SRINIVASA IYENGAR.Final Mkw

ORAL HISTORY OF SRINIVASA (HAL) IYENGAR

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv

Outline of Topics vi

Oral History 1

Selected References 187

Curriculum Vitae 191

Index of Names and Buildings 193

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PREFACE

Although many give lip service to the importance of the numerous professionals whose contribution is essential to the success of an architectural project, few engineers have been given the recognition they deserve. Hal Iyengar, the son of a civil engineer, was expected to follow in his father's footsteps but, because he was interested in the design of buildings and not bridges, decided to strike out on his own.

Srinivasa Iyengar, know as Hal, was born in French Rocks, India in 1934. Hal collected several graduate engineering degrees both in India and the United States before being hired by SOM (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) in 1960. Hal's interest in the structural design of buildings was a perfect match with the work that SOM was doing. In his oral history Hal says,

"Mies recognized that the structure has a basis that could be used in architecture. You know you need the structure. But to base your architecture on the structure was the essence of Miesian principle. So this is what Skidmore practiced and that's what I was interested in."

This interest sustained and challenged Hal for 32 years working as a "team" with Fazlur Khan and Bruce Graham to create award-winning high-rise buildings, such as the John Hancock and Sears Tower in Chicago. As Hal's career developed, with each new project the structural envelope was pushed, creating an evolution of systems. Hal has come to be regarded as a tall buildings systems specialist and in recognition of his contribution Hal has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors.

To record Hal's densely woven story of people, ideas and events we met in his home in Sanibel, Florida on January 25, 26, 27, and 28, 2008 where we recorded seven hours of Hal's first-hand memories on five ninety-minute cassettes. The transcription has been minimally edited to maintain the spirit, tone and flow of Hal's original narrative and has been reviewed for accuracy and clarity by both Hal and me.

Published material that I found helpful in preparation of this interview is appended to this document. This oral history is available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in a downloadable version from the Chicago Architects Oral History Project web page, .

Thanks go to many people in the completion of this document. First, my sincere appreciation goes to Hal Iyengar for his willingness to share his personal and professional memories with candor and thoughtfulness of the people, issues and events he experienced while at SOM and the consulting work that followed. To those at SOM who generously supported Iyengar's oral history, we are grateful, especially to Craig Hartman, who has been our liaison throughout this undertaking. The staff at SOM deserve thanks for their prompt and efficient assistance, especially Anita Sanchez, Amy Hawkinson, and Karen Widi; and the library staff at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries: Amy Ballmer, Melanie Emerson, and Susan Augustine with the helpful direction of Mary Woolever, Art and Architecture Archivist, and Jack Brown, Director of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Essential to processing this document in its many phases has been the cooperation of Donna Forrest and Michel Schwartz in the Copy Center at The Art Institute of Chicago, for which we are appreciative. Last but not least, we acknowledge with appreciation the contribution of our transcriber, Susan Crapo, who brought this document to its final form with her usual willing cooperation and careful handling.

Betty J. Blum July 2008

OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Early Years and Family Background 1 First Job After Earning Civil Engineering Degree 3 Back to School: the Indian Institute of Science 5 University of Illinois and a Research Assistantship 8 Early Computers at the University of Illinois 11 Work at SOM 14 First Jobs and Working with Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan 19 Exploring the Structural in Architecture 22 Tubular Building System 25 Frame Building System 28 Telescope Structures 29 Working with Walter Netsch and Bruce Graham 32 Working with Myron Goldsmith and the Brunswick Building 35 Working with Fazlur Khan 39 More About Computers 41 Rational Architecture 46 Advancing to Partner 48 Women at SOM 49 Hancock Center 54 Influence of Mies van der Rohe 71 The Group Approach 73 More About the Hancock Center 76 Sears Tower 79 When Fazlur Khan Died 99 Renovation of Sears Tower 103 A Time of Unrest and Change 104 Investment Buildings 106 Thoughts on Postmodern Design 107 Coping with the Energy Crisis 109 Overseas Work 110

The SOM Foundation 111 Opening SOM Offices 113 American Corporate Style 114 Energy Conservation 117 Working in the Mideast 118 Working in London 125 More About Working in the Mideast 126 Cable Suspension and McCormick Place II 138 More About Work in London 142 About Fazlur Khan 150 Structural Systems Evolution and Application 152 Frank Gehry and Barcelona 155 Irrational Architecture 160 Working with Frank Gehry 166 The Concert Shell and the BP Bridge at Millennium Park 172 Reflections 178

vii

Srinivasa (Hal) Iyengar

Blum: Today is February 25th, 2008. And I am with Mr. Srinivasa Iyengar, otherwise known as Hal, in his home in Sanibel, Florida. Hal was born in India in 1934, and received degrees in engineering from universities both in the United States and India. In 1960, he joined SOM [Skidmore, Owings and Merrill] where he worked for the next thirty-two years until he retired in 1992. But retirement was not the end of his career. Hal has consulted on projects for SOM designers in a very rational way, and for some other architects in an irrational way. He’ll explain more about that when we get into it. Because you had been involved with some of the award-winning projects of our time, I suppose you are one of the elite group that has been referred to as mad scientists of architecture, because anything that an architect can design you can make it stand up. So, you have been a participant as well as a witness to many changes in the past thirty-four years. And that’s what we’re here to record, and to hear you talk about. How did you come to select architecture for your career?

Iyengar: Well, I didn’t particularly select architecture. I was interested in [the] design of buildings. My background in India, with my first graduate degree, was in hydraulic and civil engineering, mostly connected with dams and bridges, and so on. I was more concerned about wanting to design buildings, in particular. So I talked to my advisors at the University of Illinois, which is where I got a second master’s degree in structural engineering. And they recommended a couple of firms. One was Holabird and Root in Chicago, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. And those were the two firms they recommended that I contact. I came

over to Chicago, and the first firm I went to see was Holabird and Root. And they kind of discouraged me a little bit, because they felt that I should start drafting first, and then proceed from there in a step-wise fashion to engineering.

Blum: Was this in the architecture department or the engineering department?

Iyengar: This was in the engineering department. And then next I stopped at the engineering department at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Al Picardi was the chief structural engineer at this particular time. He looked at my background, and then he said, “Well, you’ve gone through a lot. That means that you must be good at something. So we would like to hire you.” So, that’s how I got started in 1960, in the engineering department, structural engineering department at SOM.

Blum: Let's step back for a minute. Before you get to SOM, when you were a child did you have a preference for building blocks, or drawing, or anything related to architecture or engineering?

Iyengar: Well, I had a lot of interest in building blocks, playing with building blocks when I was a youngster. From the very beginning I was kind of used to projects, because my father was a civil engineer in the state of Mysore and he used to take me to many of these projects. And then I used to see some of the projects he was involved in, like the construction of dams and bridges. He was mostly concerned with those. So, I was always interested in construction, so to speak, and engineering. I wasn’t particularly concerned about architecture at that time, but I was more concerned about engineering.

Blum: You first went to—was it University of Mysore?

Iyengar: Yeah, the University of Mysore is where I got my engineering degree, in civil engineering. That was for a period of four years. And after that, my father wanted me to follow in his footsteps and take a job with the government as a civil engineer.

Blum: Did he think his position could help you?

Iyengar: Yeah, he thought his position could help me. And in fact, he had secured me a job. But in reviewing his own career, I came to realize it’s such a bureaucratic process. You start as an assistant engineer, and then you work your way up in gradual steps. And it was a very bureaucratic setup. It was in the Public Works Department in the State of Mysore. And one sort of didn’t get into designs as much as they learned to manage projects, and work with construction companies.

Blum: In an administrative position?

Iyengar: As an administrator. They did a little bit of design, a lot of administration: following the project construction, following the budgets of the various projects. So it was this kind of thing. It’s a typical public works kind of project. There was no design department as such. So, I was involved with design, certainly, for projects, and bridges––mostly engineering projects.

Blum: Now is that what your schoolwork concentrated on, bridges and dam projects?

Iyengar: Yeah, schoolwork concentrated on bridges and waterworks projects, and basics of structural engineering. And it was involved with all aspects of civil engineering, so to speak.

Blum: Did you have any contact with what we think of as architecture?

Iyengar: I did design. I worked with some projects in school that were concerned with buildings.

Blum: This is in your undergraduate…

Iyengar: In my undergraduate work. And these were small structures, not anything significant. For instance, a school; I was involved with the design of a school, for instance. And there were other projects, some similar in type and smaller in scale.

Blum: Well today and then too, architects design schools.

Iyengar: Yeah, that’s correct.

Blum: And bridges.

Iyengar: And bridges.

Blum: Where is the line now between the work of architects and that of engineers? It’s getting sort of homogenized.

Iyengar: Well, it is getting muddied, in the sense… Engineering has always been part of architecture, whether you believe it or not. So, every architect has to deal with engineering, and has to deal with engineers. And not all architects are good at it. They’d like to design their own concepts, and then let the engineer come later, and worry about how to make it work. That’s where Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was so different, in that respect, that they were able to integrate engineering with architecture. And they thought engineering has a contribution to make to architecture. I guess this comes from the Miesian tradition that structure is important, and it forms the backbone and is the essence of architecture. Skidmore

pretty much practiced that. So that’s what I was interested in when I started at Skidmore.

Blum: Well, when you were finished with the University of Mysore, and you had your degree, you went to another school in India.

Iyengar: Well, yes. First, my father got me this job in the government of Mysore, as a starting engineer.

Blum: This was after you had finished school at the University of Mysore and had a Bachelor’s degree.

Iyengar: Right. I stayed at the job for about a couple of months. And then I was not much interested in that job. So I decided to take another job at the central government of India in the Road Research Institute, doing research on highways, for a while—for a few months, I believe. And I didn’t particularly like that either. So, I went back–—I wanted some more additional background in education, so I went to Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

Blum: Why did you think you needed further training?

Iyengar: Well, the level of engineering that they were assigning me to was making routine calculations.

Blum: Making what?

Iyengar: Routine calculations, which had nothing to do with the development of concepts and ideas. And I wanted to be in a place where I had more background in design of buildings, and design of structures. So, I went to Indian Institute of Science, which is a premier research institute mostly concerned with science, and they had opened an engineering department

at that time. I was one of the first ones, I think. There were only about three or four students at the university in this department of civil engineering.

Blum: So you received almost private attention.

Iyengar: Yeah. And they had the professors. They had hired professors with background in American universities, or from U.K. So, it was kind of a place where you could expand your horizons, so to speak.

Blum: In a school like what you’re describing, did they use a text that was more architecture than engineering, as we’re talking about it now?

Iyengar: Well, it was more oriented towards engineering. Yeah, this particular course, set of courses, at Indian Institute of Science was related to hydraulics and design of dams and bridges, and so on and so forth. It wasn’t particularly related to architecture as such. It may be difficult to relate to the tradition at that time. Civil engineers were the architects in those days; architecture was part of civil engineering. So, the government didn’t have positions for architects. They had positions for engineers, who also acted as architects––which was kind of unusual.

Blum: I suppose the way I think of it is that—as we just said, someone designs, and then someone makes it work. And they’re two separate fields.

Iyengar: Yeah, two separate fields.

Blum: But you mentioned that with Mies, structure, or making it work, was the way you designed your form.

Iyengar: That’s right. Well, I think Mies recognized that the structure has a basis that could be used in architecture. Now, the structure is always there

anyway. You know, you need the structure. But to base your architecture on the structure was the essence of Miesian principle. So, this is what Skidmore practiced, you know. And then that’s what I was interested in.

Blum: You said something interesting about the second school you went to. You said it was at this school that the seeds for an overseas education were sown, for you.

Iyengar: Yes.

Blum: And that was personal.

Iyengar: Yes, for me. That’s mostly because of my contact with the professors who had had their education in the United States or in U.K. I was interested in pursuing further, and acquiring more graduate work. And it was easy for me to contact people in the United States, being at the Indian Institute of Science, because so many people from there had gone to America, and gone to different universities, so they had established contacts. So it was easy for me to contact different universities in the United States.

Blum: I looked at the website for the school. They said it was the premier post- graduate school, was competitive, and they had a distinguished alumni award for a Professor S.S. Iyengar. Was he your family?

Iyengar: No, no. S.S. Iyengar, he was one of the lecturers at the university. And I think he had gone to Germany, and acquired some of his background there. So he was a professor there at that time.

Blum: So, you left the Indian Institute of Science.

Iyengar: Yes.

Blum: And how did you connect with the University of Illinois?

Iyengar: Well, I applied to about five or six universities. I couldn’t go on my own, of course, because I needed help, financial help. So, I applied for assistantships––what is called assistantships––either a teaching assistantship, or a research assistantship. I applied for these positions at several universities: at Lehigh, I recall; MIT, and University of Illinois; and Stanford.

Blum: Well that was a pretty special list.

Iyengar: Yeah. And then I was admitted to all those places, but only University of Illinois offered me a research assistantship. So obviously, I took that. The University of Illinois at that time was doing a lot of research for the United States Defense Department. They had major contracts with the department…

Blum: This was—let’s see, what year? 1957?

Iyengar: This was 1957. And so, I was able to secure one of these research assistantships, which means that I had to work about twenty hours a week. It turned out much more like thirty hours a week. And then I can take three quarters student courses—graduate courses—three quarters time. So, it was a very hectic time.

Blum: Who did you work with for your fellowship?

Iyengar: Well, there were two people. One was Professor [John] Duberg, D-U-B-E- R-G, he was a professor that had come from the air force. And then he was interested in developing response to nuclear blasts. At that time, 1957, it was a time when the Cold War was on, as you recall. And there was a great deal of interest in developing technologies for nuclear fallout

shelters. So, the air force had sponsored several projects at the University of Illinois that needed a lot of research assistantships. And this concern was with the response of structures, either above ground or below ground, subjected to nuclear blasts. The whole idea was to develop shelters, nuclear fallout shelters, not just from radiation, but also to survive the blast, and which could hold masses of people, a lot of people. So it is a huge structure. It’s like a huge dome.

Blum: Like a Quonset hut?

Iyengar: Yeah.

Blum: This is above ground?

Iyengar: This is above ground. Initially above ground, but later on we found that many of the structures above ground didn’t survive, so we had to go underground. So we started looking at structures, responsive structures, below grade. So, I did a great deal of that kind of research for about three years. It was not my favorite type of work. I hadn’t realized that I would be assigned to this kind of work, this kind of analytical work. It was mostly analytical, mathematical work. But the university felt that I am best suited for that kind of work.

Blum: Why? What was their thinking behind this idea?

Iyengar: Well, the opinion is that a lot of American students didn’t want to deal with mathematics that much. They wanted to be on the side of research in structural engineering that had to do with the design of columns or beams, or simpler structures. But they didn’t want to deal with mathematics’ analytical side. I think anybody that got an assistantship from India they felt would be very good in math, and they would be assigned to mathematical, analytical projects.

Blum: Were your earlier math courses very challenging?

Iyengar: Oh yes.

Blum: I mean did you have a good background in math?

Iyengar: I had a good background. And from the Indian Institute of Science, it was mostly mathematics.

Blum: But isn’t that all part of engineering?

Iyengar: It is part of engineering. But it’s a more theoretical side of engineering. It had a lot on the analytical side.

Blum: Well if you didn’t like the mathematics part of it, what were you looking for?

Iyengar: Well, I was looking for a more practical side, like whether or not the projects would be related to design of beams and design of concrete elements. That would be more useful in buildings. Columns, there would be design of columns.

Blum: Well what about those shelters, that we were so preoccupied with?

Iyengar: Yeah. But shelters… If it were a design of shelter itself, I wouldn’t have minded. But this was not that. This was the precursor to that. Before the design, you had to develop the mathematical models to make sure that you understand the response of the structures to nuclear blast. So, all we would do would be to create an equivalent model of the structure, in terms of masses and strengths that would duplicate the strength and stiffness of the structure itself, and then subject it to enormous nuclear

pulse, and then see how it reacts—all mathematically. You know. You write mathematical equations, and then you analyze them at extremely small increments of time, like one-millionth of a second, because the blast pulse only occurs for a second. So you had to analyze what happens to it in an extremely small amount of time: How does the structure react, and what kind of forces is the structure subjected to?

Blum: Well, was the computer helpful?

Iyengar: Well, [the] computer was helpful. Before the computer, we had to develop the theory. We had to develop the mathematics behind it, the dynamics behind it. That’s what I mean by response, the mass and the spring system, and the model of the structure that we create will move in a certain way, and then it will create forces in all the other members around it. And then all those things could be predicted by mathematical equations. So we had to develop the mathematical equations first. And then, we were going to parametric study. Once we wrote the equations, then we can program the equations. And then we get into parametric study: like what is the diameter of the dome? How deep is it buried? What is the property of the soil? What kind of members the dome will have? How thick is the shell? And how thick are the members that frame into the dome? There are different parameters. So we would investigate a lot of different parameters. So it’s a parametric study of the dome itself. Then we’d get into programming. In 1957 we didn’t have the kind of computers that we have now, obviously. They had some initial specialized computers that the university itself had built. They had constructed the computer.

Blum: The University of Illinois?

Iyengar: The University of Illinois. Solid state hadn’t come around, so this is all based on vacuum tubes, thousands of vacuum tubes. So it malfunctioned quite often, with smoke, and everything else, coming out of the machines.

Blum: Was this the kind of early machine for which you carried around a box of cards?

Iyengar: Yeah. Well, before the cards you had to use computer tapes. You had the binary tapes, where you punch your data, literally. And then these tapes are fed into the computer. And later on, the IBM cards came in. This was the precursor to the cards. And it was very tedious work. There was no programming language that had been developed. So we had to develop every single operation, program every single operation. For instance, we had to have a big storage where there were thousands of numbers. We would have to keep track of which number was where all the time, and then bring that number, multiply it with something else, put it back; bring another number, subtract it, and put it back; bring another number, multiply it and put it back. So it was a very tedious kind of programming. It’s called fixed language programming.

Blum: Fixed language?

Iyengar: Fixed language. And then, there was no language, so it’s all—you had to work with the very basic computer technology. And then there was only one computer for the entire university of thirty-five thousand students. So that means anybody who is doing research had to have a certain degree of priority, and they, of course, worked twenty-four hours a day. I was assigned between two and four in the morning, three days a week. So, for the next three years I spent a lot of time every night. Sometimes every night working on the computer, which is a very slow and tedious process. And all that resulted was an enormous report that you could

compile and give to the air force, and they would look at it. I don’t know whatever happened to those reports.

Blum: Were any of your creations built?

Iyengar: No, I don’t recall reading about any of them. It seemed like the bureaucracy wanted to advance the state of the art in little increments. They would authorize you to do some amount of work, and then they would—you’d go into the next contract, do some more amount of work. Eventually, at some point, I suppose it would have led into the actual shelter design. But this is the background of the theoretical work that needed to be done. So it wasn’t very rewarding. It wasn’t very exciting. It was very tedious, is what I remember.

Blum: You mentioned there were two professors that were important to you at this time.

Iyengar: Yeah. Professor Duberg was the project director. And the other one was the head of the department, Newmark, Nathan Newmark. And he was the one who had selected me for this particular research project.

Blum: Why do you think that he selected you?

Iyengar: I approached him afterwards, after I was told that I would be working on this project. I wanted to change, and he said, “No, you can’t change. We selected you especially for this project, and you have to work on this project.” It was too late to do anything about it, so I stuck with it.

Blum: But you say you were there for three years.

Iyengar: I was there for three years. I was involved in a Ph.D. program. I got another Master’s degree after two years in structural engineering.

Blum: You were collecting degrees.

Iyengar: Collecting degrees. And then I did my course work for the Ph.D. but I got too tired. You know. I was doing the same thing over and over.

Blum: Do you mean the research project tired you?

Iyengar: Yeah.

Blum: Or was it the actual class work?

Iyengar: Not the class work. The research project tired me. I couldn’t change. And I would have had to continue for another two more years to get my Ph.D. So I thought maybe I should take a break. I should take a year off or something like that, and see what it is like outside in the actual practice. So I went to my advisor and asked him for advice as to where I should go look for a job. And he said Chicago. Go to Chicago. And he gave me the name of two firms: Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and then Holabird and Root. So I went to visit both of them. Like I said, I think Skidmore was very much impressed with my background, and then said, Anybody who has gone through all of this has got to be worth something. So, we’ll hire you. So, I started in 1960.

Blum: What did you know about Skidmore, Owings and Merrill prior to presenting yourself as a candidate for employment?

Iyengar: Well, the only thing I knew about it was that it was an AE firm, architecture and engineering together. And I’d also learned that most engineering firms were separate from architects, and the architects were separate from engineers. They were different firms. And very few firms practiced the architecture and engineering together.

Blum: Which Skidmore did?

Iyengar: Which Skidmore did, in the Chicago office. So, they told me that this would be a good place to get exposure to architecture, engineering, and designing buildings which I was interested in. If you’re really interested in designing buildings, you should go to a firm that practices both architecture and engineering. They gave me names of two of the firms, both of them are AE firms—architecture and engineering together. So, I was very much interested in that aspect of it, not only engineering, but also architecture.

Blum: Well, how did that idea work on a practical level in the office? Were you working on the same project with architects? Were you at one end of a hall, and they at the other? Or how did this all take shape?

Iyengar: Well, we had a structural department; and we had about twenty-five people. But we were all on the same floor though, in [the] Inland Steel building.

Blum: How large was the firm in 1960 when you joined?

Iyengar: I believe we were about two hundred and fifty people. And then we had about twenty-five people who were structural engineers. We were at one end of the same floor where the architects were.

Blum: So engineers were about ten percent of the personnel?

Iyengar: Ten percent of the personnel. And then there’s the mechanical engineering department too. There was the structural engineering department, and the mechanical engineering department that dealt with

the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning. And then about thirty percent of the firm was engineering at that particular time.

Blum: So much has been written about the teamwork and the way SOM was organized in studios.

Iyengar: That came later. That came later, much later, in the 1970s. Bruce Graham was the one who organized it. And then Fazlur Khan was involved with that too. And then they said, Well, in order to be an integrated practice, if you want to draw the engineers out from engineering into architecture, and create different solutions, then they ought to be having dialogue every day and working with each other side by side.

Blum: Who said that?

Iyengar: Bruce had an idea that he wanted to break up the firm–—it was a very large firm–—into smaller studio type arrangements. Each studio would have a studio head, an architect. And certain projects would be in that particular studio. So he felt that the engineers who supported that particular project in that particular studio would reside in the studio. And then there would be many other studios like that. Before then, they were all…

Blum: Each one working on their own project.

Iyengar: Each one working on their own projects. So, in other words, the whole office would be split up into eight or ten studios. Each studio would be composed of about thirty architects, twenty-five architects. And then the engineers connected with it would be with them, working with them. Before then, there was the design department, an architectural design department. It was on a separate floor, on the fifth floor, if I recall, in the Inland Steel building.

Blum: Do you mean interior design?

Iyengar: No, architectural design. Architectural designers were separated from architectural production people. So, in other words, the design people came first, and they designed the building. At some point, about two- thirds of the way, they would bring in the architectural production department. Architectural production department would take that, and they would make it into working drawings. And the architectural production department was separate from the design department. And then engineering departments, again, were yet again separate from both the architectural production department and architectural design department.

Blum: So, the engineers were not in on the ground floor of a project.

