonal braced illustrate new design solutions and strategies catalyzed by these tube, which excels in absorbing seismic energy and found deliberately overlapping research interests. iconic expression in the John Hancock Center, and the stepped superframe, which eliminates transfers induced by wind forces. For the Guiyang Cultural Plaza (GCP) Tower in Guiyang, the The hypothesized result became known as the “articulated team of SOM architects and engineers saw an opportunity to superframe system,” which fortifies a conventional ductile, advance the study of supertall construction that had thrived reinforced concrete core with a lattice-like perimeter structure under the direction of Fazlur Khan. Having surveyed the solar, known as a superframe girder, comprised of multi-story modules wind, and soil conditions of the Guiyang site, the team proposed with materially reinforced corners designed to absorb gravity and a structural system that would address both seismic and wind lateral loads.

Figure 12.3 Rendering of the Hangzhou Wangchao Center in China. Image © SOM.

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Figure 12.4 Hangzhou Wangchao Center geometry diagrams. Image © SOM.

As in Khan’s , the GCP Tower found a distinct visual a monumental building that would mesmerize visitors with a vast, and spatial identity through efforts to architecturally express long-span, open space covered by a massive, seventeen-acre mega- its structural system. To determine the building’s final form, a roof, the Mumbai terminal is defined by its mushrooming mega- parametric platform was set up to facilitate a dynamic workflow columns, which appear to merge seamlessly with the monolithic roof among representatives of different disciplines: the studio members they support by virtue of a customized paneling system that covers established a live link to transfer data from Grasshopper into a the contoured surface of the superstructure. Through a sophisticated central REVIT model, within which the team – including structural application of CATIA and Rhino, the SOM team was able to integrate and MEP team members – could visualize the architectural concept the process of structural analysis with the modeling of the building’s and actively participate in generating and reconfiguring the panelized surface, allowing for structural and architectural concerns geometry of the design via a custom plug-in developed through the to simultaneously inform one another. The resulting Rhino/CATIA REVIT API. model of the paneling system at Terminal 2 was precise enough that manufacturers were able to use the model to fabricate the custom, The tapering of the tower – from a 50 by 50 meter base to a 29 interlocking GFRC (exterior) and GFRG (interior) panels so critical to by 29 meter crown – was calibrated to generate lease spans that would meet the programmatic needs of the office and hotel slated to occupy the building. Crucially, the 521-meter-tall form was translated into data that could be entered into the structural team’s ETABS model, allowing the team to tweak the form of the building to balance programmatic and structural concerns with remarkable precision. Here, SOM’s longstanding interest in integrating the design process inspired a resourceful networking of standard analytical and modeling programs to generate a unique design. The approaches and workflows developed for the GCP Tower were advanced further in the design of the Hangzhou Wangchao Center, for which SOM architects and engineers worked together to give sculptural expression to an innovative, high-performance structural system referred to as a diagonalized, braced mega-column system.

In a similar manner, separate computer programs and digital Figure 12.5 The ticketing hall at the new Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport Terminal 2 in Mumbai. models were synthesized to develop the design for Terminal 2 at Photo courtesy SOM / © Robert Polidori | Mumbai International Airport Pvt. Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai. Envisioned as Ltd.

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the building’s stunning architectural effect.

Similar experimentation with modeling software was undertaken for the design of the Lotte Super Tower, a 555-meter skyscraper proposed for a site in Seoul. The project provided an opportunity for SOM studio members to explore how the scripting of a central BIM model could help generate a conceptually simple but geometrically complex tower design that, if built, would be the tallest skyscraper in Asia. SOM studio members began with the basic premise of constructing a tower that starts with a square base and ascends, uninterrupted, to a superlative height while tapering seamlessly to a circular top. In theory, this aerodynamic form would distribute ’s mass and mitigate wind loads with extraordinary efficiency. The execution of the concept presented several challenges that the studio sought to tackle with parametric modeling. Not only would individual floor plans and accompanying MEP specifications continuously change to mold to the unique geometry of the tower’s elevation, but the proposed diagrid structural shell would also take on a bespoke form that would need to be wrapped in a customized curtain wall.

Figure 12.6 Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport Terminal 2 column diagram. Image © SOM.

Figure 12.7 Rendering of Lotte Super Tower in Seoul, South Korea. Image © SOM.

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Figure 12.8 Geometry diagram of Lotte Super Tower. Image © SOM.