Iyengar: Well they may be consulted. They would be consulted, but they were not in on the ground floor, in the sense they couldn’t observe day-by-day what was happening with the project. The whole idea was–—Bruce’s idea was––engineers would see something happening, somebody designing, in the sense that somebody was drawing up some sketches. And then that would trigger some reaction from the engineers. They would say, Here is a solution for the drawing that you’re making, for the design sketches that you’re making. So, from the very inception of the project, it would incorporate certain engineering ideas. If we didn’t do that, then the designer would complete the design, and then the engineers would come and then say, No, we want this way; they want it that way. Change this. And they would say, No, it can’t be changed, because it’s all been designed. So, in order to incorporate the engineering notions and engineering ideas from the very beginning it had to occur from the moment of inception, from the inception of the project, in the conceptual stage. And then there would be relationships not only between the senior

people, you know—like the senior engineer and the senior designer—but there would also be relationship between the working junior engineers and junior architects. They would be working next to each other, so they can see what’s happening with each other. So this was the kind of symbiotic relationship that Bruce wanted, that an integrated solution and an integrated practice would result in a better solution.

Blum: Did it work?

Iyengar: It worked, for the most part.

Blum: And when you came in as a newcomer, at what point were you included in some of these meetings?

Iyengar: Well, I was not included right off the bat in discussions with Bruce. Al Picardi, the head of the department, would meet with Bruce.

Blum: Well, were you meeting with your counterpart in, say, an architect? A new architect?

Iyengar: Occasionally, yes. I was still too junior to be involved, even at that stage. But that changed very rapidly.

Blum: Describe what you did as a newcomer.

Iyengar: Well, one of the first projects that I was assigned to was the Business Men’s Assurance building in Kansas City. I must say, at this particular point, I was introduced to Fazlur Khan, who was there at that time. And he had joined. He had come back from Pakistan just a year before. And then he had been there in 1955, and he worked there for a couple of years. Then he had gone back to Pakistan to see if he could practice there. And he didn’t like it, so he came back. In 1960, I believe, he came back, and I

joined in 1960. So, Faz Khan said that we have a very rudimentary way of designing structures for the BMA building. Traditionally––I don’t want to get too technical––it was a method of designing the building for wind forces, which had come from 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. And it wasn’t accurate enough. So he had introduced a new method. He would make calculations, and refine it, refine it, until he’d get it right. And he had a method devised for that. So he asked me to work with him on that. And then we both worked on it for the BMA building, which was the first building that I worked on. And BMA is also the building that Fazlur Khan was involved in, and Bruce Graham was involved in. You know. It was based on a frame principle, beams and columns. And I could very easily see that the structure, the frame of the structure was very, very neatly exhibited by means of a gallery all around it, all around the building.

Blum: Was this a new concept at the time?

Iyengar: No, it wasn’t a new concept. Well, buildings were mostly frame buildings. We call it frame. It’s just a stick building, beam and column with bays arranged in two directions. Three bay by five bay, or three bay by seven bay. Thirty feet by thirty feet bays in the floor plan. They would be arranged in two directions. And most of New York buildings were based on that, up until then. And most of the buildings in the 1940s and 1950s were based on the frame principle. And so that was the principle that was used. But most of the buildings didn’t exhibit the frame. They were clad in terra cotta, or some other pre-cast material, or limestone. So the very character of the structure would not be seen. The frame was hidden inside, and then you wouldn’t see the structure. What you would see was really cladding. What you would see would be the terra cotta and limestone cladding. There are many, many examples of that, even to this day, in Chicago and New York. So, Bruce was very much interested in exhibiting this frame character, beams and columns. And then he wanted

to have a pristine expression of the frame, beam and column all joined together. And [the] BMA building was one of the first buildings that he tried to express that. And then he wanted to accentuate this expression by incorporating a gallery all the way around the building. In other words, the cladding—the glass line—was not flush with the column. They were set inside. They were three or four feet behind, so that you see the beams and the columns very clearly on the outside of the building.

Blum: Was this the same system that he was continuing to work on when he did the Perimeter Center in Atlanta?

Iyengar: Yes. Yeah, Perimeter Center is the project… Bruce had a lifelong interest in exhibiting the frame character. Later on, he came to associate this thing with the sculpture of Sol Lewitt, if you recall. Sol Lewitt had a very rectangular square framework. And his whole idea was the building is a frame of that type. And then he wanted to exhibit that very clearly. If the glass is in the same plane as the frame, it kind of distracted to some extent. So, he would push the glass back, create a gallery all the way around. There were two examples of this. One is the BMA building; the other one is the Hartford Life Insurance building in Chicago, but that one is in concrete. But yet, it has the gallery all the way around. And later on, Bruce pursued this at the Perimeter Center.

Blum: Well now, years separated the BMA building and…

Iyengar: Oh yeah. BMA building was in the 1960s and the Perimeter Center is in— I believe in the late 1980s.

Blum: So was he really refining, developing a system? Or was he just repeating?

Iyengar: No, he wanted to express the structure, as much as possible.

Blum: Well, did the later building express the structure better than the BMA building?

Iyengar: He expressed it a little better. It became a vocabulary. If you recall, you see extensions of the frame—open frame. In other words, he had begun to conceive of it as a basket, if you will, of a Sol Lewitt-like sculpture, into which the building is introduced. So there is an atrium here—you don’t see that—it’s all columns and beams, an expression of the frame. And then he did another project much later, in the late 1980s, in London, called Ludgate Center. And that’s based on also this kind of a principle. But only this time [Ludgate Center] he wanted to expose the steel. This is in concrete, and this one is in steel. But this one is fireproofed, and clad in marble.

Blum: This is the BMA building.

Iyengar: In BMA building. But what he did in the Ludgate building is to expose the steel. He wanted to take the raw steel, paint it, not fireproof it, and have a frame principle.

Blum: What about fire? What about fireproofing?

Iyengar: Well, we had developed in the late 1980s a lot of technology related to fire engineering. We could assess the stability of a structure when it’s subjected to temperatures—high temperatures of the fire. I think we’ll come to that later on. We have several concepts based on that—exposing the steel. So, Bruce had the lifelong ambition to see as much of the raw structure as possible. And you know, later on we’ll talk about Phase 11 [eleven] of Broadgate.

Blum: The Exchange House?

Iyengar: Exchange House. It’s all based on the exposed steel on the outside, without any fire protection. Bruce wanted to emulate the character of the Eiffel Tower, so to speak. It’s exposed steel. That was his notion all the time. But every time he tried to think about it, he couldn’t really proceed too far because of the fire protection requirements.

Blum: Do you mean that was imposed on him by the city or the…

Iyengar: Not that he tried. But he knew automatically that it wouldn’t work. And he evolved in the sense that he wanted to get more and more pure structural form, so to speak. He always tried to do that.

Blum: Before you got into all these projects, and were still a new comer at SOM, did you know at that time that SOM was committed to do modern work?

Iyengar: Yeah, I knew that. I think…

[Tape 1: Side B] Iyengar: The structure was the basis for the architecture, so it was very important for us to be involved in the evolution of structure. And its form was important. It wasn’t sufficient just to make it work, but it had to have some character that could be used in architecture.

Blum: What do you mean, by character?

Iyengar: Well, some kind of an expressive character that you could use in architecture. I think it came—–not right away, not when I started working ––but within a few years of that. Faz Khan was already into it quite a bit. He was very much interested in architecture and engineering together. And he developed a relationship with Myron Goldsmith. Myron also came from a background of engineering and architecture, although his engineering background was not as extensive. But he was very much

interested in engineering and architecture together. Goldsmith worked in the office of Nervi, the Italian architect, and very much interested in expressing the structure. So, Goldsmith was professor—adjunct at IIT [Illinois Institute of Technology]. And Fazlur Khan teamed up with him. The idea was that in 1962, 1963—the idea was that there was no research that was being done in systems. There was no research that was being done in coming up with structural ideas that could be used in architecture. There was no laboratory, so to speak. In other words, if you want to build a structure, there are plenty of laboratories all around the universities, in many universities. But if you want to build a structurally- based architecture, there is no laboratory. There is no research being done. So, they both teamed up, and then they said, Well, we’re going to do research. We’re going to get master’s degree students, and they will write a thesis. They will select a project which has a structural value, and we’ll investigate it for its architectural expressiveness, and how it would work in architecture. And then we’ll see. We’ll publish this, and see how it works.

Blum: Whose idea was this?

Iyengar: This was Myron Goldsmith, I believe. I think he pulled Fazlur Khan into it almost right away. So every Saturday, I also attended many of these sessions. Every Saturday we’d go to IIT. We had a master’s degree student working on a thesis. And they would take a project, whether it is a long-span project—and Myron was very much interested in cable suspended roofs. And he was also interested in tall buildings. And he had looked at some diagonal bracing. And then we would counsel the students as to what the structural form is. And the student would look at it, and then come up with architectural expressions for it. So there were many theses that were developed on that basis. In fact, some of the best ideas came out of that kind of collaboration. Hancock building came out of that.

Blum: There was recently an exhibition of Myron’s work at the Arts Club. And a good portion of that exhibition was student work that he had been the advisor for.

Iyengar: Yeah.

Blum: And out of the program you’re talking about at IIT. There was one project that had the diagonal bracing without the spread the Hancock has.

Iyengar: That’s right.

Blum: But that was years before Hancock.

Iyengar: Yeah, this was in 1953. He started his thesis work in 1953.

Blum: Well now that wasn’t Myron’s. I don’t recall it being Myron’s work. It was a student of Myron’s.

Iyengar: It’s a student of Myron’s. But I call it Myron’s work because Myron was the advisor. It was a student's work, but Myron was very much instrumental in coming up with the ideas. So what he did initially was to explore the diagonals on a partial basis. The buildings had only partial diagonals. It didn’t have full diagonals. So he didn’t pursue the engineering of it. He liked the idea of diagonals. And he knew diagonals played a role in the wind resistance of the buildings. So he put it all together. And some buildings had frame at the top, as they worked their way down to the bottom, they had their diagonals at the bottom, in the last third of the building. So he had played around with the idea of diagonals almost like a graphic pattern, in buildings. And Faz took that idea, and said, Wait a minute. You could extend the diagonals all the way, and make it into your system—a complete system. There would be

only columns and diagonals and horizontals, not just partial, but all of it. That’s how the Hancock building concept grew.

Blum: And it was Faz who turned it into a fundamental system?

Iyengar: A fundamental system. You see, we call it a trussed tube. It’s a tubular concept based on the trusses. And it was very, very efficient. And it was used for the Hancock building.

Blum: Well, it’s interesting to see something actual come out of the research to take form in the world.

Iyengar: Well yes. I think he also did research on what he called tubular buildings.

Blum: Please explain what you mean by tubular.

Iyengar: Tubular buildings. I think you probably have heard the word before.

Blum: Tube? Why yes.

Iyengar: Yeah. And this is a system based on columns which are very closely spaced on the exterior of the building, as if it’s a hollow tube. As if you are building a silo with punched openings in it. And this would be a very strong building, in terms of the lateral loads. So this was a tube. And then, there was a lot of exploration of that. And then it turned out to be one of the workhorses of tall buildings—tall building design. One of the first buildings that used the tubular building concept is the Dewitt- Chestnut building in Chicago. I think it was about forty-four stories. Buildings before that had shear walls inside the building, and then regular bay system on the outside of the building. This was the first time we were able to come up with an idea that the exterior form of the building took all the lateral loads, all the wind loads, and the interior, you

don’t need any shear walls on the inside. Later on, this concept was extended by others to the World Trade Center, for instance. Columns were at very close centers, about three foot three, and three foot three inches in centers in the World Trade Center. It’s based on the exterior tube concept. So there were many buildings that were based on the tubular idea. The whole idea of a tube was coined by Faz, Fazlur Khan, that the buildings worked like a tube. You know, this is so contrary to the idea of a frame. In the frame buildings the bay system went in and out of the building in two directions. It worked on the principle of bending of beams and columns for the lateral load resistance, whereas the tube building worked as a cantilever, which is fixed in the ground, and subjected to lateral loads. It was much superior. Out of these ideas, Faz was able to theorize very early, in 1964, what he calls the systems evolution. In other words, there’s no point in trying to use a frame building based on a bay frame like this building—try to do a hundred- story building with it, because it would be terribly inefficient. You see, it’s not very efficient at all. So you would need a different kind of a system for it. And then he would say, a tubular building on the outside is a much better building. But if you introduced diagonals, like in the Hancock building, it would be better yet. It would be a better cantilever building. So out of this came the idea that each height zone of the building, whether it’s fifty stories, sixty stories, or a hundred stories, you would need a different idea. You had to go beyond the frame building to compose elements to resist the wind loads, to make it more efficient. See that’s the whole idea of the systems approach that Faz came up with.

Blum: But are you saying that one led to the next, to the next, to the next?

Iyengar: Yeah. But the amazing thing was he was able to come up with an idea— here is a later picture of the systems: the frame building is here, you can introduce vertical trusses and shear walls; then you can improve the frame, and you can put belt trusses and outrigger trusses in the building;

and then you can make it into a partial tube and a full tube, and bundled tube, and diagonalized tube. So all these different variations are there. The question is, you know, Do we get an opportunity to use it?

Blum: Was SOM the only firm working in this way?

Iyengar: SOM was the forerunner of all of these things.

Blum: Oh, they were.

Iyengar: Yeah. When we did this, everybody else began to copy it. When we did the tubular building, there must have been a hundred tubular buildings built in this country, and elsewhere.

Blum: How would you categorize Mies’ buildings because he was really the architect of those decades?

Iyengar: Yeah. Mies’ buildings were still framed buildings. He was still mostly concerned with expressing the frame. He didn’t get beyond that. But, his principle though, his notion of the structure having a prominence in architecture could be seen all the way through. Even though he didn’t carry it through himself, he can apply the principle. That’s why Bruce would call the truss tube the Miesian concept, because the structure is the primary element of his architecture. As long as the structures play a dominant role, creates the essence of architecture, then it become Miesian, according to Bruce.

Blum: Do you think that the idea of structure dictating the form was something that was an element in Chicago architecture before Mies?

Iyengar: To some extent. To some extent. Well, there was an attempt to build a bearing wall type building in Chicago around the turn of the century,

slightly before the turn of the century—I mean the 1900s. The Monadnock building, for instance: It could be construed as a tubular building. But it was built with bricks and bearing walls. It’s a bearing wall type building. There were some attempts to come up with structure. I think the whole idea of a frame came about from Chicago.

Blum: You mean from the balloon structure? That very early wood frame system?

Iyengar: Yeah. The frame buildings as an organized system came from Chicago. First there were the bearing wall type buildings. And later on, they introduced cast iron columns within the bearing walls. Next they put some lintels—steel lintels—within the bearing walls, and connected it to the cast iron columns. And later on, they said, Wait a minute. This is working so well, we can get rid of the brick. We can make a beam connection to the cast iron column in such a way that it will resist lateral loads. So out of that came the tier building, or the frame building concept. There was a building called Home Insurance building. I don’t think it exists anymore.

Blum: No, it’s gone.

Iyengar: But it was one of the first frame buildings that was built in the 1880s, I believe. [1884-85] So there was a bit of a tradition in Chicago for a structural notion. But the essence of what’s happening since Mies is that structure came to the outside. And the structure didn’t get buried internally. It came outside to be expressed. Because most of the buildings, even the frame buildings of the 1880s and 1890s, the frame was inside, but you never knew that. It was clad with terra cotta and other materials. And with the Miesian approach, with 860 Lake Shore Drive, you could clearly see the frame. And then, so the idea of pursuing the structural

expressions in architecture is a Miesian idea. Bruce was very much committed to it.

Blum: What about Gordon Bunshaft, and his Lever House? Would you say that fit into the…?

Iyengar: It fit into the overall concept. He was very much interested in that. But he was also somewhat more concerned about the building as an object. I think if you look at Lever Brothers, you see the concept as an object: the glass wall, predominately glass. And then the podium, sitting on a podium. He didn’t particularly express the structure, but he did express the form though. The form is very strong. His Solow building, for instance, with the curves. You know. It is, again, another one of those, not necessarily a structural expression, but it does accentuate the form. He had very much interest in a strong form. He was interested in the structure, but not to the extent that Bruce was, in showing it—showcasing it.

Blum: One of the earliest jobs that I saw your name attached to was the McMath Solar Telescope at Kitt Peak [Arizona] with Myron.

Iyengar: Yeah. With Myron. I was not involved in the beginning of it. I got into the middle of it. It had already been designed, so to speak. I joined the effort midway. And it was exciting.

Blum: Well, it’s such a beautiful…

Iyengar: It’s a beautiful concept.

Blum: I’m going to call it an object like sculpture, but I’d suppose you’d call it a structure.

Iyengar: It’s a beautiful form. Well, it is both a structure and a form. And then we did another project. I don’t know who the designer was.

Blum: For the Lindheimer telescope structure?

Iyengar: The solar telescope in Kitt Peak. Not the solar, the stellar telescope.

Blum: Well I have your name on three similar telescope projects. One was the one at Kitt Peak.

Iyengar: One is in Cerro Tololo [Santiago, Chile].

Blum: And another was the Lindheimer at Northwestern University in Evanston.

Iyengar: And the other one was in Santiago, Chile.

Blum: And that was just the telescope?

Iyengar: Yeah, the telescope structure.

Blum: Were there challenges in these jobs for you?

Iyengar: Well, I was working on the Hancock building when Walter Netsch called me one day, and then said, I have a telescope structure, a Lindheimer telescope structure in Northwestern University. And then he had wanted to come up with a framework. What did he call it? A three-dimensional framework. And how could he make it work? You know, with simple pipes, and so on. So we worked on it, and came up with the idea that the piers that supported the telescope had to be separated from the rest of the structure. The vibrations would be carried away from the building to the core, and then out to the telescope, and then it would disturb the

observations. So it was a very important element of design of all the telescopes that you had to have an independent support for the telescope. And that whenever you worked on the floor of the telescope, it had to be separate from the telescope mounting. So, Walter’s idea was to come up with this network of three-dimensional pipe framework, that it was separate from the concrete piers in the center that would carry the telescope. He would support the floor on the trellis, and then the framework. This is his way of separating the structure from the piers.

Blum: Well, you must know that Walter’s telescope has been demolished.

Iyengar: Oh yes. Yes, I know.

Blum: And it took, I understood, three tries to bring it down.

Iyengar: Three tries. I was there.

Blum: So you really did your work well.

Iyengar: They tried to blast it. And they thought they could do it, and it didn’t blast. And they tried to drag it, and pull it. And finally, they had to cut it up in pieces.

Blum: That certainly is testimony to the strength of what you did.

Iyengar: That’s right.

Blum: I understood that at SOM people were assigned to different teams. And you, obviously, were on Bruce’s team.

Iyengar: Yeah.

Blum: For so many of his projects—his design projects, you were on as an engineer.

Iyengar: That’s right.

Blum: And you worked with Walter.

Iyengar: I worked with Walter on a few projects, not too many.

Blum: Well, Walter and Bruce’s interaction is known to have been very difficult.

Iyengar: That’s right.

Blum: Did that spill over to people in the office?

Iyengar: It certainly did. He wanted dedicated people.

Blum: Who wanted dedicated people?

Iyengar: Walter. He wanted certain engineers assigned to his project, and only that, and they can’t work on anything else—which I didn’t contribute to. I was working with Faz and he was not working with Walter.

Blum: Was Walter, at that time, working with his Field Theory?

Iyengar: Yeah. He was working with that at the University of Illinois, Northwestern University. I did work with him on a project in Algeria, University of Algeria in Blida, University of Blida. There were two universities. I worked with him on that—with Walter I mean. But those are only the projects that I worked with him on.

Blum: What was the difference working with Walter than working with Bruce, for you?

Iyengar: It was much different. Because Walter had already made up his mind what he wanted, either he would or his team would have already had the concept all done. And then it was more a matter of coming up with the right kind of a structure for it. It was much different with Bruce. In later stages, Bruce, of course, would warn you in the sense that I have a project—it may be a fifty-–, sixty–– story project—you guys come up with some ideas. While he hadn’t even started a line yet. He’s already asking for ideas.

Blum: Well, he demanded a lot more from you.

Iyengar: Oh, he demanded a lot.

Blum: And how did that fit with what you felt you wanted to do?

Iyengar: Oh, very much so.

Blum: Oh, you liked that more than…

Iyengar: I liked that. I liked that very much. And he even—before Bruce drew anything, he wanted you to come up with ideas, what kind of structure may be appropriate, you know. So it was a different kind of relationship.

Blum: Well, it seems that your engineering participation would be much more prominent in Bruce’s projects.

Iyengar: In Bruce’s projects, yeah. And Bruce evolved gradually. But the seeds of his structuralist expressions were there all the time. At one time there was a meeting at the Chicago Club, I think. They had a meeting with Bruce,

and what’s his name? Chicago architect, German architect, he did many projects. He did the State Office building. Helmut. Helmut Jahn. And they all gathered together, and they said that we’re going to take something away from each architect and see how they will do it. Okay?

Blum: What do you mean take something away?

Iyengar: Deprive the architect of some means—how would you deal with it? When it came to Bruce, they said they’re going to take Fazlur Khan away. Just take the structure away, and see how he comes up with any ideas.

Blum: How did he respond to that?

Iyengar: He said, Well, he knew enough about the structures, he can come up with his own ideas. But the notion was that he depended on Faz Khan and myself so much that without the engineers he wouldn’t have any structure. It’s teamwork. Where would he be? It was the kind of notion the others were trying to employ.

Blum: Before you came to Chicago, did you know about the Chicago School of Architecture? Or what is called the Chicago School?

Iyengar: No. Actually, I didn’t know very much about architecture. And I wanted to work on buildings, but I didn’t know very much about architecture. It was kind of an immersion for me to be involved with architects, and I learned very quickly. And again, the interaction of the architects and engineers being in the same office, working together, facilitated that kind of a system, that kind of provided an education in architecture. And later on it became very important that we understand architecture.

Blum: Did you have anything like—oh, say—Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture or Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture as a text in any of the degree programs you were in?

Iyengar: We had Le Corbusier’s work. Yeah. We had Mies’s, some of Mies’ work. And Le Corbusier. Mainly because he had done some work in India, I think. He had done a whole city, I think. Chandigarh, yeah. So, I was familiar with that. But I didn’t know the details of architecture, and how to interact with that.

Blum: So you learned on the spot.

Iyengar: I learned gradually, as we went along. And Faz was a good teacher and mentor.

Blum: Did you ever actually study with him? Or did you just work alongside him?

Iyengar: We worked along. We worked along, and then we developed an interest in developing systems, and developing different kinds of ideas for tall buildings. Like I said earlier, we were involved at IIT, where we would lend our expertise in engineering to come up with an idea—an engineering idea—that could be explored architecturally. And then, Myron Goldsmith was very much involved with that too.

Blum: What was it like to work with Myron?

Iyengar: It was exciting. And you had to be very deliberate with Myron. Ideas didn’t flow just like that. We would discuss a lot of things, and then it would gradually emerge what he wanted, and so on. But he was a good teacher as well. He would ask a lot of different questions. But we didn’t work on too many projects together.

Blum: You did, or you didn’t?

Iyengar: We didn’t. Dewitt-Chestnut was one of the key projects I worked on with him. You know, that was the tubular idea I talked to you about, in 1964. And then built another project in…

Blum: Did you work on the Brunswick building with him?

Iyengar: I think Brunswick building was both; Bruce and Myron were both involved in it. I couldn’t figure out exactly who did what.

Blum: Just like Inland Steel with Bruce and Walter.

Iyengar: Inland Steel. Yeah. Brunswick building is an unusual building. I think it’s worth talking about that. Brunswick building was one of the forerunners of what we call the systems approach. You know, I talked a little bit about the frame building, a bay frame building. In other words, you have a three bay by five bay building, you know; and there’s a system of bays, either thirty feet or forty feet bays in two directions, and you would frame along each one of these lines, and you would have a system. So that means thirty feet by thirty feet, you had an interior column at every thirty feet. Your whole floor system was broken up into bays of either thirty by thirty, or twenty-five by twenty-five, or whatever the dimension was. It was split up into a bay system. That was a traditional frame building. The Brunswick was the first building that kind of departed from that approach completely.

Blum: What did it do instead?

Iyengar: Instead he came up with a tubular building. They had the frame on the outside of the building, on the facades of the building, and he had shear

walls on the inside of the building. And then in the span between the shear walls and the outside was spanned by a long-span joist, thirty-eight feet. There were no interior columns. Only shear walls, which enclosed the elevator system, in low-rise, mid-rise and high-rise, and all the other facilities in the core, like the toilets and other kinds of things. And then there’s the exterior of the building. There are no other columns. There’s no bay system to be identified with. So this was the first building that kind of departed from that. This is a product of the systems building. In the sense, the system—the tubular system being on the outside dictated that kind of a system. It wasn’t organized along a bay principle, or anything like that.

Blum: Why did it have a slope to it down towards the base?

Iyengar: Well, that really had more to do with the idea that we had nine feet four inches column centers on the exterior of the building, throughout, to express the frame. It was felt that on that particular corner, if you bring a nine foot four column all the way to the ground, it would impede the flow of traffic, impede the flow of activities at the ground floor. They wanted much more openness. So there was a huge transfer girder, fifty- six feet span, that is twenty-four feet deep, fifty-six feet span, that supported this frame on top. Now, when the frame came in, the idea was that the beam had to be so wide, so thick and that the column came and rested on it, and there would be a ledge. In order to get rid of the idea of a ledge, the column was sloped to come to the top of the transfer girder. In other words, this transfer girder had to be very thick; it’s over eight feet thick. It would stick out of the building. And then, these columns were brought down, and then just in the last couple of stories, it flared out to meet it. It flared out to meet the transfer girder so that there wouldn’t be a huge ledge. It would make the transfer girder to be part of the system, instead of being separate. If it came down separately and went straight down without the flaring out, it would appear like that is a platform on

which the rest of the frame sits. So that’s why they came up with the flare. And they also came up with exposing all the beams and columns. This is exposed concrete—painted, but exposed concrete.

Blum: So whose building design was it?

Iyengar: Oh, I always thought it was both Bruce and Myron. I don’t know exactly who contributed to what. I think it’s probably more Myron. I think it was more Myron. He certainly was more involved in the transfer girder— evolution of the transfer girder at the base of the building. Well this brought about additional problems—technical problems—for us, because they wanted to express the columns and the form of the tubular system on the outside. It means the glass was on the back of the column, and this was exposed; which means that the temperature in the column in the winter would be very cold. It had no insulation. Which means that this building would contract on the outside by as much as two inches.

Blum: Would that crack the concrete?

Iyengar: No, it wouldn’t crack the concrete, but the inside of the building would be warm, because it’s being heated. The shear walls would not contract, but the exterior would contract. That means the floor on the outside every winter would go down two inches, and up. But it would also crack the floor beams that go inside, being tortured that way. So we came up with an idea of hinging it at the shear walls, on the inside, to make it work better. That’s also very unique. I think very few buildings of that type—of that height were an exposed concrete building.

Blum: Did Faz work on that building?

Iyengar: Yes, Faz worked on that. I worked on it. It was in 1963, I believe, when we started working on it.

Blum: It has been called a breakthrough.

Iyengar: Yeah.

Blum: Apparently it was the first of its kind.

Iyengar: First of its kind. Well later on we learned to understand the character of the wall, the character of the frame, so to speak, of the frame tube, to a point where you could do these transfers without such a heavy transfer girder. It’s a very unique building. And the Dewitt-Chestnut, of course, being an apartment building, it goes down all the way. I think it still transferred over two bays at the base of the building.

Blum: What was Faz like to work with? You seem to have been in almost every project until his death, you seem to have been his partner.

Iyengar: Yeah. I think—well, we were very much involved with—he was exciting to work with. He was multi-dimensional. He was involved at IIT and so was I. But he was more involved with it. He was more dedicated to it. He spent a lot more time. And he was involved with a lot of outside talks and seminars, and he was involved in the profession a lot more than I did.

Blum: Well, you’ve done a lot of publishing.

Iyengar: Yeah. Yeah. I have about a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or something like that—publications.

Blum: That’s quite a bit.

Iyengar: But he did a lot more. And he pursued the ideas. He had a knack for communication with Bruce, so that his ideas got translated into real

projects. Many of the ideas that he had worked on at IIT became real projects. Even the seeds of Sears Tower were sown in the research.

Blum: In the research at IIT?

Iyengar: But the genius is really in coming up with the idea that you can come up with varieties of assembly of elements to resist lateral loads into your different system. So it became very important that we take a look at each one of the buildings separately, distinctly, and not assume that you can use the same system over again.

Blum: So each one has its own unique…

Iyengar: Each one has its own unique character. And also this was a time before the computer became such a prominent feature, where the power of ideas were a lot more important than the results.

Blum: And now?

Iyengar: Now, it is the power of the computer that is a lot more important. The computer generates the form, generates the solutions. You can put everything in the computer and see if it works. If it doesn’t work, you change it, and so and so forth. Computer is becoming a lot more of a… not a tool, but a generator of ideas, so to speak.

Blum: Is that good?

Iyengar: No, I don’t think so. But that’s the only way you can understand so many of the newer buildings that are being built.

Blum: Is that what globalization is all about?

Iyengar: That’s what globalization is all about. Powerful computers that can see very iconoclastic buildings all around the world, with varieties of forms. I’m sure you have followed many of them, with curves and all varieties of things. You couldn’t possibly think about doing any of those without the computers. And certainly, even the architects can’t do without them. Even the architects couldn’t draw it without the computers telling them what it looks like. It’s gotten to a point like that.

Blum: Isn’t that amazing?

Iyengar: Yeah. But it’s not so much the power of ideas. In the power of ideas we were taught there was a system, and a system has to be structurally relevant, and it has to be efficient, and it has to withstand certain loads. And if you combine these elements like this, it would work like that. It’s the power of ideas that propelled this evolution. Now, it’s still based on this, but you take pieces of this, pieces of that, pieces of all these, and assemble it together and then see if it works.

Blum: Do you have Frank Gehry in mind when you say this?

Iyengar: Yeah. Frank too. But many of the tall buildings designed today, and others are done that way. Well, there are very few architects that think purely in terms of systems. The only architect that does that is Foster, Norman Foster. He still does that. He’s very successful at it. But mostly architects think of the form, and then you introduce all kinds of elements and then you figure out how to make it work.

Blum: When you joined SOM in 1960, did you have as one of your goals to become a partner?

Iyengar: No, far from it. I had no idea. I had no idea.

Blum: Were you thinking it was just a job, and you’d get a paycheck regularly?

Iyengar: Yeah. Well, that was basically the idea. I don’t know how to describe it. I guess you’d say if you’re really committed to a profession that you create your own job description. You know, the job didn’t describe what I would do. We described what we would do. So in 1962, for instance, the computers were just coming on-line, the commercial computers, into the practice. We bugged the partnership, saying that we need a computer, and we know it would be very useful for us. They said, Well, there are no programs available. You had to write your own programs. Okay, we said, Yeah, we will write our own programs.

Blum: You and who else?

Iyengar: Faz Khan. We worked day and night, and day and night for two years. And developed programs. By then they had advanced much farther than they did when I was at the university.

Blum: You mean the sophistication of the technology?

Iyengar: Technology. They had a program oriented language called Fortran, so it was much easier, much easier to use Fortran than the machine language that I told you about that we were using at University of Illinois. So we developed about thirty programs, Faz and I, working day and night. And then they—this was before the computer came into our office, and then they—as soon as the computer came, we were able to use it. And then it gradually grew from there into different disciplines, and so on. The power of the computer still wasn’t enough when we were designing the Hancock building or the Sears Tower. We had to rely on our judgment first. Sears Tower could not be solved in any computer that we had, the structural analysis of it. The largest computer was at McDonald Douglas in St. Louis. And then we took it over there. They said they’ll do it for

twenty-five thousand dollars, or something like that. And we said, Okay. But they came back after three days and said the computer is still working, we can’t…

[Tape 2: Side A] Iyengar: Okay. And then they said that we had no other choice but to go ahead with it. I said, “No, we have a choice. We know how this building works. And we can do it without the computers.” So we did. The building was up to twenty-eight stories before we got the full solution to it. You see, it’s that power of ideas I’m talking about, that we so believe in the concept, and know how it works, how it behaves, and you have an intimate knowledge of it. But, with today’s structures, you don’t have that personal knowledge of how it works. But the computer is telling you how it works. That’s what you rely on. Hopefully there’s no mistake in the computer. So, that’s the problem with it.

Blum: But your work was mostly handcrafted, or partially handcrafted?

Iyengar: Partially handcrafted. But we knew what the answer was before you went in.

Blum: So you were just proving it with the computer analysis?

Iyengar: We were proving it. Well, we probably knew about it, to ninety percent accuracy and maybe the computer improved it to higher accuracy. You see, it improved the accuracy of what you were already thinking. But with today’s systems, it’s much more difficult. You can’t think how it really works, because you’re mixing and matching so much of the structure. I’m talking about the technology. And it’s very difficult for anybody to understand really, is it really going to work or not? But the only way I’m going to find out is if I’m going to put it all in the computer, and see if it works.

Blum: Would you like to be a young architect just starting now?

Iyengar: Oh, why not? Why not?

Blum: Think of where you could go with all this help from the computer.

Iyengar: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, there’s a symbiotic relationship between the computer and the conceptual ability. First, you come up with some ideas, that you don’t know how it works or not. And then the computer— you go to the computer and then you know it works. And then it augments your judgments, augments your conceptual ability, because you have a tool that you can use to verify your ideas. And then you can build on it gradually, to a point where a computer could be a very, very useful tool.

Blum: Were you and Faz the only two people at SOM that really understood the computer, and made use of it?

Iyengar: Initially, yes. First from 1962 until 1965, and then it became more complicated, and we got bigger computers. And then we grew up. We didn’t want to spend that much time on the computer ourselves. Computer programming had to dial up into the mechanical engineering and in architectural areas. So we felt we needed some real computer programmers. So we hired computer programmers.

Blum: By then did you have the computer in your office?

Iyengar: Yeah. And then, between 1965 and 1970, I think we hired some people to just learn the computer, and take care of the programming, and coordinate the activities of outside programming with larger computers

and programs and so it has grown to include many others. But initially, for the first few years, Faz and I were the only ones.

Blum: Am I mistaken, or was there a time at SOM where all the computer work was given to the Chicago office, because they were so efficient and knowledgeable of what the computer could do?

Iyengar: The New York office didn’t do that. The New York office did their own.

Blum: They did their own?

Iyengar: They didn’t have a computer, but they had consultants that did that.

Blum: Well, what about San Francisco?

Iyengar: We did it for the San Francisco office. I think the Hartford building in San Francisco was the first building that we tried using the computer for the San Francisco office. They sent us information and we ran it on the computer and gave it back to them. And they complained it’s too expensive, and all that. Yeah, I think the computer grew after that by leaps and bounds.

Blum: You said you had no idea about becoming a partner when you first joined. What did you hope to have, or hope to get from SOM?

Iyengar: I don’t know if I had… I was having a good time. And like I said, we defined our own job. And it just all happened. And in 1965, Faz said, you know, he’s going to work on the Hancock building. And there was a time when they wanted to bring in outside consultants to work on the Hancock building, outside structural consultants. And Faz said, “No way. If we do that, I’m going to leave.”

Blum: Oh really? He wanted to do it.

Iyengar: Well, yeah. It was his idea. It was his system. So, we did it for the Hancock building. And then there was a continuous flow of ideas. I call this period the golden age of structuralism, because—in tall buildings anyway—if you look at the number of tall buildings we did, it all fit a pattern. And we were able to use a rational approach to design tall buildings.

Blum: What is a rational approach?

Iyengar: Rational. For instance, we had the BMA building. I can point to what kind of system it was. I can point to the DeWitt-Chestnut building, and the kind of system it used, and how it propelled the system’s evolution further. And the Brunswick building. And then–—I didn’t work on this– —the First Wisconsin building, in Milwaukee. It used vertical trusses and the outside trusses. It was a truss system. And then later on, it went into truss-tube with the Hancock building, bundled tube with the Sears Tower. And then we had the core brace systems, you know, concrete…

Blum: Core brace? Please explain that.

Iyengar: Yeah, because there was an evolution in the 1960s through 1980s of a powerful structure on the outside. But it came to pass that so much of structuralism on the outside was not desired. They wanted much more ability to change shapes vertically. And so the structure kind of went from the face to the inside again. First, in the 1960s it came from inside to outside, now it went back from outside to inside, because they wanted a lot more freedom on the outside to fashion with different types of window wall systems. It became a deliberate effort to compose the window wall, have a composition of the window wall. So, despite our structural expression, like we did in One Shell Square or One Shell Plaza,

one of these buildings was too boring. It had no character in that sense, but they wanted a lot of modulation of the exterior form. This came about in the 1980s. So, structure withdrew from the outside to inside. So, we based many systems on the core. How do we allow the core in the center, in the inside, to be as strong as possible, leaving the outside to be a lot more free? So this led to many buildings, one of which is the Jin Mao building in Shanghai.

Blum: Oh yes. And that was Adrian’s.

Iyengar: Adrian. Adrian Smith. It’s based on a very strong core. But it does, in fact, engage the outside by means of outrigger trusses, and then exterior columns, a system borrowed from the First Wisconsin, so to speak, and applied to that, and then giving a lot more freedom on the outside. And there was a proposal for Dearborn Center.

Blum: That never materialized.

Iyengar: It never materialized. The Dearborn Center, at the intersection of Dearborn and Adam Street, was a site for several proposals. We had Dearborn I and Dearborn II, and finally, we didn’t build it.

Blum: Why did nothing materialize for the Dearborn Center?

Iyengar: There were two proposals. One proposal was a mega frame kind of an idea, with frame tube elements, that Bruce had worked on. He was constantly exploring different types of structures that he could use. This is what I mean by exterior freedom; he wanted a lot more freedom on the outside. Let’s see.

Blum: Are those Hedrich Blessing photographs?

Iyengar: I don’t know. This is Adrian's. This is Dearborn II. You can see the amount of exterior freedom that Adrian wanted. But we have a concrete core, and outrigger trusses here, here, here, and here, and so on. This is Dearborn I, like a super frame—strong legs, interconnected—I don’t know if you can see it…

Blum: Oh yes, I do.

Iyengar: Interconnected, by a super frame idea. And it didn’t come to pass. We had taken it pretty much to the working drawings, for a different client. And the basic idea for the Dearborn Center was that you had a central atrium in the center of the building, which interacted with the holes in the faces. And there are other ideas.

Blum: Oh, there’s the diagonal again.

Iyengar: A diagrid super frame was conceived for a project in Houston, an eighty- story project. It didn’t get built.

Blum: Well, a lot of good ideas did get built. You say you had no idea about becoming a partner, but you moved up rather quickly.

Iyengar: Very quickly.

Blum: You became an associate partner, and Director of Structural Engineering.

Iyengar: Well, that was—I don’t know—1966. I became a participating associate. That’s what they call it, associate. That’s the lowest level of partnership.

Blum: Well, now did you then entertain ideas about continuing on?

Iyengar: I knew I would advance further, at that particular point. And then I became an associate partner in 1969. I had worked on the Hancock building with Faz, and then we were just about to start Sears Tower in 1969.

Blum: Well, those were jewels in the crown.

Iyengar: Right. And then in 1975 I became a partner.

Blum: Did you find you had any difficulty whatsoever in the firm, because you were foreign born?

Iyengar: No. No, I don’t think so. I think it was very much—very much on the basis of the initiative you took. That was very much the case. If you just stayed in your corner and did your work, that was fine too. But if you took it upon yourself to do something more, showed some enthusiasm and showed some initiative, there was always opportunities to do work. Skidmore was that kind of place.

Blum: The reason I ask the question is because I have heard from some women who were employed by Skidmore in the early years that they didn’t feel they got their rightful due. So, I wondered how you felt about it.

Iyengar: Well, I think there’s some truth to that. I was always struck by the fact that there were so few women, in any position. I don’t know if it’s because of the recruiting, or if it’s because of promotions after they recruited. There were very few women, even in the architectural department. The women were mostly concentrated in the interior group, for some reason. But not many in the regular architectural area and engineering area.

Blum: Was that the stereotype for women? They belong in the interior group, so they can do that kitchen and the bath and the furnishings?

Iyengar: Well, it was very high quality design work. But for some reason, there were more women in the interior group rather than in the architectural area. So, when you come to the associate partner level, there were very few women. There were at least two I know of: Patricia Swan and Natalie de Blois.

Blum: Well, Natalie was in the New York office.

Iyengar: Out of New York, but she came to Chicago. She was in Chicago for a long period of time before she left the firm.

Blum: What did someone have to do to raise their level of participation?

Iyengar: Well, from my recollection of those days at Skidmore, it was a very highly competitive environment. You had to really fight your way to do your bit. You know, you were recognized for what you did, but it wasn’t offered to you. You had to really show yourself to be talented, and you accomplished certain things, and then they would recognize you. So, it wasn’t something like that they would encourage you to do things. It’s just that you had to have your own initiative, so to speak, to do things.

Blum: Well, I know Natalie has said that most of her projects were those where she worked with Gordon Bunshaft.

Iyengar: Yeah. I think that was her background in New York. I don’t know what her history was in New York, actually.

Blum: Well, she worked on some very important projects.

Iyengar: Very important projects. But she came to Chicago, and she was there for several years. I worked with her on one project, in Pittsburgh. And also two projects, I believe. One in Baxter Laboratories, and one bank project in Pittsburgh. And there was another lady, Patricia Swan. I don’t know if you know her, or not. She was in New York. I worked with her a lot. In later years of my career, I was doing things with the New York office a lot. And she was doing a lot of projects in Denver, in Denver office, with one of the clients, Oxford Development Company. So I worked with her a lot, on several projects.

Blum: Did you work with her on the Equitable near Tribune Tower in Chicago?

Iyengar: The Equitable building, yes.

Blum: Yeah. Well, that was, I think, Bruce’s design.

Iyengar: Bruce was the designer on that project. And this came almost immediately after the Brunswick building. And I think Natalie worked on that. And Bruce was the designer. And in terms of the systems, I think the Equitable building was one of those buildings that…

Blum: Do you mean the engineering systems?

Iyengar: From an engineering system, we took one step further. Because I talked about the frame buildings—the frame buildings were all equally strengthened—of equal strength–each one of the frames. In the Equitable building we kind of took the step of making these perimeter frames, on the face of the building, much stronger than the inside ones. It was the first time we were able to do that, and that’s because we were able to innovate a new calculation method of assessing how much wind load goes to the outside, and how much wind load goes to the inside frames.

Blum: So, did the design come out of your engineering discoveries?

Iyengar: No, it didn’t. It didn’t come out of the engineering. I think it was conceived as a frame building, three bay by five bay building. I believe it had a thirty-five or thirty-seven feet bay system. It’s really a frame building, but it was pushing up in height for a frame building. I believe it’s thirty-five or forty stories, or something like that. And it was getting to be somewhat inefficient for that height. So we came up with this idea of providing a deep spandrel beam on the outside; and then a stronger frame on the outside of the building, as compared to the inside of the building, where it would not affect the floor to floor height.

Blum: Is there any significance to the fact that the Equitable building is the color of this sofa? What color would you say that building is?

Iyengar: It’s a more grayish taupe, a taupe color.

Blum: Who do you think selected the color?

Iyengar: No, I think it came out of the cladding of the early versions of the anodized aluminum. I think that was one of the colors that… I don’t know if Bruce chose it. He must have chosen it. There were three or four colors that anodized aluminum came in, so that was one of the colors that was used in this building.

Blum: Well, it certainly is on an important site in Chicago.

Iyengar: That’s right.

Blum: Going back to your progression to partnership, with your additional title, each time, what were your benefits and what were your added responsibilities?

Iyengar: Well, I think, when you’re a structural engineer, you work under the direction of a project engineer. And the project engineer works under the direction of the department head, and then the department head really gets to interact with the architects to come up with the system. And the project engineer usually completes the system and the working drawings, and all the technology involved in producing the structural design of the building. When you’d advanced into the project engineer level, you’re in charge of a project. You’re totally responsible for it. But you work under the direction of the chief engineer.

Blum: Well, you were the chief engineer at one point.

Iyengar: Yes. And then, when I became a partner participating associate, I was given more responsibility, in the sense that they would hand pick projects that I could work on.

Blum: Such as?

Iyengar: Such as the Equitable building, and the Brunswick building, and the Hancock building.

Blum: Because you were inclined to work on those type of projects, or you just put your bid in for it?

Iyengar: Well, I put my bid in always. I was very hoggish, in a sense. I would always put in my name for a project. And most of the time I would get what I wanted.

Blum: Was that a formal procedure, that people did that?

Iyengar: It was a formal procedure to start with. It depends on who was busy, and who was not busy, who was working on a project, and if you had more time available. But after a certain point, it became obvious that any difficult and new project, I would get it. And this was especially true after Hancock building.

Blum: After?

Iyengar: When the Hancock building started, I think we separated the office. We wanted to create a separate location for the design of the Hancock building. So, SOM was located in the Inland Steel building; that was their primary location. And then, there was an office located on 36 South Wabash, which is the Carson Pirie Scott building, Carson Pirie Scott store. And we had several stories up above. And there was a special office set up for the Hancock building. And then, initially, I was working on some other project in the main building, in the Inland Steel building. Faz was the initiator of the project. He went with the project team into 36 South Wabash. And after only a month or so, he was looking for an engineer to act as a project engineer. And then he asked me to go with him. So, I went to the 36 South Wabash office and stayed there for a long time.

Blum: How did the project come to SOM?

Iyengar: Well, I think it came through a developer called Jerry Wolman. And he was a developer from the East; I think from the Pittsburgh area. And there was this site which had not been developed for a long period of time, right in front of the Fourth Presbyterian Church and the Continental Hotel, and the Pearson Hotel, in that area. And then he happened to acquire the site. He wanted to have an investment building, and he wanted to maximize the potential of the site, and his program included office and apartments, and then a commercial area. So it was in that kind of a mix, this area. Apartments could do well, so could offices, and so

could commercial. So his idea was to mix all of them together into three separate buildings, I believe.

Blum: Three?

Iyengar: Yeah. Well, there was a podium, and two buildings: one building for the office, and one building for the apartments.

Blum: Do you mean like Lever House? It sat on a platform?

Iyengar: Yeah, on a platform. That was the initial notion for the Hancock site. But then again, people—Bruce especially—began to realize that a podium of that type, covering just about covering the whole site would not be very good in that congested location, in front of the Continental Hotel, and so on.

Blum: You mean the three smaller buildings?

Iyengar: With the podium and the three smaller buildings, especially the podium. So that developed into two buildings: one for the office and commercial, and the other one for the apartments. The office was about fifty stories, and then the apartment was about sixty stories.

Blum: Was anyone at that time thinking diagonals and tapered shape?

Iyengar: No. I think I had to stress the fact that economics was the key parameter that the developer was looking for. Wolman wanted to build an economical building. He was a developer, after all. And he had a certain amount of budget, and he wanted to build a building for that. And then, the notion was that, you know, fifty, sixty story building is about the size of the economy that he could afford. It’s only after Faz came up with the idea, together with Bruce, that you can have a single building, and also

the economy would be equivalent to your fifty-story building. Because of this newer system that he had devised, it was more economical.

Blum: Had it been tested on any other building?

Iyengar: No, it had not been tested on any other building. I think it was a bold move. And also, an act of faith, I believe.

Blum: What about all the studies that had been done by research students at IIT?

Iyengar: Well, it was part of the research program. One thesis at Illinois Institute of Technology had this kind of a system. But it had not gone through a vigorous testing, and the complete analyses, and things like that. I do recall that we did make a physical test of a building, which is not tapered, but with diagonals at all the faces. And then we loaded the building, to see how stiff it is: a very simple test, at IIT. And then it revealed that the building was much stiffer than what we had thought, because of the diagonals.