Well aware that these considerations each had their own particular set of unique design options with unprecedented efficiency. SOM parameters to fulfill, SOM studio members sought to first establish has continued to refine the practice of integrating and tagging and script the relationships between these parameters in a central data from various disciplines in a central model with projects BIM model. The generative logic of the building’s structural, such as the 240-meter Karlatornet in Gothenburg, for which a façade, and MEP systems were thus translated and integrated into BIM model, rather than drawings, became a core deliverable to be software code, allowing for studio members of adjacent disciplines directly consulted by contractors. to work independently and then input values into the master BIM model. These changes would automatically alter a host of SOM’s integrated approach to design has pushed studio members specifications in the BIM model based on prescribed parametric to incorporate new considerations during the conceptual phase relationships, from which new values could be extracted and of the design process. In recent years, the firm has prioritized translated for studio members of other disciplines to independently concerns for sustainability, using analyses of site-specific energy, analyze and work with. For the coordination of the curtain wall wind, and heat patterns to help generate architectural form. For with the structural shell, the studio was able to test more than ten the Pertamina Energy Tower in , SOM studio members geometrical relationships, generating and thoroughly exploring a assessed the climate of the Indonesian capital and set out to

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reduce solar exposure and heat gain. After studying hundreds of floor plan profiles, the team determined that floor plan minimization had the potential to optimize the building’s energy savings more than façade orientation. The slim, curving profile of the tower was calculated to reduce heat retention and optimized by angling the north and south facades and placing a deep wall on the east and west.

SOM studio members experimented with a few additional parameters to generate features that contribute to the architectural effect as well as the sustainability goals of the building: the team devised a form-finding algorithm to map the building’s exterior louvers so that they correspond precisely with the path of the sun, admitting natural illumination while protecting against glare; the bifurcated form of the tower also creates space for a “wind funnel,” an apparatus designed through a series of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) studies to increase the speed of the east-west wind and capture and convert the power of the accelerated wind into usable energy.

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND THE EVOLVING NATURE OF ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE

SOM has long understood that new technology can catalyze Figure 12.9 Rendering of Karlatornet, a 246-meter tower that will be sweeping changes in the architectural profession. In recent years, Sweden’s tallest building. Image courtesy SOM / © Pixel akes the firm has pursued multiple research initiatives, many of which

Figure 12.10 Rendering of Pertamina Energy Tower from the west. Image courtesy SOM / © Smilodon CG.

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discussed by external experts examining the architectural, structural as well as sociocultural concepts of the projects. The firm is currently also exploring the development of advanced communication tools that could potentially join the SOM network into a 24-hour global office, allowing teams from different offices to share large models and data sets and execute projects with a remarkably expanded bandwidth. Along similar lines, SOM is also researching Advanced Interoperability Data Sharing Platforms, some of which use cloud-based technology to enable the sharing of a master model among a broader group of participants as well as the use of a single model for multiple purposes, including design exploration, visualization, analysis, documentation, and fabrication.

While pioneering technological solutions to manage the ever- expanding complexity of buildings – which include small projects such as the net-zero energy Kathleen Grimm School in Staten Island as well as larger scale projects such as the master plan for the Cornell Tech campus – the firm is also looking ahead, already anticipating a plateau in existing technology’s ability to generate geometry and data. Given the exponential increase in information considered relevant for architectural design and construction, SOM has become acutely aware of the mounting demands placed on its studios to feed all the necessary information into BIM platforms like REVIT or, more recently, virtual reality visualization platforms like Unreal Engine. With this in mind, the firm has set out to actively research and develop innovations that would not simply Figure 12.11 Rendering of the Pertamina Energy Tower crown section with enhance existing design processes but fundamentally change wind turbines. Image © SOM | 3D World. workflow.

With this open-ended, investigative attitude, SOM has begun continue earlier efforts to integrate the architectural design exploring AI technology and machine learning. The firm is process. Part of these initiatives is also the publication of SOM researching the potential development of a future modeling Journal, a series of publications with the first issue in 2001 and software that could integrate AI technology to learn human- the latest in 2017, where projects are presented and critically implemented design processes and behaviors and carry them

Figure 12.12 Daylighting diagram of the Kathleen Grimm School for Leadership and Sustainability at Sandy Ground, the rst net-zero-energy school in New York City. Image © SOM.

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Figure 12.13 Aerial view of the new Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Photo courtesy SOM / © Iwan Baan. out to unprecedented stages. With this application of AI studio members could also use VR platforms to conduct virtual technology, computer software could effectively “complete coordination meetings, where they could explore system the thought” for complex geometric models and generate an interfaces and discover clashes. In addition to visualizing physical array of otherwise unforeseen design solutions. Incorporated aspects of architectural designs, SOM is also experimenting into REVIT, AI technology could also assist in farsighted with VR to visualize energy data, temperature, light levels, and collision detection, anticipating conflicts among various A/E glare – all information that is typically invisible – in false-color, models and issuing recommendations to avoid them, which could rendering this data in three-dimensional space so that it can be potentially free up time and labor to explore radically alternative more intuitively understood. solutions. As the firm develops a greater familiarity with these techniques, SOM has also been actively researching the potential of virtual integrating them into the design process, it will also explore new reality technology to both shape and represent their designs. ways to use them – ways that exceed the current predictions. The As a working design tool, VR technology could allow studios culture of SOM is fundamentally rooted in collaborative thinking, to experience design options in an immersive, multi-sensory which has helped the firm continuously reinvent itself over the way, thereby creating immediate feedback that can be used last 80 years, and will help shape its future innovations to the to inform design decisions. Architects, engineers, and other architectural design process.

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