Blum: Stiffer is good?

Iyengar: Stiffer is good. It was very rigid. So, we knew the truss was working. Our calculations indicated that it would be that stiff, and the experiment indicated it would be that stiff. On the basis of this simple test, which was no more than five or six feet long, representing maybe a ten-story building, or something like that—it was loaded as a cantilever, and then representing the wind load. And then it was very stiff. We didn’t deflect very much. So, based on that principle, and then the analytical verification of the fact that the experiment corroborated the analytical values that we found on the computer, then we were able to say that this is a system that could work in a much different scale.

Blum: By physical, do you mean a model, perhaps, was actually constructed?

Iyengar: A model was constructed.

Blum: It wasn’t just figures on a computer.

Iyengar: It was not figures. There was a model, a physical model, in steel. A very small model, about six inches by eight inches in cross-section, and then there were four columns, diagonals on each face, and horizontals.

Blum: I wonder where that model is now?

Iyengar: To tell you the truth, I don’t know. It should be at IIT.

Blum: Well, what was it made out of?

Iyengar: It was made out of steel. And then we loaded it at one end, to see how much it would deflect, with a particular load. And then we compared it to the analysis that we had made. And then it corroborated the analyses, and the experiment; so we were able to take the analyses to a much larger structure––the actual structure–—and then be able to have some degree of confidence that the structure would perform like the experiment did.

Blum: And Bruce went for that.

Iyengar: Well, Bruce went for that. And it was a very bold move on Bruce’s part, as well, because it was totally different from anything that had been done up until then. Diagonals had not been used in the exterior of the building. That would interrupt the windows. Initially the concern was that people would not buy it, people would be thinking that, you know, their viewing would be disrupted by the diagonals, and that it would interfere with the rectangular nature of the windows. So, there was a great deal of

concern that it would not be a good solution, from that point of view. But, Bruce was able to persevere, and show that the amount of disruption that would occur would be very confined, especially when we came up with the notion that the diagonals would be twenty stories in approximate height on the facades. It wouldn’t be in every window. It would be perhaps two windows on each facade, eight windows on any particular floor. Once that became obvious Bruce simply wanted it because of the expressive nature of the structure. You know, he was very much in favor of the fact that you wanted to show the structure, and the strength of the structure, in the diagonals on the outside of the building. So, he was able to sell it. He was able to sell the developer that you can create a hundred story building for the price of a fifty story structure. That would be a symbol, that would be a big marketing tool, so to speak. So Wolman went for it.

Blum: At that time, when Bruce was selling the idea to the developer, was it already a tapered building?

Iyengar: It was. It became tapered from the very beginning. It became tapered because of the two different requirements that had to be met.

Blum: And what were they?

Iyengar: One was the office floor, which could be anywhere from thirty to forty feet, or fifty feet, in span–lease span—from the core to the exterior of the building. But in the apartment building, it started from the forty-fourth floor. You couldn’t have a very deep space, because you wanted proximity to the window. You couldn’t create internal bedrooms without any proximity to windows, or viewing. So, the size of the apartment floor was limited. So they said, We’re going to have only this size apartment building, but it could get smaller. So, the whole idea was to take the largest office floor that the program demanded.

Blum: Which would be the lower portion.

Iyengar: Which would be the lowest one. And then take the first apartment floor, which would be the largest apartment floor that you could accommodate, and the smallest one at the top. And then this gave you the taper. And so the taper is really a function of the programmatic requirements of the offices and the apartments. And of course, the commercial and the parking were also included in the tower. Well, I think there was a notion at this point that a single tower that would incorporate all these functions: they’ve got commercial, they’ve got parking, and office, and the apartment, into a single tower was something unique, at that particular time.

Blum: And everyone went for it.

Iyengar: Everyone went for it.

Blum: That was a heavy responsibility for Faz, and all of you to take on.

Iyengar: The only heavy responsibility to take on—and mind you, the computer was not developed to a point where we could immediately put everything in, and then get the results and know in a quick time, a short amount of time, whether or not your ideas worked. And we had to kind of take our time.

Blum: So how did you do it?

Iyengar: Well, we did it manually at first, and then with simplified models. By models I mean analytical models. We would create a model and each tier we would analyze, and be able to proportion the members to diagonals, to verticals, to columns, and proportion each one of them separately, and

then marry them together analytically. And then we were able to go to MIT, and then put the whole thing into the computer.

Blum: Do I understand there were some problems with an MIT advisor?

Iyengar: Well, there were differences of opinion, let me put it that way. The MIT advisors––brought on by the owner of John Hancock Insurance Company––had come onboard to deal with the developer. They brought on the team from MIT, to review the work that we had done. So, they were always a little concerned that we hadn’t used as much wind load as we should, that there was no record of winds in Chicago going to that height. And we had projected winds that high based on our experience, but they felt it should have been more.

Blum: You mean more protection from the wind for the building?

Iyengar: Higher level of wind load. So we agreed on a Chicago wind load times 1.25, twenty-five percent more than Chicago wind load. And we agreed on that. There were some goings-on back and forth for quite a while, for a few months, until we settled on how much wind load we should be using.

Blum: And that was the problem with the MIT advisor?

Iyengar: It was a problem. They were taking a much more conservative point of view.

Blum: So they wanted more protection for the building.

Iyengar: They wanted more protection. But we were able to compromise between their position and our position.

Blum: It’s my understanding that Jerry Wolman was not the eventual developer—he was the first person that wanted to develop that site, but he was not the last person. He had financial troubles, and the project passed to others. Could you talk about that?

Iyengar: Well, Jerry Wolman had—we didn’t know this, but Jerry Wolman had a certain amount of commitment that he could make for a certain period of time.

Blum: Financially?

Iyengar: Financial. His notion was that he would develop the project, and the project would get started, and would be built up to a certain point. And by that time, he would have the owner finance the project…

Blum: The Hancock Center?

Iyengar: John Hancock. And he would get all the expenses that he had, total investment that he had, he would get it back, plus whatever else that…

Blum: His fee?

Iyengar: His fee, plus his profits, and so forth. That was his desire. He wanted a quick turn around on his investment. But that didn’t work out as well, because of a particular problem we had with the foundations.

Blum: What was the problem?

Iyengar: Well, the caisson system—the Hancock building is located in one of the deepest caisson areas. It’s about a hundred and fifty feet deep. Caissons are concrete piers that go from the bottom of the building to the rock.

Blum: Do I understand this correctly? This is the support that the building stands on. And Chicago, I’ve always heard, has mushy ground.

Iyengar: Mushy kind of ground. But you had to go through that in order to reach the rock. And especially close to the lakefront where the Hancock is located, the rock gets deeper so you have to go farther down. And in the Loop of Chicago, you can go down a hundred feet below the ground and you can hit the rock. But in the Hancock location it was a hundred and fifty feet. That means you need deeper caissons. So they had—the contractor had come up with a method of constructing the caissons, which wasn’t very good. And then the caisson shells—they put a steel shell into the ground all the way to the rock, as they excavate with an auger. And then they would clean it, and then pour concrete in it. And then what they did was they wanted to use the steel shell for the next caisson. They would pull the steel casing that the concrete was being poured in, and then the concrete would fill the pier. But don’t forget, there’s a lot of pressure of the water on the outside below grade. So, what they did was that normally they would have a crane pull the shell. And the crane could only exert a certain amount of force. If they couldn’t pull it, they would leave it there, and not pull it. But they came up with a strong frame with a huge motor which exerted a tremendous amount of force, to pull the steel shell. What it did was it not only pulled the steel shell, but it also pulled the concrete with it. Once the concrete started coming up, it left a lot of holes in the pier. There were portions of the pier that were not continuous with concrete. The water from the neighboring soil, and the soil, had contaminated the concrete, and there were gaps within the pier. So, it was—the building had been built up to five stories, and it was determined that one of the caissons was moving.

Blum: How was that discovered?

Iyengar: Well, somebody had surveyed the steel base plates in the start of the steel construction, and the next time they came it had moved two inches. So it can’t move two inches. Where could it move two inches? They re- surveyed it, and then they again insisted that compared to their previous reading it had moved two inches. And then Faz was very dubious about what’s happening with it. He wanted a concrete core put in, drilled through the whole concrete, all the way to the rock, with a small diameter core. And all of a sudden we found big holes where there was discontinuity of concrete. So, that stopped the whole project. And then there was a big investigation that was undertaken, to drill every single caisson. There are fifty-seven caissons in the project. Every single one had to be drilled—not once, but two or three times.

Blum: Who decided? Under whose jurisdiction was all this? Did the city step in? Did the zoning people step in?

Iyengar: No, the city didn’t step in. We reported to the city what we were doing, but it came upon us, and Faz and the SOM team, to make sure that the investigation was carried out properly. So we hired several consultants. And then the investigation started. It took—all of it—nearly six months. And then there was the question of how to repair this. Do you want to rebuild it? In many cases, there was a secondary shaft dug right next to the original one, and literally rebuilding the caisson holes in the base of the—that’s about fifty feet below grade, seventy feet below grade. There are many locations that had to be fixed that way. So all this took time. All this took time and money. Even though the contractor’s insurance company covered most of it, because it was their fault that this occurred. It was a problem for Jerry Wolman, because he had thought he would flip the project, complete the project in a short period of time and be able to sell it to the owner. And he had already made commitments for his next project somewhere. So it was a problem for him.

Blum: Now, so he stepped out. Who stepped in?

Iyengar: Oh, John Hancock took over.

Blum: They actually became the client—the owner?

Iyengar: They actually became the client. Right.

Blum: How long did Hancock take to complete from beginning to end, considering this setback?

Iyengar: Well, I think it started in 1966. It went up to 1969. It was three years. Once this problem was solved, construction was very rapid, and it took three or four floors a week to construct.

Blum: But it was completed and very successfully.

Iyengar: It was completed very successfully.

Blum: And then, you notice, of course, the access to the parking from the sixth floor on, by means of a ramp on the outside. There’s concrete ramp.

Iyengar: Yeah. It’s a ramp system that takes the cars to the sixth floor. The parking is provided between the six through thirteen. And thirteen on to forty- four is the office, and forty-four and up is the apartment building. I think I want to speak a little bit about the geometric coordination. This was very important. The system was very rigorous, in the sense that the system worked only if certain geometric conditions were met. And this is what I meant about Faz completing the tubular system, whereas Myron had left it open.

Blum: With the Brunswick building?

Iyengar: No, with the earlier research that he had done, in his thesis work in 1953. Myron had played around with diagonals on the face, but he didn’t tie them all together into a box, into a system. So, the diagonals on each corner, or each face, had to meet at a certain point—column point. We call it a tier. Each tier has to have a horizontal tie. And there were tiers at twenty stories, approximately twenty stories, and it went up the building. And then we had to marry the column locations on the face, forty feet on the column spacing on the broad space, and twenty-five feet on the short face. And where the diagonal intersected one of the interior columns on the face, we needed a horizontal provided. And the horizontal can only be provided at a floor level.

[Tape 2: Side B] Iyengar: And the architectural and structural departments worked together to come up with a variety of tapers, to satisfy these requirements. And so, for instance, the taper—the spacing of the columns, and the intersection of the columns on the diagonal—you ended up with a certain vertical height. That was divided into three floors. Whereas, when you went to the apartments, the apartment floor heights are smaller than the office floor heights. So you need a different set of vocabulary there, but the same system. So there was a lot of geometric restrictions on the system, but it took a long time working it all out. The program, the taper, and the geometry of meeting the floor-to-floor heights was a very intense process, searching for the right solution.

Blum: And you would categorize this building among the systems that you talked about.

Iyengar: That’s right.

Blum: What would you call this one?

Iyengar: Well, I would call this a truss-tube. In technical behavior, it behaved like a true cantilever. And the exterior of the building participated fully as a box, as a tube, in carrying the lateral loads of the wind. And the interior didn’t carry any wind loads at all, as contrasted to your frame building, where the wind load was distributed amongst all the frames on the interior. With Hancock the exterior of the building carries the wind loads. And this was a very important concept. The typical building in concrete was a closely spaced column system on the outside, like a bearing wall, let’s say the bearing wall on the outside: with columns set very close centers, and very deep beams, and the spandrel beams. This was the system that was used on the DeWitt-Chestnut building. And also, eventually the World Trade Center in New York. But this one is different in the sense that we introduced the diagonals. Because we introduced the diagonals, the column spacing could be wider. It was forty feet on the broad facade, and twenty-five feet on the short facades. It’s not closely spaced column system at all, it’s a much more open system. But yet, it came up with the same, or better, stiffness, and better efficiency in terms of carrying the wind load.

Blum: If a plane, as the ones that went into the World Trade Center in New York—if a plane was to fly into Hancock, would the building behave the same and just collapse?

Iyengar: That’s hard to say. I don’t believe so. Because of the diagonals, it’s a much more powerful system, much more continuous system. But then again, it wasn’t designed for that. So, what the result would be, I don’t know.

Blum: After 9/11, was there a concern for safety when new buildings went up?

Iyengar: Well, there was a concern from a security point of view. I think, Hancock invited us, and we went in and explained the system, and what it was

capable of. And then they had hired some consultants that indicated what the access ought to be to the neighboring buildings, the plaza areas, and so on—that it was possible to get close to the building on the plaza side with a truck loaded with bombs, and things like that. So, they remodeled the plaza after 9/11, with planters and so on, so that you couldn’t get close to the building with a truck.

Blum: Well, they always had the below grade plaza on the Michigan Avenue side. I thought originally that plaza was to be a skating rink.

Iyengar: It was slated for a skating rink. It’s filled over now, and it becomes part of the entrance for the commercial area at the bottom. So, there were a lot of initiatives that were taken after 9/11 from a security point of view to make sure that trucks couldn’t get close to the building—close enough to cause damage like the Oklahoma City bombing, and of course 9/11. And there were security measures initiated for the automobiles, because from the sixth floor to the thirteenth floor were the internal parking areas. So they initiated a better way of inspecting the cars before they went up into the building. And so there were a lot of initiatives that were taken, from a security point of view. It was the same for the Sears Tower, as well.

Blum: Oh, I would imagine.

Iyengar: Even more so. Yeah.

Blum: I read something about—let me see, I want to cite it correctly, there was a pin-fuse joint for earthquake protection. Was that a consideration?

Iyengar: In the Hancock building?

Blum: I read about a pin-fuse joint for earthquake protection.

Iyengar: Pin-fuse joint, but not for the Hancock building. There was an effort that Faz spearheaded as a way of mitigating against earthquakes, where in the lower parts of buildings—tall buildings—you would have a link that would actually separate, and then fuse, absorbing the earthquake energy. I think that’s in the basement, something like that.

Blum: Was earthquake protection part of the mix in doing Hancock?

Iyengar: No. Hancock is an area where we have low probability of earthquakes. It’s, I would say, zone one. There are four zones of earthquake. Zone one would be the lowest zone. Zone two, zone three; and California is zone four. So, for zone one, it was not a major concern. Wind load actually predominated much more than the earthquake. So, most buildings in Chicago, they’re not specifically investigated for earthquakes. They may be tested for a level of force equivalent to a level one earthquake. But most buildings in Chicago are not.

Blum: So, wind is the big factor.

Iyengar: Wind is the major force in Chicago, with tall buildings. That is a major force for tall buildings anywhere, but especially in Chicago, because of the exposure of the building to the lakefront, and so on.

Blum: You know, of all the features of Hancock, the one that has been, I suppose, most consistently criticized is where the building meets the ground. Somehow it just didn’t work aesthetically. Why was that?

Iyengar: Well, see the problem was that the building—it’s a structural concept. The structure starts from the foundation. So there is the foundation, there’s the one basement. And the clay was about twenty-five feet below grade. And clay is the area where we wanted to dump the wind sheers from the base. So literally, the base of the building, from a structural point of view,

it’s about twenty feet below grade. So, the question became, well, what do we do with the structure? The structure should start from the base, from the foundations. So literally, the diagonals should have started in the basement, twenty feet below. So, that was tried. And all of a sudden, you have the diagonals starting from down below, and you have the plaza floor and the ground floor, and it seemed odd, that all of a sudden you had the diagonals coming at all different angles through the floor. So, then the question was: What do we do aesthetically? How do we exhibit this mega frame, or the truss frame? Bruce’s notion was that we would elevate that one story high, and then we would exhibit the system from that point of view on, and we’ll have a travertine podium until then. But within the travertine one-story podium there are diagonals that take it all the way to the foundation. They are different types of diagonals, in a much smaller scale, and between many more columns and many more diagonals that take it to the foundation. But see, there’s a transition that occurs at the second floor, between that system, from the second floor to the basement, which was a different system of diagonals, and the main system that’s starting at the second floor. The diagonals are exhibited from the second floor up. So it was a conscious decision to kind of showcase this structure as if it were sitting on a platform. So, it was less successful, it was less honest, from a structural point of view. But the only other solution would have been, and it was investigated, that like the Citibank building in New York, you actually go down and enter—the main entrance that would be twenty feet below. They investigated that and they didn’t like that very much.

Blum: Aesthetically, or functionally?

Iyengar: Functionally, they didn’t like that very much. And so they wanted to start the building at the ground floor. The main entry would be at the ground floor, not twenty feet below, so you would have to have cascading steps going down below, and then start the building there. So there were some

initiatives to look at it. Then on either side of the building on the outside, there wasn’t enough room between the building and the street to accommodate steps and stuff like that. So, that was abandoned very quickly. Then Bruce came up with this suggestion that we would showcase the structure—we would literally start it in the second floor, even though the structure starts in the basement, technically. And then we would have a system of smaller diagonals that would take it down to the basement.

Blum: Well, that’s interesting to hear an engineering explanation for what I’ve always thought was an aesthetic choice.

Iyengar: Yes. It’s an aesthetic choice. And there was a lot of debate about it, you know, Do you want to falsify the structure? Or do you want the really true nature of the structure? For Bruce, it was important. He always prided himself with structural logic, and not being untruthful about the structure, in terms of his expressions. And then, he had this problem of wanting to deal with it. If there was enough room, I think if the lot was much bigger, if there was enough room they could slope it down. It’s possible that he could have started the building below grade.

Blum: You have said in the summary of your career, you have said, regarding Hancock Center, quote, “Structure is the essence of architecture.”

Iyengar: Yes.

Blum: Is Hancock a good example?

Iyengar: This is a prime example. I think the nature of the architecture, and the primacy of the diagonals, and the horizontal ties, and the minor ties, and the showcasing of the structure components in a very bold fashion, is the architectural expression in this particular case. Of course, initially people

thought it was too industrial, or just too mechanical. But Bruce thought it was in the tradition of Chicago. That’s what it is. This is a strong frame and we want to show that. And also, the black color was chosen for a similar reason.

Blum: Yeah, why black?

Iyengar: Well, it exudes strength, I guess. I don’t know.

Blum: More so than white?

Iyengar: More so than white.

Blum: Or the taupe that he used for other buildings?

Iyengar: The taupe, yeah. I think he used black for many of his buildings; on Hancock he used black.

Blum: And Mies had used black for the 860 building very effectively.

Iyengar: Very effectively, yes.

Blum: Do you think Mies had any influence on some of the choices that Bruce made?

Iyengar: Well, I’m sure he did have a lot of influence. I couldn’t point out to you in particular details, in what way, but the choice of color, for instance. And the issue of following the module all the time was very important to him. And often when you came to the end of the building, the module was always compromised a little bit. But in Bruce’s building, he followed the structural module very carefully.

Blum: And would you say that in Mies’s building it was compromised?

Iyengar: No. It was not compromised. He followed the module. Bruce followed the same thing. But a lot of other architects compromised. The module would start where the curtain wall started, or something like that, not where the structure started. There’s a difference of a certain thickness between the glass and the central line of the column points. So, Myron and Bruce, they always thought the central point of the column defined the module. They start the module from there. Somebody else would start it from the glass line. So, there were nuances like that which came from Mies’s tradition of defining the module, and following the discipline of the structure. Yeah, there were a lot of little things like that.

Blum: What do you think the effect was on SOM—and Bruce, as a prime example—from Mies’s work?

Iyengar: Well, I think…

Blum: And Mies’s methods?

Iyengar: Mies’s method. I think Bruce always had an inclination and a notion to use the structure as the basis for his architecture. I think from the very beginning he had that notion. He was always searching for different vocabularies in which he can express the structure. For him, the structure formulated the basic vocabulary of the window wall system. The window wall was not separate from the structure. The structure formulated the basis for the window wall. I think you can see that in his work, in the BMA building, for instance, or in the Perimeter Center in Atlanta. Structure always had the basic framework that gave him the discipline for the architecture. He followed that all the way through. And he was consistent in his method. Mies, in a sense—the principle is what I’m most interested in—the principle that Mies enunciated, that the structure—

discipline of the structure has a place in architecture, was very much what Bruce followed. It was not that—that the structure might take the form of diagonals, or a frame, or a tubular system, a closely-spaced column system—these all are manifestations of the structure that’s utilized in his architecture.

Blum: Where did someone like Gordon Bunshaft fit in the picture, between Mies and Bruce, and his own work?

Iyengar: Well, I think Gordon Bunshaft followed the Mies influence, as well.

Blum: Although he denied it.

Iyengar: Although he denies it. And then for him, the notion of different structural compositions was not very important, as it was for Bruce. And Gordon liked the discipline of the frame, the columns and the beams; but he didn’t explore different possibilities and different compositions of the structure. So most of his buildings are frame buildings, as far as I know.

Blum: You know, there was a time when no one in SOM got credit for what they did, in the sense that if a building was, say, a feature in a magazine or journal, it would always attribute the building to SOM—not Gordon Bunshaft or Bruce Graham, or any other designer. I suppose that filtered down all the way in each discipline, because it’s truly rare in the early days to know who engineered buildings.

Iyengar: Right.

Blum: It seems the engineer is the invisible man in all of this.

Iyengar: Yes.

Blum: How did you feel about the system like that, where everyone was sort of anonymous under the big umbrella of SOM?

Iyengar: Well, it was okay, because, for me, there are several ways of defining the responsibilities. One responsibility—–always the primary responsibility– —is with the concept. Who came up with the concept? Of course, it doesn’t end there. One has to carry out the concept. One has to engineer it, one has to follow through with all the ramifications to the end. That’s where the team comes in. So, SOM is very much for a team effort to put the building together. So, it is to SOM’s credit that they recognize the team, in the sense that there’s no one super star that, all of sudden, has a magic wand, and a building appears. It’s a group effort. There are a lot of people involved in it. So, people were not super stars, in a sense. Inside the firm, people knew who the designers were.

Blum: Oh sure.

Iyengar: Who came up with the concept, who came up with the ideas, and so on and so forth. But it was not publicized that one would be a super star, one would be featured as a super star who came up with the ideas, as many of the other architecture firms do. And then SOM was more of a group practice. And there was not just one designer in the firm; there were many designers. Not one design partner, many design partners. So it’s unfair to simply feature one design partner, and not the other design partner. Of course, each one showcased their own work in publications, and magazines, and so on. And then they would always have included who the designer was, and so on and so forth. Ultimately, it would come out. But the system was not built around one person.

Blum: How would you answer an architectural critic, who published in the New York Times, during the early years of SOM, to say, It’s ridiculous to give credit to the firm of SOM, when Gordon Bunshaft’s work was so

distinctive you couldn’t miss it. And that of Ambrose Richardson in Chicago, it was clearly his, it was just like a trademark of the designer. And yet, SOM wanted only the firm to be credited.

Iyengar: Well, all I can relate to is that’s the way the partners felt about the group practice. It’s the essence of the group practice. It was a group of architects that got together, and then said, We can design buildings, have our own designs; but yet have the strength of a major firm furnishing all the other components that are necessary to make a building successful. So it’s the sense that the practice is diverse, and that there are many more people that are involved in it; and the credit goes to the firm, as such. Even though, like you say, people would know who the initiator of the concept was. And it was very clear that Hancock is Bruce’s, and it was Bruce’s idea. And Faz played a major role in it. So, all the different people were credited in some way, but not as the sole initiator.

Blum: He was the star.

Iyengar: Yeah, that was the concept.

Blum: Well, maybe this exemplifies what Nat Owings said about SOM at its inception. He wanted it to function like a guild—a medieval guild, where everyone made a contribution and no one person got all the credit.

Iyengar: Yeah. I think very much so. Very much so.

Blum: He also said that he thought competition was the essence of bringing out good designs from designers.

Iyengar: Sure. There was intense competition.

Blum: How did that competition work?

Iyengar: Yeah. Well, I think the competition part came in when you kind of treated yourself as an individual practice. In other words, you can say Bruce had a practice, and Walter had a practice—Walter Netsch. They all had their practices. In other words, you went after the prize. You got the job. If you got the prize it was your project. It was your practice. And you had your team within SOM that worked on it, even though there was support coming in from all sides. You had your team that worked on it. So, the competition came in the fact that in order to be successful, you had to be out there in the business world, in the corporate world, or in the education world, to get the jobs.

Blum: Were you ever in that position?

Iyengar: Later on, but not initially. I think the notion was that the architects would get the jobs, then we would concentrate our efforts mostly in contributing to the design of it, the structural design. We would make a joint presentation for many, many projects. When a client came in, we would make a presentation of the structure, we would make a presentation by the architects, and so on and so forth. We would highlight each component of the firm.

Blum: Were you in on the meetings with clients?

Iyengar: Yeah, before we got the job.

Blum: May we go back to Hancock? There was a critique that said Hancock is like a giant cowboy stalking the town. And they asked the question: shouldn’t the tallest landmark building be part of a bigger plan? In other words, SOM was being criticized for just plunking that big monolith right on Michigan Avenue, without considering what was around it, without any regard if it fit into the neighborhood.

Iyengar: Well, that’s a valid criticism, of course. You know, if you believe in contextualism in the neighborhood, and if you believe that the project should evolve out of a general plan of the whole neighborhood, and it should have a sympathetic relationship to the neighboring buildings in a contextual manner. Certainly it didn’t do any of that, and became sort of a stand-alone icon. It was a cowboy, in that sense of the word. But Bruce came to embody the issue of contextualism and planning very much in his work.

Blum: Did he?

Iyengar: Yeah, he did. And he was very much involved in the World’s Fair to be held in Chicago in the early 1990s. He was instrumental in the planning.

Blum: The one that never materialized.

Iyengar: And it never materialized. He was very much involved in some committee in the business to oversee development of downtown Chicago. So he was aware of the contextual nature of it.

Blum: But not at the time of Hancock.

Iyengar: Not at that time. That’s right.

Blum: What was the concern for, say, urban ecology at the time Hancock was built—related to Hancock or not?

Iyengar: Well, the main concern was the debate about tall buildings. What did tall buildings contribute to the city? SOM’s position was that it’s better to create a smaller footprint and have a taller building, than fill the whole site up with a lower building. Okay? I think that notion ran through

many of the notions of a plaza, and then isolate the tower, creating open spaces all the way around the tower.

Blum: Wasn’t this also the idea behind buildings in a park that were built as subsidized housing? To release a lot of ground for parking and play yards, and lawn, and whatever, so that allowed the building to be tall.

Iyengar: Right. In a multiple function sense, yes. But in the neighborhood of Hancock, it was mostly apartments and the office culture—the commercial culture. I remember very much the debate and the concern was that if we had proceeded with two buildings, the site would be too congested, and it would not allow enough open space around the building. It would fill too much of the site.

Blum: At ground level.

Iyengar: A similar concern was also expressed when we did the Sears Tower.

Blum: Oh yes.

Iyengar: You know, because it took so much space. You know, obviously, you could have put in a smaller building, and used the program. But then again, there’s the pressure of development, that you wanted to put four and a half million square feet in Sears Tower. There's 2.8 million square feet where the Hancock building is. And if you said—you have so much area that you want to put in if you didn’t create a very tall building then you would have a very congested site. That’s not contextualism, but just answers one question regarding the open spaces. And now, that logic was used quite often.

Blum: Well, Hancock took a twenty-five year award, in spite of all the criticism at the time.

Iyengar: That’s right.

Blum: It has turned out to be an icon of the city. It received a twenty-five year award from the AIA. But, as far as you’re concerned, what new ideas did Hancock bring into the discipline of building?

Iyengar: Well, I think the major contribution is really in the structure, because a break-through structure with the diagonals on the exterior of the building. Whether you exhibit the diagonals or not, it was a powerful system, it was an efficient system. And in fact, it was so efficient, and it was so iconic, that for quite a while people didn’t copy it, because they would be accused of copying [the] Hancock building. When we started Sears Tower, there were some diagonal schemes that we looked at for Sears Tower.

Blum: Oh, is that right?

Iyengar: But Sears said, No, we don’t want anything like this because this is just like the Hancock building. We want our own building. I’m sure such concerns went through the profession that we wouldn’t come up with another diagonalized building, for the fear that you’d be compared to [the] Hancock building. It had become such an icon. But it did penetrate the vocabulary of systems, diagonal systems. Bank of China building in Hong Kong has very powerful diagonals too.

Blum: But maybe that was far enough away not to be compared with Hancock.

Iyengar: Far enough away, but it molded into a different shape. It wasn’t a tapered shape. You know, it was a kind of a triangulated form. For instance, the recent Hearst building in New York. Are you familiar with the Hearst building?

Blum: No, I’m not.

Iyengar: The Hearst Tower. It’s just recently been completed.

Blum: Is that a diagonal?

Iyengar: Yeah. Smaller diagonals. And so there is a proliferation of schemes like that, but none like the Hancock. None like that vocabulary. Even to this day, you wouldn’t say you wanted to create another Hancock building.

Blum: Well, you have said, and I quote you, “In many respects, Hancock was a coming of age for me.”

Iyengar: Well, in the sense that I was involved in the design, structure and design, of the Hancock building, in all its aspects. And I had learned about how to deal with newer systems, and what that brings with it. Hancock brought its share of concerns, technically, because it was a very tall building, and then there were concerns about the oscillations and the human perception, and we had to deal with that. We had to hire a psychologist to find out how you feel motion in the building.

Blum: I thought it was when you heard the water in your toilets slosh.

Iyengar: Well, that too. Even before that, you perceive the changes in accelerations. And how do you perceive it? Your inner ear perceived it first, and so on and so forth. And then, Faz went to the Museum of Science and Industry. There’s a rotating table, it’s a Maytag, exhibit or something like that. A huge table that was rotating and he found out that it could be speeded up or slowed down. So, he took a bunch of people, cleared out the whole thing––all the exhibits––but kept the rotating table, and then put people

in all positions, sitting, lying down. And he would slowly move it. When do you really feel the motion?

Blum: What did he discover?

Iyengar: He discovered if you get half a percent of G—gravitational force—is when you begin to feel the motion. So, that became a criteria for the design of the building. He went back to the building to see what acceleration are we feeling in the wind here? You know, we came up with three-quarter percent, and so on and so forth. Of course, the technology has progressed much more now. We are able to assess what level of accelerations that we get in a wind tunnel. Wind tunnel testing had not been advanced to that level at that time—not for buildings anyway. For aircraft industry, yes, but not for buildings. So, you can really assess it today, in the wind tunnel, what level of acceleration you feel, how many people feel the motion, how people don’t feel the motion. If ten percent of the people feel the motion, that’s the limit. If fifteen percent feel, it may not be okay. So there are criterias that evolved for the design of tall buildings. But we didn’t have any of those. We had to evolve those criterias.

Blum: So, this was something that was developed for Hancock, and went on to be used for other buildings?

Iyengar: It went on to be used in other buildings. They’re refined, of course, as time went on. And for instance, in the Trade Center building, you probably heard of the dampers for the wind oscillations. They put small dampers in the floors to damp the motion. It came about because they felt that there was too much motion that people would feel. So, there was no concern from a strength point of view, the building would stand at a very high wind level—but how do people feel inside? You know, that was an important criteria as well.

Blum: All these things that no one ever thinks about when they see a building. They either like it, or they don’t like it, and on they go.

Iyengar: When you’re doing a really tall building, you know it becomes—you’ll break through from all the traditions, and you’re breaking up the scale, so to speak. And you develop different problems that you want to take a look at. Even the lights at the top…

Blum: Oh yes. What about those?

Iyengar: The lights at the top—you know, initially it was a good idea, as a symbol.

Blum: Was it so planes wouldn’t fly into it, or…?

Iyengar: No. No, just to highlight the end of the building, I guess. But it got in the way in the migratory season because the birds honed in on that, and then they died. So in the migratory season it is shut down, and they turn down the lights.

Blum: Well, it’s still out there. And quite a few other buildings now have lit tops.

Iyengar: Lit tops, right.

Blum: You know, it’s often occurred to me, if someone in the process of developing things for a building, if they discover something, or invent something, or design something that they patent, does that patent belong to them, or to the firm?

Iyengar: Well, I think the way it is used in Skidmore is there are very few ideas that we patent. You can’t patent ideas.

Blum: Not ideas, but… I was mistaken about that pin-fuse thing for the Hancock project, but that, in fact, was something that was invented by Mark Sarkisian, an architect with SOM in San Francisco.

Iyengar: It wasn’t taken far enough to be a system for earthquake. But there were—within the firm there were a lot of patents taken for—specifically for furniture design, I think, emanating from our interior department.

Blum: When that design was used, was SOM—even if it wasn’t SOM that used it, was SOM paid as the holder of the patent?

Iyengar: SOM was paid. I don’t know if the person got paid or not. In some exceptional cases, the person was allowed to take the patent with them. I think, as far as these chairs, the Skidmore chairs, it was designed by an interior designer. I think he took the patent with him. I think he got compensated for it.

Blum: Davis Allen?

Iyengar: Davis Allen.

Blum: Well, they’re handsome looking. I don’t know how comfortable they are. They’re very straight up.

Iyengar: Well, they’re straight-backed. Sometimes I’ll sit there because it gives you better support from the back, straight back.

Blum: Well, after Hancock, you went on to work on another project, as important as Hancock, I suppose, with the same team that designed Hancock, Bruce and Faz. You went on to the Sears Tower.

Iyengar: That’s correct.

Blum: When were you called into the process?

Iyengar: Well, I was called into the process from the very beginning. Initially, we thought that we might have to joint venture the project, that’s the way the client wanted to talk about it, with C.F. Murphy. And then, even at that time, they had spoken to me about the fact that I would lead the project, and I may have to relocate to a special office where they would have C.F. Murphy people and Skidmore people, and so on and so forth.

Blum: Oh, it was going to be a collaboration between…

Iyengar: Collaboration. I don’t know what happened, I think Skidmore were able to negotiate individual responsibility for the whole project. So, C.F. Murphy was out.

Blum: Why do you think they were in, in the first place?

Iyengar: I don’t know. I think the client brought them in.

Blum: Well, they certainly had good connections at City Hall.

Iyengar: A good connection with the City Hall and they were in. I remember one meeting where C.F. Murphy was there, and then they were talking about setting up a separate office for the project, and so on and so forth.

Blum: Just like Hancock?

Iyengar: Just like Hancock. But it just disappeared pretty quickly. And then I continued on to be the structural designer, working with Faz on this project. It was somewhat of a different relationship. I had more

responsibility here. I was in a separate office, and Faz was in the main office. So I had more responsibility on a day-to-day basis.

Blum: This was begun in 1969, but not finished for quite a few years.

Iyengar: I think it started in 1969. The construction started in 1970. And it was completed in 1974 or 1975.

Blum: And in 1985 an addition was added, and the redo of the entrance.

Iyengar: There were several initiatives for redoing it.

Blum: I have read that the idea of building the tallest building in the world was very, very appealing to SOM and to the City of Chicago. Why?

Iyengar: Well, I think, obviously the prestige that comes with it, and the fact that Chicago has always been the second city, and we want to be the first city as far as tall building was concerned. And there were marketing advantages that people were talking about that it would bring on better rental—the project. And you could have an observatory at the top, and it could bring in certain amount of rental revenues for the building. But my recollection is that we didn’t start out with the fact that we wanted to do the tallest building in the world.

Blum: How did that evolve?

Iyengar: It evolved. When it got closer and closer to the fact that it could be the tallest building, then it got pushed into being the tallest building. And when we approached about ninety stories, there were schemes up to ninety stories, they said, Why do we want to stop there?

Blum: Well, wouldn’t that have been the tallest building? What was the tallest building at that time?

Iyengar: Well, the tallest building in Chicago was the Hancock building. And in the United States it’s the World Trade Center, Trade Center building and the Empire State building. The Trade Center was a thousand, three hundred and fifty feet tall building. Hancock was eleven hundred feet. The Trade Center in New York, I don’t think, had opened yet. A lot of arrangements had been made for its design, and it was under construction, I believe. And so the impetus was to make it taller than the World Trade Center in New York. That was thirteen hundred and fifty feet. And initially, somebody said, Well, we’ll make it fifty feet taller. Said, No, can’t make it fifty feet taller. They’re going to go back and put something up there to make it taller yet. So make it really tall, make it a hundred feet at least. So we were fourteen hundred and fifty feet. But it wasn’t artificial in the sense that it did fit the program.

[Tape 3: Side A] Iyengar: Sears had their own requirement. They had really large departments, really large purchasing departments, and they wanted to accommodate the entire department on one floor. They wanted sixty thousand to seventy thousand square feet on one floor.

Blum: For their own use?

Iyengar: For their own use. So that fifty percent of the building was to be used by Sears. They wanted to use the other fifty percent in the rental market, as an investment building. Seventy thousand square feet, or sixty thousand square feet is a very large floor to be rented.

Blum: Hard to conceive.

Iyengar: You could have very deep spaces in the interior. So, from the very beginning—again, like in Hancock, there were two building solutions. One building for Sears’ requirements: very large floor areas; another building as an investment building, for a bit smaller floor areas. So there were a lot of initiatives to look at in a two-building scheme. But we looked at it for a while, and then it was discarded.

Blum: Well I understand that that was Bruce’s way of operating; he offered options to his clients.

Iyengar: Yeah. Right. There were several options that were offered, two buildings… And then, it was a difficult process—somewhat difficult process to convince Sears that the floors should be reduced—floor areas should be reduced. They insisted they wanted very large floor areas. What eventually happened was fifty thousand square feet for floors in the Sears’ area. That was a big comedown from the sixty to seventy thousand that they wanted. So we had to make studies to show the travel times between floors, versus travel time on a single floor to walk all the way out to the end, and so on and so forth, to show them that it would be more efficient to stack it and take a stair to go to the next level, than to walk all the way across to see someone at the other end of the same floor.

Blum: So, was it alternate level, or double-decker, elevators?

Iyengar: No. I think it was just a notion that making the floor size larger and larger is not necessarily efficient in terms of communication between people. That, at some point, you’re going to be walking all the way to the other end of the same floor, which is a seventy thousand square feet floor—it may be easier to walk up to the next level, and stack the same space into two levels instead of one level. So, studies like that were made; planning studies were made like that to convince Sears that, you know, the optimum space for them probably ought to be in the fifty thousand

square feet area. That’s what the area was at the base of the building. And like in the Hancock building, they wanted smaller floor areas for the rental.

Blum: Was there ever a thought of residential in the Sears building?

Iyengar: There was no thought of residential. There was a thought of a hotel on the site but it disappeared very quickly. There was a programmatic requirement for a hotel.

Blum: Oh, but you say that was eliminated early on?

Iyengar: That was eliminated. Sears wanted a hotel because a lot of traders came to see them, and they would go next door to the hotel, and then they’d come to their offices. No, that wasn’t pursued further.

Blum: So it was all going to be offices and commercial?

Iyengar: All commercial, all offices. Some commercial in the lower levels.

Blum: Commercial, meaning stores?

Iyengar: Restaurants and stores, and stuff like that, in the first level, and a couple of levels down below.

Blum: So, the sixty-four dollar question: How did the Sears' shape evolve?

Iyengar: Well, the shape evolved because you were looking for a method of reducing space, making the floors smaller, and using the floor area. It was given that a building—a very tall building—would have to be really efficient, in terms of the amount of structural steel it used, and so on and

so forth, to be economical. Sears had very stringent limitations in the amount of money they wanted to spend.

Blum: Did they?

Iyengar: Yeah. There were limitations in the investment they wanted to put forward in this particular building. Now, Sears management at that particular time was not a flashy management, it was from the ordinary folks. And that was their marketing ploy.

Blum: Well that’s what Sears had meant to so many customers over the years.

Iyengar: To so many customers. They’re very prudent, they’re frugal; and they come up with good products at a reasonable price. And that was their image. They didn’t want a flashy, expensive building to represent their corporate image. So they had limitations on that. From the very beginning it was clear that we had to come up with an efficient structure. So, the search was on for a kind of a structure that would be economical and efficient, and at the same time, be able to come up with transitions in the areas to make it smaller in the top. There was some thought given to making it tapered, but the amount of reductions in the area in a tapered building was not thought to be enough. They wanted something more radical than that, changes in shapes and sizes on the floors. So, the whole idea of innovating a modular space, a series of spaces stacked on each other, that could be stopped at any particular point while the others continued on, developed. That combined with the idea that we could have a structural system that can go with it: the bundled tube system. [drawing] See, these are tubes that could rise to different heights, and then it would terminate at a particular point. Obviously, it worked to our advantage that Sears wanted very large floor areas, because the building wanted to be bulky, structurally, at the base of the building. It didn’t want to be slanted, it wanted to be bulky at the base of the building. So

that means the large floor areas that Sears wanted were put at the bottom of the building, up to the fiftieth floor. And then, you started thinking about using the spaces above that. By stacking the floor modular spaces, you could take one vertical tube, terminate it, while the next one continued on. So, there’s a series of tubes that went up to different heights, and you compose the whole thing together as a bundle, hence the notion of a bundled tube. And it was thought that seventy-five feet would be a good dimension for a modular tube. And then you compose nine of those into a square pattern of nine tubes, and all of them ran up to the fiftieth floor: two of them dropped from opposite corners, and two of them dropped down from the sixty-sixth floor. It became star-shaped at that point. And then three of them dropped down from the ninetieth floor, so there were only two left. And two continued on up to the hundred and tenth floor. So, the shape was evolved on the basis of the modularization of the space.

Blum: Was that a product of Bruce’s thinking? Or engineering ideas?

Iyengar: Engineering ideas came first, I think. First we wanted to think that we can partition the building into a system of cells. And once you partition the building into cells, each partition could rise to different heights. I think that notion came first. And then, Bruce and his famous cigarette…

Blum: Yes. What about that cigarette story? What’s the scoop on that?

Iyengar: The cigarette story is that he was sitting in Faz’s office at one time, “You mean you can build a scheme like this?” And he took a lot of cigarettes, there were five or six of them, he pushed them up into different heights, each one, kind of composed a shape like this. Each cigarette is a cell. “Can I make these cells go up at different heights?” Faz said, “Yes, this is what could be done.” And pretty soon they ordered the dowels, introduced the square dowels. They were half-inch square dowels. You know, they

worked well with it. And then they were composing different massing with it.

Blum: And the walnut scheme?

Iyengar: The walnut scheme emerged from that, finally, nicely polished and everything else—the walnut scheme. And they said, “This is the scheme.” I think there were about twenty copies made of it. Everybody had one. “This is the final scheme.” So, it was a combination of the structural idea and a need for modulating the space that created the overall shaping.

Blum: Was the client satisfied that this perpetuated the image that Sears had worked so hard to establish over the years?

Iyengar: I think they were satisfied. But they were still concerned that Sears, as an image—of not wanting to be the biggest and the tallest, and stuff like that. But they went along with it.

Blum: Oh, you mean they objected at the beginning?

Iyengar: In the beginning.

Blum: Because they left the building soon after.

Iyengar: Soon they left building, yeah, soon after. Well, they were there—ten years, or something like that. Then they left the building. They went to Hoffman Estates. But then they had corporate problems, and other problems related to that. The challenge of structure is coming up with the appropriate size of a smaller tube, which would be very efficient, and then bundling it together, making it all work together. This created the whole system. I always make comparisons between Sears Tower and the World Trade Center in New York. The World Trade Center structure was

only on the exterior of the building. It’s a tubular building on the exterior. This is a bundle of smaller sized tubes, which was more efficient. So the column spacing could be increased to fifteen feet column spacings in Sears Tower; whereas in the Trade Center it was only three-feet three- inches, columns spaced very closely. So that was an advantage, not only from the window point of view, but for the viewing and aesthetic point of view. There were advantages from the construction point of view, because there were so many joints in the tube and the beams that needed to be welded. The fewer the joints, the fewer the welding that you would need to do. So there were a lot of advantages with respect to the bundled tube system with respect to column spacing.

Blum: The steel industry: Did they have any stake in the fact that all these elegant tall buildings were going up, and steel was the primary material?

Iyengar: Well, of course they did. They wanted to put more steel, and they wanted to compete with the concrete buildings. And they wanted to state that steel is the appropriate material to use for super tall buildings. So, the steel industry cooperated in both the Hancock and the Sears Tower, very much so.

Blum: By cooperating, what do you mean?

Iyengar: Cooperating in the sense… Usually, you design the structure, and then you put it out for bid—for the steel companies to bid for construction. That process was changed in both Hancock and Sears Tower. We came up with the term called SCOPE project, in the sense that you developed the drawings to a certain level, called SCOPE drawings, and then we would invite the industry—in this particular case, let’s say, steel industry—two or three steel companies would come and look at it, and give their suggestions as to what is the appropriate way to continue the design to completion—construction design wise, because most of the

drawings had not been completed. So they would participate in that discussion, with the proviso that whatever ideas one company came up with will stay with them, not with the other company that came up with a different idea. For instance, the column spacing at fifteen feet, there was a great deal of debate about that. Even at that particular time, the notion of how to build such a tall building came into the picture. And the steel people said, Well, what we could do is we could create a system with— they called it “Christmas Tree”, which means that the column, and half spandrels to the next span prefabricated. And then you can do all the welding in the shop, and in desirable positions, and bring it to the field, and connect it in the middle of the span. So this erection unit idea caught on, and the notion was, how big an erection unit can you have? You know, what can you transport in the streets of Chicago? The answer was ten feet, but ten feet was too close a center, so we wanted to open it up much more, to fifteen feet. So they came up with an idea to transport it at an angle at forty-five degrees, which would be ten feet wide, in the streets of Chicago. So they were very much involved.

Blum: And this is to move it to the site?

Iyengar: To move it to the site. They were very much involved in the notion of participating in the parameters of the design. You know. So, we talked to them. You know, Can we deal at fifteen feet? Can you come up with it for that—could slant it, and then transport it through the streets of Chicago. And they agreed, they could do it. So fifteen feet was it. So, there were notions of their participation in many other aspects as well. So when the time came to bid, they were already part of it. They knew what they were bidding on. There was no big mystery for them.

Blum: What does SCOPE stand for?

Iyengar: SCOPE, in the sense that you outline the scope of the project.

Blum: Oh, I thought it was an acronym for something.

Iyengar: No. The scope of the project. You don’t produce all the working drawings—completed drawings. You would do the typical floor, and special two or three floor plans, but not all the floor plans. And you would do the amount of materials that you would consume in the building. And you would do a typical window/wall detail, maybe a couple window/wall details—alternates. So you indicate the scope of the project but not something that you can work off of to complete the building—to build the building yet. That process occurred later. So they would come up with a price on the basis of the scope they see. And then you would verify whether or not you’d met your guidelines, with respect to the budgets. And then only when you’re satisfied that the project would come under budget, or meet the budget, you would proceed to the next stage. So, the SCOPE project was very much instrumental in assessing the real budget of the building before you even started building it, or before you even started awarding the contracts. Both Sears and Hancock buildings, we went on this kind of a principle. It later on acquired a different name called “Fast Track” project. At that particular time, it was called a SCOPE project. And you got the guaranteed maximum price for it from the contractor, and then you proceed to—if you don’t like the budget, you proceed to make alternates, and then you proceed to go ahead and design the building, and complete the building.

Blum: You know, there was something that I read that I’d like to read to you, and have your comment, if you wish. And I quote, “Another key player was Hal Iyengar, one of the finest structural engineers, who had a great reputation. Iyengar worked with Khan on numerous projects. Because of Khan’s preoccupation with other projects, the Sears Tower was primarily carried out by Iyengar, in terms of structural design and detailing.”

Iyengar: Well, that was true. Faz was very busy at that time with some other projects. And then, he had other responsibilities in the partnership. So, I was the project engineer. I did most of the structural design. But, both Faz and Bruce were located in the main part of the main building, in the Inland Steel building. I was located in the Sears…

Blum: In another building?

Iyengar: In another building.

Blum: Did you see that as a disadvantage, to be disconnected from the people you were working with?

Iyengar: A little bit, because I never knew what discussion Bruce had with Faz. They used to get together and have discussions. And then all of a sudden I would hear about something that they had talked about. I didn’t know what they had talked about. And we would start talking again about… So I didn’t know where the ideas came from. You know, whether Bruce came up with it, or Faz came up with it. He would bring these ideas, and then we would try it out in the team. So, it was a little bit of a disadvantage from that point of view.

Blum: Did e-mail and computers help bridge the gap?

Iyengar: We didn’t have e-mail at that time. I don’t recall if we were e-mailing at…

Blum: Oh, that’s right. This was the 1970s.

Iyengar: It was in the 1970s, early 1970s. We had project meetings very frequently. I met with Faz once a month, or once in two weeks, or something like that, during the design period. I would review with him what we’d been doing. And then he would give his recommendations, and we would

proceed further. And we also had outside consultants, both in Hancock and Sears. We had two or three outside, eminent, engineers that would come and critique our work once in a while. They would come once every six weeks, or something like that.

Blum: Were they academics, or practicing engineers?

Iyengar: Academics mostly.

Blum: Do you remember who they were?

Iyengar: Well, there was Paul Weidlinger, and Professor Chester P. Siess. S-I-E-S-S. And Herb Rothman from Amman and Whitney, in New York. So these people would come in, and their job was to—not do any work—simply to see what we were doing, and criticize it—critique it.

Blum: Was that useful?

Iyengar: Very useful. They would—as people who had no responsibility but simply to critique, they could bring up all kinds of questions. Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? What happens if you do this? What happens if you do that? So they would bring out all kinds of questions. We would have to, of course, investigate each one of them, if they’re found to be relevant, and then seek the right answer. It served a very useful purpose.

Blum: Sounds like an awful lot of research went into not only Hancock, but Sears, as well.

Iyengar: That’s right. Well, at that time in the Sears, the wind tunnel testing had come. It was much more developed, so we went through a full course of wind tunnel testing for Sears Tower.

Blum: Describe that process, please.

Iyengar: Well, first of all, you wanted to make wind tunnel tests on three levels. One is the direction of winds, and the critical nature of the wind. Because we have records only at the airport–—wind speed records only at the airports––not at the particular site where we are building the building. We had to translate the data from the airport to the particular site. So you need a mechanism to translate that. The only way we can do that is by the wind tunnel. We would have the relationship built in between the airport wind velocities and the velocities at the site. At the site, it will record differently, because the neighboring buildings would all affect the way wind would act in the building. So, for that, there was a model—one in two thousand scale model—built. Then the direction of wind was assessed, and the relationship was built in—it was built between the airport wind tunnel records—wind force records—and at the site wind force records. We, of course, had wind records at the airport for over a period of twenty, thirty years. So we could do a statistical analysis on that particular data, and then deduce it to the site, as if we had wind records for the site. That is one level of testing. And the second level of testing has to do with assessing the window/walls. Window/walls have peculiar wind pressure buildups that occur on the window/wall, around the corners, and so on and so forth. So we wanted to assess the wind for the design of the glass in the window/wall system. And the last one was the actual behavior of the building, in the structure.

Blum: With wind.

Iyengar: With wind. With its oscillations, and so on. So the full course of wind tunnel testing was done for the Sears Tower.

Blum: Well, these are hardly things that people would know about. Unless they read your oral history.

Iyengar: Yeah.

Blum: When you and Faz were working on these very important buildings, you were moving your systems ahead, or changing them to suit the project. But were they a progression of one another?

Iyengar: There was a progression of one another. The Hancock building didn’t have a progression, with the exception that later on it was adapted to a concrete building, the use of the diagonals. The 444 Ontario Street building is a forty-five story building. It’s got a very graphic diagonal.

Blum: Was Myron involved with that?

Iyengar: No, Myron was not involved with that. It was after Myron passed away. It was the last project Faz worked on, before his demise in 1982. So that was the only project that I know the Hancock was translated into a different kind of system using the diagonals. But Sears Tower had a lot more buildings. It had a clustering of tubes, rising to different heights. It was an idea that was pursued on many other buildings. One was the—in Chicago, the One Magnificent Mile building. There are clusters of hexagonal shapes. There’s a cluster of three tubes joined together, each rising to different heights.

Blum: And each dedicated to a different client?

Iyengar: No. The distinction was up to certain heights, all three office spaces working together; and then the apartments above that. And there is some commercial in the first floor. So, that was one of them. And the Ohio National Bank building was another one, where the idea of bundling

tubes was so powerful that you could adopt it in concrete for a thirty- story building. You can clearly see the delineation of the concrete tubes at the different heights there, clusters of six tubes. We didn’t need the strength of the bundled tube in this system, because it wasn’t tall enough. But however, the planning idea of terminating tubes, bundling tubes, was so powerful, Bruce used that in there. And I was able to work with Chuck Bassett in San Francisco.

Blum: On which project did you work with him?

Iyengar: In California. And we worked on a building, the Allied Plaza building in Houston. It’s a seventy-two story building. This is a bundled tube. In this case, there’s a bundle of two semi-circle—quarter circles, rather, bundled together back to back.

Blum: Hal, all of these award-winning buildings were done with the same team: Bruce, Faz and you. There may have been other people, but the primary three. At some point in all of this, Faz unexpectedly died. How did his death affect you? Professionally and personally?

Iyengar: Well, personally, it affected me a great deal, because we had worked for nearly twenty-three years very closely on many projects, and he was a personal friend and a mentor. So it affected me a great deal, in the sense that I would not have the mentorship anymore. But, to some extent, that reduced to some extent because I had become a partner in 1975, and then we had kind of branched out a little bit from each other; because, as a partner, you’re supposed to be independent, and do your own stuff. But it did affect me quite a lot. And I think it had a major effect on Bruce in the sense that he really felt the loss very much. He had established such a close relationship. He often used to say, “We think for each other.” That was his term that he used to use. So there was a great chemistry between them. And it went beyond personal, the personal chemistry between

them. They used to discuss all sorts of issues. And I think Bruce felt that loss. And of course, SOM, and the rest of the team, they also felt the loss. And he had been involved to a large extent in projects in Saudi Arabia at that time. He was working on the Mecca campus in Saudi Arabia. Being a Moslem, he was one of the few partners that could go to Mecca, whereas the other partners could not go there. So, he was very much involved in not only the architectural part, but also the programming part—the university programs, pedagogical programs. He was very much involved in it. So, we felt a loss there too because he was spending so much time in Saudi Arabia.

Blum: But these were SOM projects, weren’t they?

Iyengar: These were SOM projects. But he developed a very close relationship with the client in Saudi Arabia. And he kind of evolved—even though he used to say his first love was structural engineering, but he kind of evolved into being much more involved in architecture; and later on, much more involved in planning issues, especially the University of Mecca. So he had branched out somewhat from his original discipline of structural engineering.

Blum: And you felt his loss. Professionally, did you move up into…?

Iyengar: Professionally, in terms of responsibility, we had shared responsibility as being the senior engineers in the firm. At that time, we had several—not only in Chicago, but we were working with the New York office, and we were working with several other offices. They had opened offices in Los Angeles, in Denver, in Houston; and we were working with [the] San Francisco office. So, it was more of a nationwide kind of an effort. And we both shared in that. And so, I think, after Faz was gone, of course, most of the responsibility fell on me, as the senior partner.

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Blum: Were there any projects that you and he had been working on, in spite of the distance, and what he was doing in the Mideast? Were you involved in any research projects that you, then, continued after his death?

Iyengar: No, I don’t recall. There’s one project that I kind of picked up after his demise. It was the 444 Ontario project. That was the last project he had worked on. It had not started construction, so I picked it up, and then we completed it a couple of years afterwards, after his demise—in Chicago. But otherwise, I played my role as the senior partner in structural engineering. By that time, we had one more partner in structural engineering. And so, we were able to share some more work.

Blum: What was the last project you worked on with Faz?

Iyengar: It was the 444 Ontario Street building. And this was kind of a mixture of the exterior tube system that he had worked on so much, the closely- spaced column system in concrete, combined with the Hancock diagonals. So, he had kind of intermixed the two disciplines together, in the sense that you couldn’t isolate a diagonal over image like in Hancock because of the nature of concrete. So what he did was, whenever the diagonal went through the grid system of columns, he would close the panel that went through where the diagonal went through. So it gives you a really graphic pattern of diagonals. And there were two buildings built with that. One was the 444 Ontario Street building, and the other one was 780 Third Avenue building.

Blum: Where was the Third Avenue building located?

Iyengar: 780 Third Avenue building in New York. This is the building I’m talking about. You can see the graphic pattern of the diagonals. And there’s the grid of the framed cube of the building. And then you had the diagonals

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tracing the panels that are created by this grid, being closed off, and the diagonal literally goes through that.

Blum: Making a pattern.

Iyengar: And making a pattern. So, this is a combination of the Hancock type concept, and the Dewitt-Chestnut type frame.

Blum: Did you feel this was a culmination of a lot of previous effort?

Iyengar: Yeah, it was a combination of previous effort. It was an effort to apply the system of the Hancock building, which is in steel, to concrete. Whereas the concrete vocabulary is really a more wall-like character—you know, the wall-like character of the closely-spaced column system. And actually, since the building wasn’t very tall, he didn’t complete the diagonals. He left the things out in the middle, like two channels which are diagonalized in the building. And the 780 Third Avenue building is a simple tower. It was a very narrow building, I think only about seventy feet wide, but about fifty stories tall. Again, you can see the graphic pattern of the diagonals. This time the diagonals go all the way around, pretty much like the Hancock building.

Blum: It looks to me like the diagonals really elongate the height of the building.

Iyengar: The height of the building. Yeah. This was an effort to kind of adopt the system of the Hancock building with the diagonals to concrete.

Blum: It must have been satisfying to see something come to, not completion but sort of a plateau, and have the systems be evident, and to mix and match systems.

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Iyengar: Yeah. That’s right. Well, you know, Sears Tower had many offshoots. And we talked about some of them yesterday. And then, one more outstanding one is the Bank of the Southeast in Miami. This was, again, with Chuck Bassett. As I mentioned before, I had worked with Chuck Bassett on the Allied Plaza building in Houston. Again, that was based on—with quarter circles in a bundled tube fashion. And this was a bundled tube also, in concrete, with a rectangular tube and a triangular tube joined together, for this very high, hurricane wind load location. And then, of course, we had a sculptural effect on the top, when the other half of the thing was also triangulated.

Blum: We haven’t talked about Sears's face-lift, the renovation and expansion that SOM did about ten years after it was built.

Iyengar: Yes.

Blum: Do I understand that, in part, the renovation was necessitated by some of the work that SOM did a little in error, in the first place? Is that correct?

Iyengar: Oh I don’t know if I would call it in error, but it was from the Wacker Street side, there was more congestion, there was lack of room for entry to the second floor and to the first floor, and to the lower level. So there were three levels that you had to gain entry to, and there wasn’t sufficient room within the tower to accommodate that. So, one entered the tower, and then negotiated either up or down, by steps, to the different levels. So, the effort here was to delineate the passageways, and the entrance to the building, in a more assessable fashion than was provided originally.

Blum: Was Sears still in the building at the time?

Iyengar: Sears was still in the building. So there was an addition put on it, with an arch-type roof, two stories tall. And then it provided additional space in

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which to negotiate new construction for the stairs going down. So it provided a better access to it. And also it made the handicapped access much easier, from that end.

Blum: Did you feel that the curvilinear form of the new entrance was sympathetic to the severe rectangular lines of the original building?

Iyengar: Well, it really wasn’t sympathetic at all. It was clearly an add-on, and appeared like an add-on. But it worked, from a planning of view. But from an aesthetic point of view, it would be clearly observed as an add- on, as something that was done later on.

Blum: Well, you know, what we’ve been talking about, buildings in the late 1960s, 1970s, were executed at a time when there was a lot of change was taking place; it was a time of great unrest. There was the Vietnam War, civil rights, women’s rights, assassinations. If you look back, it was really a time of unprecedented turmoil.

Iyengar: That’s right.

Blum: And at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Louis Skidmore, one of the founders, had died.

Iyengar: Yes.

Blum: Nat Owings had moved away. What else had happened? Oh, the masters of modern architecture: Mies, Corbusier, Gropius—they all had died. So, it was really a time of great upheaval. What was SOM able to do, to accommodate all of this unrest and upheaval? Civil rights were a very important issue.

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Iyengar: Yeah. Well, I don’t know if I perceived any particular change in the design aspects of buildings, and the design concepts. They were still driven by corporate architecture. They were still driven by the Miesian approach. Skidmore never really abandoned the Miesian approach up until the 1990s, I believe. And if there was anything that really brought about a change that was forced by the exterior influences, it has to do with the shaping of buildings.

Blum: Are you talking about the engineering?

Iyengar: No, the shaping of buildings, literally.

Blum: In what way?

Iyengar: In the sense that—for instance, the 60 State Street project in Boston. And it could have been a simple rectilinear building, which probably would have been the case in normal circumstances; but because of the site and so on, it was actually fitted into the site in a geometric formulation of the form of the building.

Blum: Was that for security?

Iyengar: No, it was not for security. It was a change in design principle and philosophy. You still had the same kind of systems that you are dealing with, like the tubular building, and those kinds of structural systems, but you’re adapting it more to shaping the building, and to making them look more like objects.

Blum: Nat Owings wrote a book in which he said that by the mid-seventies, SOM was no longer very creative in what they produced. They were order-takers. And he said this because he felt the developers—instead of private clients—had really taken over. And what they wanted was a good

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bottom line, and not necessarily an architectural jewel. What do you think about that?

Iyengar: Well, I think the 1970s were, mid-sixties to 1970s, you know, even close to the 1980s, were driven by the so-called investment building.

Blum: That’s what he was talking about.

Iyengar: Yes, that’s what Owings was talking about. It was a building driven by developers. It was a building that was very much driven by the bottom line, and the cost of the building. There was a notion: exotic architecture is more expensive. And if you use different kinds of materials on the exterior it was more expensive. And the market edge was, you couldn’t charge that much more rental. So, there was a great deal of influence of the developers in shaping the buildings, and the concept that you can come up with.

Blum: Were there any discussions at SOM about what direction the firm is going to go? By that time, 1975, you were a partner.

Iyengar: Yeah, I was a partner. Yes.

Blum: So you would have participated in discussions like that.

Iyengar: Well, I think there was not so much trying to seek a direction, as much as to seek talent that would lead us in different directions. I think there was a definite concern that we weren’t growing a diversified group of partners and designers that could take us on different paths. They were all molding in somewhat similar fashion, in the Miesian style.

[Tape 3: Side B]

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Iyengar: There were design meetings. Every so often, every few months, the design partners would have a design committee, and they would meet and talk about design, what direction design was going.

Blum: Did the idea that the Miesian vocabulary had run its course, and now it was what was called Postmodernism, exemplified probably by some of the designs that Adrian Smith did as opposed to Bruce Graham, did that ever enter the conversation?

Iyengar: It entered the conversation a lot. But there was a notion that Postmodernism is a fleeting development, that it would not last. It would not endure. That was the feeling that SOM had.

Blum: Did SOM think that it would return to the Miesian vocabulary?

Iyengar: Not necessarily Miesian vocabulary. They would return to the Miesian principles, but perhaps they would grow partners that had different attitudes towards it. Adrian Smith was one of those. And he fashioned his architecture not so much on the structure and the Miesian principles, but much more on the facade compositions: compositions of stone, compositions of stone and glass, metal and glass, and in varieties of combinations. He concentrated much more on the window/wall composition, and the play of light. And so that was very much evident in the 1970s. The only effort the firm put together was not to dictate any design to any partner—any design attitude to any partner—but to seek partners—to make new partners—that had a different philosophy. So you couldn't change a certain partner if he believed he wanted to do a Miesian-type architecture, he was free to do so. He would not dictate to them, saying that your architecture is no good, you had to change. There was no such attitude. But there was an attitude that we need to diversify. We need to bring up more partners that talk differently about architecture.

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Blum: And was that possible?

Iyengar: It was possible, I think, to some extent. The newer partners—Adrian Smith, for instance—you know, he was very much involved in, like I said, the play of light on the facades, and the facade compositions, the geometry of the facade. He concentrated on that a lot more than other partners did, and he spent an inordinate amount of time composing what the building would look like, in terms of the cladding. There was Rick Keating, who was another partner. And he also had somewhat different ideas about form and shapes and compositions. And so there was an effort to diversify, so to speak. But it was not really successful in really branching out, so to speak. It never really abandoned the Miesian style too much. They did not abandon it.

Blum: And they were slow to do whatever they did.

Iyengar: There was very definitely the feeling that the Postmodernism architecture espoused by, for instance, Helmut Jahn, at that time, with the reflective glass, the use of different colored glasses, and so on and so forth, is not enduring architecture. It would not last. It’s kind of a passing fashion. It would fall on itself. It’s only in the 1990s that, I think, the firm began to grapple with the idea of different types of different architecture, only because the older partners had retired. You know, Bruce had retired, and many of the other partners had retired. And the newer partners, most importantly, Adrian Smith and Rick Keating were the partners that were in the forefront of change.

Blum: Well, along with all the unrest we talked about, there was also inflation. There was an energy crisis. I mean, all of these things were turning things upside down. How did SOM deal with the energy crisis, and/or inflation?

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Iyengar: Well, the energy crisis: I think there were some initiatives in the energy crisis. There was an attempt to—it wasn’t a movement that said that we had to have different types of buildings because of energy, but there were sequential improvements: using insulated glass more, and making energy studies much more accurately. And then, also looking at the form of the building with respect to the solar—with respect to energy. For instance, the 33 West Monroe building.

Blum: Was that the building in which SOM had their office?

Iyengar: No, it's the one opposite that. There’s a building—we moved there eventually—building at Monroe and Dearborn, on the south side. That’s the one. It’s a very flat building that was initially thought about as a taller building.

Blum: Did it have atriums?

Iyengar: Without the atrium. It was a tower form. But it was made into an atrium building, and a flatter building, mostly because of energy conservation efforts; because of the floor area to window wall ratio, and so on. That came into the vocabulary, that you would look at the floor area to cladded area proportions, and you would try to optimize that.

Blum: So conditions were dictated by circumstances beyond their control, outside of SOM?

Iyengar: Outside of that. Yeah.

Blum: Did SOM downsize at that time?

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Iyengar: Well yeah. I think SOM had grown to be a very large firm, and mostly because of the overseas work.

Blum: What was the overseas work?

Iyengar: Overseas work—you know, foreign work, international work. We had a huge project in Hong Kong, the New World Centre, with many buildings. Even though nothing outstanding architecturally, the project was huge. And there was a project in Egypt with many buildings again: hotel and office and apartments, and so on. And of course, in Saudi Arabia, we had the airport, a major project. There were nearly three hundred to four hundred people working, in Chicago and New York offices, on these projects. This all started in 1977, it went up to 1980, I believe. And then, it continued on for a while longer. And then, the firm had grown to a very large size by then. I think we had nearly twelve hundred people in the firm, all told, put together. So, it was a difficult task to feed the beast, so to speak.

Blum: It was my impression that the Mideast work saved SOM because there was very little in the United States at that time.

Iyengar: There was very little in the United States. It went on for a while. But we didn’t escape it. And then when the Mideast work kind of turned down, and then we had to downsize in the late 1980s and the 1990s. And there was a dramatic change, and dramatic downturning.

Blum: You know, one of the things that is in the fabric of the times was civil rights: empowerment for women, civil rights for African-Americans. Did SOM deal with those issues in any particular way?

Iyengar: Well, they dealt with it in the sense that the firm was open to minorities. There were several minority architects and engineers.

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Blum: Minority? Do you mean African-American?

Iyengar: African-Americans. There were several women architects as well. So, they didn’t go out of their way to say that this civil right is happening so we had to bring everybody in. It just sort of happened. There was no particular thrust to accentuate that. But the firm was open—always open.

Blum: Walter Netsch said that he had meetings with his group about all this, and what they could do to improve to make it a more open kind of situation, and improve access to jobs.

Iyengar: Yes. Such meetings took place. Not only with Walter Netsch, but also with the partnership in general, that we should really emphasize the recruitment of black candidates for the architecture and engineering area. I think there were initiatives going into the inner cities, trying to get recommendations of students that we would like to hire. Yeah, those kinds of initiatives were going on.

Blum: Something that did happen in 1980 was the creation of the SOM Foundation. What was that all about?

Iyengar: Well, they wanted to establish a foundation as a means of encouraging research in architecture, research in pure architecture. I don’t mean research in technology, research in—you know, not the kind of research you were talking about at IIT, but research in basic architecture. And people with ideas would research that, and many esoteric projects were financed through the foundation. And some of the scholars, architectural scholars, the idea was that they would actually come and work in the SOM Foundation.

Blum: And they had bought the historic Wright house, Charnley House.

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Iyengar: They purchased the Charnley House for that purpose. And then also they established traveling fellowships for architectural and engineering students. So that they would award three, four, five, or six traveling fellowships for architectural students that could go to different parts of the country, or different parts of the world. They kind of had to come up with their own program to do that. And then the foundation went to universities to publicize what’s happening with the foundation, and so on.

Blum: The foundation didn’t last very long. Is it still operating?

Iyengar: It didn’t last very long. It’s still going, I believe. Yeah, I think it’s still going. We don’t have the building, of course. And we don’t have a physical place.

Blum: Does the foundation have a director?

Iyengar: No director. It’s directed by the partners themselves. And some partners have assigned some responsibilities to do that. It’s my understanding that it’s still continuing. But I may be wrong.

Blum: I thought it flourished for a while and then it ended because it was a financial problem to keep it afloat.

Iyengar: Yeah, it was a financial problem to keep that afloat. But I think it’s still going on in a small scale to offer fellowships and assistantships.

Blum: Well the foundation must have been established, or at least the idea started, when SOM must have been very flush with money.

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Iyengar: Oh yeah. They were doing very well. And Bruce was the spearhead behind it, and Hartmann. So they were all involved in the formation of the SOM Foundation. I think—I may be wrong, that’s a thing I need to find out myself, if it’s still going on or not.

Blum: You wrote in your biographical sketch, “The 1970s brought a different role for me.”

Iyengar: Well, it’s a different role in the sense that the firm was expanding. They were opening offices. Now we had opportunities in Denver and Houston, Los Angeles…

Blum: But wasn’t that always the case? I mean, Chicago didn’t only do Chicago projects.

Iyengar: No, it didn’t do… But they didn’t have offices. They only had three offices, you know: New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Well, they had a smaller office in Portland for a long time. But all of a sudden in the 1960s, we began to expand a little bit. We expanded to Los Angeles, and they felt we needed to have a Los Angeles office. And more importantly, Houston.

Blum: In California, was it Los Angeles, or San Francisco?

Iyengar: Los Angeles. There was an office in Los Angeles. It was closed after a number of years. And then there was an office in Houston. We did quite a bit of work in Houston. And we did—one of our clients, Jerry Hines, was very much involved in us, developing projects in Houston, and all around the world, in a way. And in Denver: Denver was conditioned on the fact that one of the New York partners, Don Smith, was working with Oxford Development Company from Canada. And Don Love was the developer.

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Blum: What was the name of the company?

Iyengar: Oxford Development Company. So initially, he started working in Calgary and Edmonton, in Canada. And then the developer—Oxford Development Company—they moved to the United States, and then they moved to Denver, and they wanted to develop many projects in Denver. So we kind of had an office in Denver to service those projects, and then it grew into an office.

Blum: What decade was this—about?

Iyengar: It was in the late 1970s through early 1980s. And it went on for a while, until, you know, the developer kind of retrenched, and they went back to Canada. And then we had to close the office.

Blum: You know, SOM has been accused of trying to develop a corporate style that worked so well they could plunk it down anywhere in the world. Is there an SOM corporate style?

Iyengar: Well, there is an organization, of course, you know. It’s fashioned after a group practice. And then, there is also an organization for the project, how the project is to be organized. And first of all, there’s the design partner, who would be in charge of designing the project. And there would be an administrative partner. So there would always be two partners assigned to a project. It was the responsibility of the administrative partner to see to the contractual end of things, and keep the client happy, so to speak, and see what the requirements are; and of course, collect the money. So all those issues. You know he was more a client’s advocate, in a way. You know, in the firm. That’s the way it was felt. You needed somebody who would listen to the client, and talk to the client, not only in design terms, but also in their corporate terms, with

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their requirements. What are they trying to achieve within their own organization? And what are they trying to achieve with this particular building? So, the administrative partner was very much involved with those things.

Blum: Would that lead to a sameness in many projects? This American corporate style, as I understand it from some of the critics, was that practically the same building could work in Denver, in Portland, in Chicago, in New York, and it would be looked at as a trademark building of SOM. Or you could even do it in Saudi Arabia.

Iyengar: No, I don’t believe that’s a correct characterization of it. You know, for instance, if you take the corporate style of architecture, you can look at Hancock building and Sears Tower—two very different types of buildings. Both are corporate type buildings. One was for Sears themselves, and the other one was an investment building, for an insurance company, John Hancock Insurance Company. There is the Three First National Plaza building right opposite the One First National Bank building; that’s a corporate structure, that’s for the bank. So they each have a different architecture. It’s not like there was a sameness. It was not like a cookie cutter that you had one building, one type of building that you repeated throughout. They were all unusual identities, each building had a separateness, a separate identity. You know, Brunswick building was different than many other buildings. So, the styles were different. But I don’t know what you mean by sameness. The sameness in the sense they were all based on Miesian principle; they were all boxy, and they had a flat top. And only later on did they begin to realize that—you know, they were catching up with enunciating the top, and so on. But they had considerable difficulty with respect to that, because the Miesian style really ended abruptly. It didn’t have a particular ending for the building. So there were differences. Gordon Bunshaft very much did his buildings. He didn’t think his buildings were

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all the same. And he had different types of corporate buildings. You know, he had certainly—Lever House is an example of a breakthrough building. Chase Manhattan Bank building. And so there are many examples of buildings that are unique architecture, but fit within the corporate style.

Blum: When Gordon was doing his buildings initially for the Rockefellers and various other commissions, the early ones were not the ones that critics talked about as being the same. The early ones were custom tailored to the client. But after a while, when the developers were calling the shots, that’s when the critics began to…

Iyengar: I mean, you’re talking about developer building.

Blum: Yeah, I am.

Iyengar: Developer buildings. There are many buildings that are built for developers that tended to be the same; the same in the sense that they have to meet the same criteria, in terms of the budgetary requirements, and so on and so forth. Even Sears Tower, for instance, was very much dictated by the budgetary requirements of Sears Tower. I think the building suffers architecturally because of that. Even though the form was very strong, the window/wall is kind of weak. It doesn’t even represent the structure properly. You know, and the tubular lines are enunciated, but there’s a column at every fifteen feet, and you don’t see those columns. So, it’s a flat window/wall. It was very much a function of the budgetary requirement that was imposed on the building. That’s all they could afford in terms of the window/wall.

Blum: Well, could it have been better with more money?

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Iyengar: Oh certainly. Certainly. I think you would have seen more metal cladding featured on the columns, more articulation of the exterior of the building, and the facade. It came out to be a very simple, flat wall.

Blum: Did SOM give any consideration to green architecture? To conserving energy?

Iyengar: Well, like I said, conserving energy only with respect to the shaping of the buildings. There were a couple of the buildings that were shaped in such a way that it would minimize the energy. And we talked about the 33 West Monroe building: it very much did that. There were a lot of initiatives with respect to sunshades. You know, there were several buildings that used sunshades, you know. And I showed you the Perimeter Center in Atlanta. That one has sunshades. And I think we did another building in Minneapolis that had sunshades. And once we went into the Mideast, you know, certainly there was a lot of concern; a lot of initiatives for…

Blum: Well, they have all the resources that we’re economizing.

Iyengar: Well, I think one of the justifications for Gordon Bunshaft’s National Commercial Bank building is the fact that he wanted to keep the sun out. The exterior is all solid, and the openings are all on the interior with an atrium in the center, with openings on the sides.

Blum: He did say that that building was his unique contribution. And he was concerned with ventilation, and with the climate.

Iyengar: With the climate. He wanted to keep the sun out. Adrian Smith did something like that too in the Mideast somewhere, Bahrain, I think. He did some project where he used sunshades and day lighting, and scoops on the outside which would bring the light in.

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Blum: Le Corbusier was doing sunshades before SOM picked up on it.

Iyengar: Oh yeah, sure. Certainly. That’s right. That’s right.

Blum: Well, it was the Mideast work that saved SOM, I understand.

Iyengar: Well, I don’t know if I would call it saved SOM, but it certainly would not have been the same scale. The firm would have survived without the Mideast work.

Blum: SOM would have survived?

Iyengar: It would have survived. It would not have been in the same scale that it grew into.

Blum: Did you go into a Mideast project early?

Iyengar: I didn’t. I went to two projects in the Mideast. One was the group of buildings in Cairo: the Arab International Trade Center, and the hotel. I was involved with that. I traveled there several times. I was involved with a project in Tehran, in Iran.

Blum: That was before this?

Iyengar: It was about more or less the same time.

Blum: But did that one in Tehran materialize?

Iyengar: Yeah, 1979. We had an office in Tehran. And we were doing—all of a sudden, we had gotten a lot of commissions from the Shah, at that particular time. And then there was a city that we were developing in

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southern Iran, in Abadan, I believe, is the name of the town. We were trying to develop a whole town, whole city, for two hundred thousand people.

Blum: Were you doing the planning, and the buildings?

Iyengar: Planning and the buildings. And then there were other buildings in Tehran itself. But that fell through.

Blum: How did SOM get those projects in Tehran?

Iyengar: I really don’t know exactly how they got it. I’m not familiar with that.

Blum: Walter Netsch said that he was working on some aspect of that. In his oral history he talked about how he had to operate in a Mideast culture. He spoke about a young Saudi prince and how he had to wait a long time until the prince came to a meeting, and things of this sort.

Iyengar: I think it was the Algerian projects, in Blida at the university. I remember very much about what he was talking about. And one time I was there, I was there in Algiers, and then we had a kiosk type facility, open all around, and Walter had trouble pinning up the drawings all around the walls. And we had to wait for the minister for a very, very long time, to come.

Blum: Days?

Iyengar: Days. And finally he came to look at the project. I think it was in Algeria.

Blum: Well, let’s talk about the Iranian project. Before you were sent out to a project like that, did SOM provide any sensitivity training, any direction as to how to deal with others in another culture?

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Iyengar: I think there probably was a lot more for the architects than for me. And I think the architecture group did get sensitivity training, with respect to the culture, and especially in Mecca and Saudi Arabia: designing the campuses, and how they had to keep the men’s dormitory and women’s dormitory separate, and they couldn’t mix up the classes. And there were a lot of cultural issues. And they hired several consultants, I think. They hired consultants in from the universities.

Blum: Oh. In Chicago?

Iyengar: Here and also in the country, who would work to inculcate the cultural values and cultural traditions that go into the buildings. I know for sure it happened in Saudi Arabia. I don’t know to what extent it happened in Iran, for instance. I don’t know.

Blum: Well, I was even thinking of the International Trade Center that you say you worked on.

Iyengar: Yeah. Well, I think very much so. I think we interacted very heavily with the Egyptian clients.

Blum: But they were from another culture, and the same thing could mean things quite different, for each one.

Iyengar: Each one. Right. But what I’m saying is that we didn’t go into the client and then say, This is the building; you take it. There was an intermediary that told us about the Arab culture, and the kind of things that would happen. But for the most part, as far as the Cairo project was concerned, these were developments that were spearheaded by the Western influence anyway. The Egyptians wanted to build a Hyatt hotel. They wanted to have apartments for the Western ex-patriots, and so on. It

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wasn’t that integrated in terms of the local culture. They had a trade center office, an international bank—it was like any other bank you would see anywhere else. So, the architecture, even though it borrowed items from the Arab culture, it did not particularly relate to the daily life of people, so to speak, in the culture.

Blum: I see. Brigitte Peterhans worked on this project.

Iyengar: Yes.

Blum: Was there a difference in the way men and women were treated?

Iyengar: In the firm?

Blum: On the project.

Iyengar: No. Brigitte Peterhans was very aggressive, and she is very good, and she spent a lot of time in Egypt. She was very much interested in the cultural aspects too, I think. She was very much into that. She went to a lot of different places to understand and research, and to view the culture.

Blum: When the International Trade Center was being planned and worked on, were local people used as workers? Or were workers imported?

Iyengar: Local people were used.

Blum: They were.

Iyengar: Yeah. For the construction, you mean?

Blum: For the construction, yeah.

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Iyengar: Hines was involved with that, to some extent.

Blum: Jerry Hines?

Iyengar: Jerry Hines. In the initial phase of the project. But they hired all local contractors.

Blum: I see. How did that work out?

Iyengar: It worked out all right. I don’t know if all the buildings were completed or not. The project was to be simultaneously going in all the projects, all the buildings rather. There was a hotel building, there was the trade center office, and there were two apartment towers. And there was the whole podium, parking, and commercial, that related to all of these things, at the base.

Blum: Was this Bruce’s project?

Iyengar: This was Bruce’s project. But it got delayed. The hotel got built, the office got built but the apartment wasn’t built until a much later time.

Blum: Was that because of money?

Iyengar: Money, local conditions, and the demand.

Blum: Were you there much during this project?

Iyengar: I went there mostly in the initial phases of the project, to collect enough information so that we could design the structure. And we interacted with the local engineers. We had an associate engineer for the project, who would look after it in Egypt. So I was involved in that kind of coordination, if you can call it that, until we came up with the design

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drawings, and working drawings. And afterwards, the construction part I was not involved that much. We had people in residence, in Cairo. I did visit several times, but on an occasional basis.

Blum: Were you doing what you did from Chicago?

Iyengar: From Chicago.

Blum: You weren’t relocated there, then?

Iyengar: I was not relocated.

Blum: Oh. Would it have been easier had you been?

Iyengar: Most of the work that we were doing, we were doing in Chicago, and we were coordinating it in Cairo. We did have team in Cairo. Brigitte Peterhans was there. So, it was a matter of coordination between Chicago and Cairo. And we had local associate architects, associate engineers. We were in their office, working with them.

Blum: Oh, I see. How heavily did this project rely on the computer?

Iyengar: It didn’t rely on the computer… I don’t know how much it relied on the computer. In the structural design area, we used computers a lot. But in the architectural area, I think it was still more traditional. I think they may have used it for finish on the facades and studies of the window/wall systems, and so on; but it wasn’t extensive. They didn’t produce drawings with it. It was all manually drawn drawings.

Blum: Well, what was the experience like for you, to be working in Chicago for something that’s being built halfway around the world?

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Iyengar: Well, it was very hectic, in the sense that, you know, your travel took a lot of time. And you needed at least half a day, or a day, to get used to the time change and the atmosphere, and so on. Certainly that had an effect. But we had to stay long enough, at least a week or two each time when we went, to be able to accomplish anything. You had to see a lot of people, and talk to a lot of people. So, it was an exciting opportunity.

Blum: Was the project itself successful? Did it meet the client’s needs and expectations?

Iyengar: I believe it did. And like I said, it ran into difficulties with the financing. And it wasn’t all realized in the grand fashion it was supposed to have been, all at once. Individual buildings were built. Foundations were built for some of the other buildings, some of the other areas, and they sat there for a couple of years before anyone picked it up again. It was a stop- and-go kind of effort that finally got built.

Blum: Did you work on the airport in Saudi Arabia?

Iyengar: No, I didn’t work on that. I didn’t work on the airport project. Faz was in charge of those. And especially, you know the most outstanding part, the Haj tents. Faz was involved with it. I was not involved with that.

Blum: When SOM got into doing buildings all over the world, I suppose you would call that globalization.

Iyengar: Yeah. When the business went down in the United States, there was a natural tendency to focus on the overseas work a lot more. SOM had not particularly done that. They did have overseas work, but they had not used it as a business practice. But it became much more of a business practice to seek clients in the Mideast area and the Far East. And it began to drive the firm, in a way. At least fifty percent of the work or more in

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the 1980s was overseas work, and certainly much more than in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Blum: You say there was more.

Iyengar: More, yeah. In the 1980s, I think, starting from 1985 we had two major projects in London. One was in the Broadgate, Bishopsgate area, a series of buildings on the railroad tracks, at the Liverpool Street Station, for one client, the Rosehaugh Stanhope Development Company. And another project called Canary Wharf at Isle of Dogs, where a series of docks were to be developed. So there were two major projects in London that I think went on for quite a while, into the 1990s.

Blum: Did you work on both of those?

Iyengar: I worked on the Bishopsgate projects, Broadgate, Bishopsgate, with the Exchange House.

Blum: Before we get there, can we talk about the National Commercial Bank? You worked on that?

Iyengar: I worked on that.

Blum: Yeah. And that was Gordon Bunshaft’s.

Iyengar: It was Gordon Bunshaft.

Blum: And he was never—although he says, “This is my best building,” he was never allowed to see it.

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Iyengar: No, he didn’t. You know, he was also the designer on the Haj tents, for instance. The ten-acre tent that is suitable for Haj pilgrims. And he was very much involved with that.

Blum: Were you?

Iyengar: Gordon Bunshaft was. No, I was not. It was one of Faz’s projects. And then, you know, Gordon was never able to go there. He probably could have, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t go there.

Blum: Oh. I thought it was because he was Jewish, and that’s why he was not permitted a visa, or whatever one needed to go to that country.

Iyengar: That might have been. There was a problem at that time that if your visa indicated that you had traveled to a place where… If your passport had a visa to Israel, you would not be issued a visa to Saudi Arabia, or Arab states. So you needed a separate passport. Some people carried two passports. But Gordon didn’t want to go through all of that. There were other Jewish people that did go there.

Blum: Oh, they did? From SOM?

Iyengar: From SOM.

Blum: Who were they?

Iyengar: Some junior designers, and so on. Certainly in the Beirut area. We had a project in Beirut. And there were Jewish people that went there, Jewish designers. Yeah. But Gordon was never able to go there, but he did many buildings in the airport.

Blum: Where is the National Commercial Bank located?

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Iyengar: It’s in Jeddah. They’re both in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. National Commercial Bank is a separate project. It’s a tower form, and it’s not multiple buildings, it’s just one building.

Blum: Unlike the project in Cairo, which you say was sort of spearheaded by western people and western thought, how did the National Commercial Bank job come to SOM?

Iyengar: I really don’t know exactly how it came through. I think we had a partner by the name of Gordon Wildermuth, who spent nearly two years in Jeddah. And he was in charge of the… He was the administrative partner for the airport project, so he was stationed in Jeddah. So he contacted several clients, and he was familiar with the banks, and so on and so forth. Somehow we were able to connect with the bank client for this project.

Blum: Ah, so it was through Gordon Wildermuth.

Iyengar: It was through Gordon Wildermuth and his contacts.

Blum: I see. What Bunshaft has written and said about the bank, he said, “The only building that I think has a major concept that’s unique and is my own is the National Commercial Bank. And that is rational, not just whimsy: those great big holes. That’s why I think it’s my best building. It’s a totally new approach to solving an office building in an extremely hot and dry climate.” So, he really regarded that as very good work.

Iyengar: He took the environment and worked with it, especially the solar conditions.

[Tape 4: Side A]

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Iyengar: Okay. He needed portals where he can bring the outside in. And he also wanted to bring some green in there, so there’s a lot of plantings and a lot of trees in each one of these areas. There’s two on one side, and one on the other side. So, it was a way of looking out and seeing the trees, and also getting light from the outside.

Blum: Would trees normally grow in that climate?

Iyengar: No, they're cultivated.

Blum: So, if the trees are not native to the area, did they need special handling?

Iyengar: They were cultivated. Imported. And then you can do that. Trees are not natural. And then his parking structure, of course, was borrowed from a similar idea to Macy’s. Macy’s parking garage is like that. Macy’s in New York.

Blum: Oh, what about Bruce’s parking structure for Hancock?

Iyengar: They all borrowed from each other. And Bruce’s parking structure was influenced by Macy’s parking.

Blum: Well, I have often wondered, what went on at partners’ meetings, if designs were discussed, and did other architects see them. I often wondered if they were somehow inspired by some of the designs that they saw, and went back to their own project drawings and used what they saw as a model.

Iyengar: Used that. Yeah. Yeah. They didn’t directly steal from each other, but certainly there were influences from each other. And they did talk about the design excellences. The partners’ meetings were mostly business meetings.

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Blum: Do you mean about money?

Iyengar: About money. There are two functions: to review the business aspect of the project for the firm; the second was to elect partners and associate partners, lot of discussions about different offices making proposals for new partnerships. So, we would discuss for two or three days, and then we would vote, and the partner would be elected. So the major effort was really to elect partners.

Blum: Do you know who your sponsor was? Were there sponsors?

Iyengar: Well yeah, there were sponsors.

Blum: Do you know who yours was?

Iyengar: I believe that Faz was. Faz and Bruce, I believe.

Blum: From your team.

Iyengar: Your team. Yeah. Who else?

Blum: Sticking with the National Commercial Bank: was there a competition, said or unsaid, between Faz and Bruce in Chicago, and Gordon in New York?

Iyengar: I wouldn’t say direct competition. But they were criticizing each other. You know. Their critiques… Gordon was a little bit more of a purist, in the sense that he talked about his architecture a lot. And Bruce didn’t particularly wrestle with the architecture of a particular building too much. He said, This is what I think at this moment. This is the architecture that comes to my mind; this is what I am going to go with.

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Okay? And he would do his best at this particular moment, to come up with a particular architecture. And he may have had different ideas, and would say, I would use it in a different project, I wouldn’t use it here. There’s a difference between that attitude, and the attitude of Adrian Smith, for instance. And he would study the elevations, he’d study the window/wall system ad infinitum, and over and over and over again, until he’s satisfied that he’s getting the right play of light, and light angles, and right composition of the metal and the glass, and so and so forth. Bruce didn’t wrestle with that compositional aspect.

Blum: Did he leave that work to you engineers on the team?

Iyengar: No. I think not the architectural part, but certainly the systems part. The system vocabulary: what did they want the system to say, what did the system express?

Blum: You say Adrian studied endlessly, but Bruce did not.

Iyengar: Adrian studied the compositions of buildings. And what I mean by that is that Bruce studied the elevations, and he would quickly make up his mind, this is what he wanted. He didn’t wrestle with it for a long period of time, and refine it and refine it and refine it until he’d get it right. He didn’t do that.

Blum: What comes to my mind as you say that is the One Mag [Magnificent] Mile building in that there were objections to the building because it cast a shadow on the Oak Street beach, and the Drake Hotel. And people who lived there didn’t like it.

Iyengar: Yeah, it did cast a shadow on the Drake. But we did make shadow studies for the beach though.

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Blum: Oh you did?

Iyengar: Yeah, we wanted to make sure that we don’t cast shadows on the beach. But I think it may have cast shadows on other buildings, but not the beach.

Blum: I see. Well, is this the kind of thing that Adrian would have studied a lot before…?

Iyengar: Oh, not necessarily. He made more aesthetically oriented studies. He would take a piece of a window/wall and study it as a piece of art, until he’d get the composition right.

Blum: I know that when the National Commercial Bank was being built, there were not local contractors, but a Korean contractor. Why was a Korean contractor called in to do a building in Jeddah for an American firm?

Iyengar: Well, there were several… There was not an established local construction company. Most of the work that was done by the local construction company was of a different scale, and the quality of the materials and the quality of construction was not very good. Initially, when the National Commercial Bank was looked at structurally, we said this is a natural concrete building. You get concrete walls, and you clad the concrete walls. And the interior could be anything. It could be steel or concrete. But it’s essentially an expression of a masonry type building, a stark expression not of a metal building, but of a concrete building. So the initial effort was to make concrete walls throughout. It’s only when we found out that it is very difficult to get in Jeddah the quality of concrete. It’s very difficult to get the quality of concrete so we went to a steel structure. So this is a steel structure. There are columns and behind each one of these, faces and steel diagonals. And once we went into that kind of a mode–—and it was also partly conditioned by the fact that we had to

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frame around these big openings––the idea that with the concrete that means you have to have far more support going from here and all the way up there to hold it up, before you build the wall up above. So there were constructional difficulties with the concept in concrete walls. So it was decided to do it in steel. Once we decided to do it in steel, there was no particular steel industry in Jeddah. So it was fair game for any steel contractors all around the world. The Korean contractors came in.

Blum: How did they come in? Did they petition SOM? Did they submit a proposal?

Iyengar: Well, with the international projects, I think SOM would invite—and through their construction manager, invite several international companies to come in. It was not just the Koreans, the Japanese and the Koreans, and so on.

Blum: Well, this project strikes me as such a big contrast to the way in which the Haj tent was treated. That project was so sensitive to the local tradition. It was really a blend of local traditions and western ideas. Do you think that this one, the National Commercial Bank, is also a blend of local traditions, and western ideas?

Iyengar: No, it’s not. It’s mostly an International Style. It could be built anywhere. But probably Gordon would disagree. You wouldn’t build it up in here, because you wouldn’t need that kind of a system for environmental purposes—you know, to keep the sun out, and so on. You would have a different architecture. And Gordon may have imagined it in the desert; you know this is a stark form rising out of the desert. You know, it’s a desert form, so to speak. The travertine color—all those things may have had some intimation: the sand, and the local terrain. You know. Certainly, Haj tents were a lot more responsive to Bedouin culture and the tents that they have, and it’s very reminiscent of that. And also, the

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fact that you’re creating a habitat for thousands of people to come in to live underneath that, to be able to cook and sleep, and live there for several days, even a week, before they went to Mecca. So, it was very much involved with the local culture: the form of it, and the use of it.

Blum: Well, very interesting to see what happens as one go beyond their own borders.

Iyengar: I want to correct something. I don’t think that it was a Korean steel contractor; they were Japanese. Kawasaki?

Blum: Which contractor, Japanese or Korean, was brought to New York for a course to learn what SOM expected in the way of quality? Was that for this project, or the Haj?

Iyengar: I believe it was for Haj. Yeah. Well, it might be a combination of the two. What I’m thinking right now is that the general contractor was Korean: Samwhan. And the steel contractor was Japanese: Kawasaki Steel Company. So we’re confusing the two.

Blum: But do you think we’re speaking about the same project?

Iyengar: Same project: National Commercial Bank.

Blum: So the general contractor and the steel company are different entities on the same project.

Iyengar: On the same project.

Blum: As long as we're clear.

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Iyengar: Different steel companies were asked to bid on this, even the U.S. steel companies were asked to bid on this. And the Japanese came out with a very good proposal.

Blum: I see. But the Korean, Samwhan Corporation, was brought to New York to see a demonstration of what SOM expected in the way of quality.

Iyengar: That’s right. They were brought to New York.

Blum: I see. It was Ada Louise Huxtable, the architectural critic for the New York Times, who said she thinks architecture like this is "helicopter architecture" in that it can be built and plunked down anywhere in the world. Do you agree with her?

Iyengar: Well, yes and no. It could be anywhere in the world, but you wouldn’t build a building like this in New York, certainly, because it’s specifically designed to deal with the environment in Saudi Arabia. You wouldn’t necessarily have the rationale to build it in New York. Why would you want to build a building like that in New York? You know, you certainly can’t say that it’s the sun and the energy and all that—not as clearly as you can say it in Saudi Arabia. I think you would lose your basic rationale to build a building like that in Chicago or in New York, or some other place. And if she’s talking about the form of the building: yeah, it could be anywhere. You know, it’s not contextural. It doesn’t relate to the neighboring property. I don’t even know what’s in their neighboring property. I don’t know if Gordon knew where was the neighboring property. And it doesn’t relate to the city of Jeddah.

Blum: Wasn’t there some change, in terms of the orientation of this building, because some other person claimed part of the land this building is on?

Iyengar: That’s right.

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Blum: Did it belong to someone else?

Iyengar: Well, in Saudi Arabia we found out that you don’t have strict property lines. You just sort of know that this is your property. You can go through the records and research to see where the property line is, and who belongs with the property. I understand one day after it was designed once, somebody came and claimed that this side of the property was his, one of the corners of it. He could prove it through his tribal relationships, or something like that—some oral tradition somewhere.

Blum: Was he a prince of higher-standing than the client?

Iyengar: Of a higher-standing, yeah. So, the bank had to agree to it, and then you had to—I think we turned it around to fit it in the smaller site a little better.

Blum: How did Gordon feel about that?

Iyengar: I don’t think he minded that very much.

Blum: Did you ever work with Gordon face-to-face?

Iyengar: Face-to-face: yes, several times.

Blum: On this project?

Iyengar: On this project. And he knew what he wanted.

Blum: Was this building designed in good part by a computer?

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Iyengar: Yeah, in good part by the computer, yes. Architecturally, you mean? No, I don’t think so.

Blum: Do you think Gordon used the computer at all?

Iyengar: No. I don’t think he did. It was before his time—or it was after his time, rather. I don’t recall him ever using the computer.

Blum: But you did.

Iyengar: Yeah. But for the structure.

Blum: Yeah. Well, it’s a handsome building. It’s just a pity he didn’t see it. He couldn’t.

Iyengar: Well, let me put it this way: he didn’t want to. I think he could have. He had a problem in that he really didn’t want to go.

Blum: Because they wouldn’t welcome him?

Iyengar: They wouldn’t welcome him. And if there was a feeling that he’s not wanted there, why should he go there?

Blum: But this was his last project and he was proud of it.

Iyengar: That’s right. Well, he was doing the Haj tents just before that. That’s a fantastic project, in itself.

Blum: And Faz was very active in that.

Iyengar: Oh yeah, Faz was very much in that.

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Blum: Well, getting back to Ada Louise Huxtable, she said, “There are mad scientists of architecture, the structural engineers who can make anything stand up.” Do you think she’s describing you?

Iyengar: Well, not quite, because I’m not mad. But anyway…

Blum: Well, her language is colorful.

Iyengar: Yeah, she didn’t have much use for the type of architecture that Bruce practiced. And she thought that there’s something about the building that she didn’t like, the structural nature of it. It wasn’t a piece of art, it was a piece of technology. That's the way she understood it. The whole architecture is evolving around a certain technological aspect of the building, rather than a pure artistic evolution of the building. I think she’s probably right, and that’s her take on it. But there are a whole series of people that believed in the integration of structure and architecture together, and structuralist expressions. And so there are two different philosophies.

Blum: And in spite of her comments, the bank went on to take several awards. So, it certainly was appreciated by some.

Iyengar: Yeah, but Ada Louise Huxtable’s comments for this is that it’s too object- oriented. It isn’t architectural, and it could be built anywhere in the world.

Blum: And that you are part of the group that makes it stand up.

Iyengar: Yeah. Well, somebody had to.

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Blum: Yes. Yes, somebody had to. And the bank took an AIA Honor award, and a New York AIA award. So you have worked on many award-winning buildings.

Iyengar: Oh yes.

Blum: One of the buildings you worked on in Chicago, in 1986, was McCormick Place II.

Iyengar: Yes.

Blum: What was that work like?

Iyengar: Well, McCormick Place II was a big exposition hall, and Bruce was the design partner. And he wanted to kind of have a system that would reduce the bulk, so to speak, of the building.

Blum: What do you mean, reduce the bulk?

Iyengar: The bulk, in the sense that the height, the boxiness of it–—it’s a boxy building–—but he wanted to reduce as much as possible the height of the building.

Blum: Oh, why?

Iyengar: Because it would stand like a huge box right in front of the lakefront. He wanted to reduce the height.

Blum: Low and flat?

Iyengar: Yeah, low and flat. And the idea was that if the structure was incorporated within the building, then the height would increase.

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Because exposition halls require long spans and long span would require deep trusses from the roof. If the trusses are incorporated within the building, it would increase the height of the building. So he wanted to pull the structure outside the building. So, he had the roof and the structure is outside that would support the roof. So we came up with the cable-supported notion, with a series of piers, and the cables supporting the primary truss and the secondary trusses. So that in effect, it is a cable- suspended roof. It had two hundred and forty feet center span, and then one hundred twenty feet cantilevers on the sides. So that you can clearly observe the nature of the suspension that the system shows: series of piers at sixty feet on centers, with three cables supporting each side.

Blum: Bruce has said that his design is a salute to Mies’s building across the boulevard. What do you think?

Iyengar: It’s a salute in the sense that—it’s not in the same vocabulary, it’s a slightly different vocabulary. The building right across Lake Shore Drive had traditional trusses.

Blum: Do you mean the first McCormick building?

Iyengar: The first McCormick building: very traditional truss system, and exposed columns, and so on. You know. And it was not in the same vocabulary, but consistent with it–—consistent with the principle at least, of the structural notion, of exposing the structure.

Blum: He also had—and I don’t know whether this is structural or decorative–– diagonally-shaped panels.

Iyengar: On the outside.

Blum: On the outside.

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Iyengar: The diagonally-shaped panels from the top is a representation of the trusses inside. There’s a series of trusses on the inside that supported where the cables were. So, he pulled it out in the facade. So it’s not a real structural expression, but it’s a cladding expression of these trusses, from the inside.

Blum: I understand there were some problems getting the building built, with City Hall, or the unions. I’m not sure which one.

Iyengar: I believe there were some strikes that were going on at the time. There were construction delays. But it only occurred for a short period of time though.

Blum: I understand that Diane Legge Lohan worked on that project, and she was a female architect. Was there a problem because she was a woman?

Iyengar: Oh. No, Diane worked on the project, certainly. I don’t know if there was a problem. I don’t recall having heard about such a problem.

Blum: What were the Senate hearings about?

Iyengar: I’m not familiar with that either. But I think that had mostly to do with the contracting arrangements. Contracting arrangements, and favoritism, and the cost overruns, and stuff like that.

Blum: Bruce also complimented the old McCormick Place, Mies’s, but thought he was expressing a new age.

Iyengar: Well, by that he means that the traditional structure of the trusses and the columns, he departed from that with the suspended solution. He borrowed from the bridge technology, so to speak. It is reminiscent of the

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bridge technology, the suspension bridges. So, he took this to be that. Of course, there are a lot of roofs that would use suspended cable systems. Myron, himself, had experimented in his IIT work—lot of roof systems with cable suspensions above the top of it.

Blum: And Myron's bridge with the cables.

Iyengar: With the cables. And he had always the notion that we can use the suspension bridge form as a supporting form for the roofs, for long-span structures. He had several students working on that. He had worked on that. I don’t know if Bruce ever borrowed from that or not. His first notion was that he wanted to reduce the bulk of the building. And he also wanted a structuralist expression, some character to the building other than a simple box.

Blum: Well now, did Bruce design Baxter Laboratories in a similar way?

Iyengar: Baxter he did in a similar way. Baxter was a much more unique project, in the sense that there were only two pylons, and the cables emanate from the two pylons to support the entire cafeteria building. And it’s similar to McCormick, but it’s more three-dimensional in Baxter, compared to two- dimensional in McCormick because cables go only one way, in a plainer fashion.

Blum: Well, the McCormick Place area has become so filled with buildings.

Iyengar: Oh yeah. There are many more phases.

Blum: But McCormick Place II is quite unique, with the cable.

Iyengar: With the cable. That’s the only one that shows that character.

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Blum: Why was it white? Mies did his building in black. Why was Bruce’s white?

Iyengar: I don’t know. I think he probably still wanted to reduce the bulk of the building. He thought maybe a gray, light color, would reduce the volume of the building.

Blum: Well, from Chicago you went to London.

Iyengar: Yes. I think we had a couple of major projects in London. One was the Bishopsgate project, which I worked on. Broadgate, Bishopsgate. It was initially called Bishopsgate, but then eventually Broadgate was the name of it.

Blum: Why was the name changed?

Iyengar: Well, I think Broadgate was… There were a few buildings that were designed by other architects around the side. And then this was an extension into the station areas, adjoining the Bishopsgate Street. So it was called Bishopsgate project. But actually it was termed the Broadgate to include all the buildings: the original buildings, the three or four buildings that were done by other architects, and also the new buildings that were added on.

Blum: How did this project, Bishopsgate or Broadgate, as it was known—how did this come to SOM? What was the connection?

Iyengar: The connection was through Stuart Lipton, who was with Rosehaugh Stanhope Development Company, London. And they wanted somebody to come in and build these buildings very quickly. You know, they had a very fast schedule. They had this arrangement with the railroad properties that they would be able to use the air rights above it, and also

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build the buildings in a certain amount of time. So it was very critical for them to seek an architect and architectural engineering firm that would be able to do this in a short period of time.

Blum: Now, Bruce had a prior connection with an earlier project in the U. K. What did he do? It was Boots Pharmaceutical.

Iyengar: Yes. Wills Tobacco Company. Boots.

Blum: Boots Tobacco? I thought it was medical.

Iyengar: Yes. There were two projects. I’m sorry. Boots Pharmaceutical was one.

Blum: Bruce had established a connection with those people.

Iyengar: And then there was another project, Wills Tobacco Company.

Blum: Wills Tobacco. So, he was already connected to them?

Iyengar: He was already connected with it. Yes.

Blum: What was the process by which this informal connection was formalized?

Iyengar: I don’t know the details of it. But all I know is 1985—I think somewhere thereabouts—that this project came into the office, and then we had to formulate our teams very quickly. And we didn’t even know where the project could be executed. We thought it would be executed in Chicago and London. I mean the design work, the project design work. So we rushed over there to London. And then started interacting with the client.

Blum: What were the limits of the project? I know there was one important large building, but what about the rest?

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Iyengar: Well, the rest of it is a series of buildings. I think there were several phases in the project and several buildings. They’re all connected together, but they still identify them as separate buildings, in terms of the property. And then there’s a series of buildings on Bishopsgate that went from ten to fifteen stories high, directly located on the railroad tracks.

Blum: Did Bruce design these?

Iyengar: Yeah, Bruce designed those. He designed the entire complex. And so they were all simple forms, and the only interest in them is the metal and stone claddings, the articulation of the facades.

Blum: Were they smaller buildings?

Iyengar: In the smaller buildings. They were not isolated buildings, they were a series of buildings that were connected together, the entire facade of the Bishopsgate. There were other buildings that were isolated on the other side of the tracks, that were part of the complex. But this one building, Phase 11 [eleven], it’s called Exchange House, it kind of straddles the area of the tracks where they join together, and it’s impossible to put any columns in that area.

Blum: So how do you make the building stand up?

Iyengar: Well, I think the whole idea was to bridge the tracks, two hundred and sixty feet, from one end to the other end.

Blum: So you’re building a building that’s built like a bridge?

Iyengar: Yeah, it’s built like a bridge, two hundred and sixty feet span. And then the whole idea was… This was also fronting an existing part of the

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station, which is a British Rail station with a lot of exposed steel character to it, arches and so on. So, Bruce’s idea was to build something that would bring the feeling and the architecture of the Liverpool Street Station out into these buildings. But also it’s a building, an isolated building.

Blum: Was it a stock exchange?

Iyengar: No, it was not a stock exchange.

Blum: What was it used for?

Iyengar: It was an office building. I think there might have been, at some point, some conservation of trading in there, but it ended up as an office building. So, the idea was to span across two hundred and sixty feet, come up with a structure that had a lot of character of exposure, right in front of the Liverpool station building. So we experimented… We came up with several different concepts. And all of these concepts relied on deep trusses, ten-story deep trusses that would span the entire two hundred and sixty feet to carry the building. And it seemed that when we came up with the idea for an arch—there are four arches that support the building—and it seemed like there was a lot more interest in that particular concept.

Blum: Was that because it was sympathetic to what was around it?

Iyengar: Sympathetic to the surroundings, and sympathetic to the existing station, which has also arch forms in it. And it was less industrial looking. The complete truss form would be more industrial. But it was less industrial looking.

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Blum: But it wasn’t very sympathetic to what had already been built, the row houses. They were typical British.

Iyengar: Which ones?

Blum: The attached houses. And then, here is this very strong building. Why was it called the Exchange House?

Iyengar: I believe there was some consideration for trading floors and exchanges in there. I think the name must have come from that.

Blum: But here is this very strong building that is very unlike the other buildings. Why was there such a big contrast?

Iyengar: Well, because you had to negotiate the railroad tracks. You know, negotiate an area of the railroad tracks that was thought to be unbuildable. They couldn’t even develop it at some point. At some point—initially, they thought that you couldn’t really develop this building, because you can’t build it very easily. And it would be too expensive to build.

Blum: So how were the owners convinced that they should try?

Iyengar: Well, because we came up with this concept: the arches to support the building. And also, when it came to be that this is a different character compared to the rest of it—rest of the complex—the client liked it, and they wanted to build it.

Blum: I see. What was new about this building, for the British?

Iyengar: Well, the first thing was the nature of the structure, the arches. Once we determined that we have a structure of that type, then the next conceptual

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development was with respect to the expression of it. How do we express this, express these arches? The arches themselves—you know, Bruce was very much interested in exposing them, if we could expose the steel of the arches, very similar to the Eiffel Tower, or many other buildings that had exposed steel on it. But we couldn’t really do it without going through the complicated process of fire engineering.

Blum: What is fire engineering?

Iyengar: Fire engineering is a new technology that had come about at that particular time that you could look at fires in an analytical way. You could actually create fires inside the building, using the amount of fire load. The fire load would be the furniture, and the other flammable materials inside the building. And that would give you some values as to what kind of fire you could have, analytically. And then you can say that these fires will project—depending on the ventilation—how far out of the building, how do they impinge on the metal surfaces of the outside. And then what kind of temperatures would be acquired because of this flame impingement? Can we design these columns and beams and support systems to withstand those temperatures, and see that the structure is stable? This is far different from the usual types of system where you would determine a certain amount of fire protection for the structural elements, either two hours or three hours, after which the fire engines are supposed to come and put out the fire. So you have a fire rating. It’s a prescriptive approach. It’s not an engineering approach, it’s a prescriptive approach that you have to have two hours from this element, three hours from this element, and so on. And how you achieve that is to fireproof it with either concrete, a sprayed on fire protection; in which case it would completely camouflage the form of the steel, because of the fire protection. So if we wanted to remove the fire protection, they had to prove that the building is safe in a fire. So the fire engineering came about because of that: to generate a fire analytically, and be able to determine

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the temperatures of the columns, and show that even with the fire, the building is stable. So this is a new engineering approach that came about. I think some researchers in Britain, actually, had come up with these analytical formulations.

Blum: Oh, so was it a new feature?

Iyengar: It was. It was a new feature. It had just come onboard. And they had indicated that you would be able to use some of those techniques to determine the temperatures. And we consulted with them, and we borrowed the technology to assess our building with respect to that. So, the exterior arches—the outside arches are exposed, and they’re set about five feet from the face of the building, from the cladding surface of the building.

Blum: You mean they’re in front of?

Iyengar: In front of. Outside of it, in order to be able to better exhibit the arch character, and the structural character of the arches. So, it was very much driven by the structural logic of not only the arch and its components, but how the frame is suspended and supported on the arch. And should the arch be a solid form? Should it be more trellis-like? And all this went into the details of expressing the structure, expressing the steel—the exposed steel. So, the idea was to have a rectilinear frame, which would support the floor system, and then introduce it into the four arches that would span across two hundred and sixty feet. And the outside arches would be exposed. And a lot of detailing work went on to make sure that the steel is very expressive. You know, to bring out the character of the steel. In other words, the flanges and those elements were all exposed to see that the character of the steel is expressed.

Blum: How was this built design accepted by the general British population?

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Iyengar: Well, the general population, I think, accepted it okay, although the Prince didn’t like it.

Blum: Prince Charles? Because he didn’t like anything modern?

Iyengar: He didn’t like anything modern. He thought this was too machine-like. So he criticized the building.

Blum: Did he make a statement that was published?

Iyengar: Oh, he made a statement. I think it may have been published. I’m sure it got published in newspapers. But the client liked it. They were looking for some expression of structure—that the great railroad stations of Britain had all this character, exposed steel character. And to bring out the character of that kind of steel in a building, with exposed steel, was something new.

Blum: And eventually, was it accepted?

Iyengar: Oh yes, it was accepted.

Blum: Not only was it accepted, I’ve got a long list of awards that I selected out of a much longer list. I’ve listed two, four, six awards that the building received.

Iyengar: Yeah. I imagine so.

Blum: And there were many more that could be on this list. So, about this time in your career, you said, “It was the best of times for me to be part of this creative process.”

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Iyengar: You don’t get an opportunity really, if you’re an engineer, to play an equal role to the architect. You know. And then this was one of those buildings where we had this opportunity to do that. And Bruce was, you know, he gave me that kind of a responsibility.

[Tape 4: Side B] Iyengar: And he would even question the logic of it, Why did you do it this way? Why did you do it that way? Is that its real structure? Is this structural logic? And then he would always insist that we bring out the character of the real structure. Structural logic meant a great deal to him. The way the connections appeared, the way the bolts appear. And all these things were very important, how the connections were. And he kind of carried on the steel exposure to the under side of the first floor exposed plaza. And you can look up and see the character of the steel exposed.

Blum: And you were part of all this.

Iyengar: We were all part of this. Yeah. Well, I think what I meant was in the sense that I took the lead, given the opportunity to take the lead, to come up with the ideas. And then Bruce would look at them, review them, massage them, and change them, and we would discuss them. And then we would adopt it.

Blum: Was that the same technique as he and Faz used?

Iyengar: Oh yeah.

Blum: But Faz was gone by then so you were…

Iyengar: This was much more so, because here we were getting into more details. In Hancock there was a lot of discussion about the structure, but you didn’t get into the details of the nuts and the bolts. And then here,

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everything is seen. Every connection is seen: how the welding was done, and the bolts, and the number of bolts. And we discussed how many bolts do you need, and how many number of bolts you need. Isn’t that too many bolts? Can’t we use a higher strength bolt, and reduce the number of bolts so that it looks better. So these kinds of discussions went into extreme details, because you see every little part of the structure.

Blum: And Bruce was relating to you directly, instead of through, or with, Faz.

Iyengar: That’s right.

Blum: Did you ever have the feeling that maybe you were in Faz’s shadow?

Iyengar: Yeah, I felt it until… This is natural that I would feel that—I felt that he got—he was a very dynamic person. Faz was very expressive, very communicative, and he gave a lot of talks. And then he was very well recognized. Faz, to his credit, when I became a partner, he said, “I’m not going to work with you on the same project. You work on your own projects.”

Blum: He was setting you free.

Iyengar: He was setting me free. So, it was a way to say that, you know, you’ve got to come up with your own ideas. And if you want to talk to me, that’s fine. But you have to come up with your own ideas. And yes, I was in his shadow in the initial part, but after I became partner, no. Not after that.

Blum: Hal, you said that before we move on, there were some gaps you’d like to fill. Would you do that now?

Iyengar: Well, there’s one gap that I don’t know if I expressed it adequately enough: the period between 1963 and 1980 was a period where a lot of

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systems evolved. And there was this systems evolution that I talked about. And the amazing thing was that we were able to fit each one of the systems, and make it a reality in a kind of a sequence. We started with the frame building at the BMA, and then it went on to Brunswick building; and then the One Shell Plaza—One Shell Plaza building in Houston, and One Shell Square in New Orleans. And then the Hancock building and Sears Tower in Chicago. Each one of them were part of this evolution. And they used a different structural system to bring about higher efficiencies as the buildings went taller. So, this was the notion that Faz started in the 1960s, that the amazing thing was that he was not going to be able to recognize it early on, but be able to realize it in his own lifetime. So it’s a very significant thing.

Blum: Let me ask: how far-reaching was the system that Faz developed, that you followed, and Bruce was interested in? How far-reaching was it, in terms of influencing other architects at the time?

Iyengar: Well, it was very far-reaching, because there are many other buildings that used the systems that were devised at that particular time, especially the exterior tubular form. There were many buildings with the closely- spaced column formation on the outside of the building. That was used by many other architects.

Blum: Can you think of an example where another firm, other than SOM, used any of the systems that you and Faz developed?

Iyengar: Well, there were—I can’t think of them right now, but there was one building in Houston, which is thirty-five stories tall. It used an exterior tubular system.

Blum: Do you know who the architects were?

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Iyengar: I think it was I.M. Pei. Of course, though, each project had to be molded to the requirements of the particular project. You know. And it’s not that they copied what we did, but what I’m saying is it had an influence on the type of systems that people came up with.

Blum: Well, I was thinking more about something like the Mies phenomenon. I mean, Mies did it, and then so many people who followed his thinking did it again, and again, and again, and again.

Iyengar: Yeah. It was very similar to that. I think it was followed by many other architects and engineers.

Blum: I see. Well, that is a useful chart that shows the progression. Who drew that chart?

Iyengar: Well, initially, Faz drew that chart in 1964. It’s not as extensive as the chart I showed. It just had three or four systems. It showed the frame building, and then a building with trusses, and a tubular building, and the truss-tube building. And there are three or four buildings, kind of projected, that we could use for different heights of the building, going anywhere from thirty stories to a hundred stories. And so it was—he kind of theorized that we’ve got to get away from the frame building. That was the building type that had been used most frequently up until that time. And then he said, “You can’t keep using the same system when the building height increases, because of the needs of the structure.” And he had to come up with a different assembly of elements and system.

Blum: Was there any thought that there was a competition between what Faz was doing and what Mies was doing?

Iyengar: I don’t think it was a competition. Mies didn’t come up with a structural system. He had a structural system, which was primarily the frame

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building, but he kind of came up with architectural expressions that fit the frame. He was more concerned about the details of the frame expressing them clearly and in a frame format. He wasn’t that much interested in coming up with different types of systems for different heights, and so on and so forth, like Faz did. So there was no competition in that sense. And as far as I can see, whatever Faz came up with, and Bruce came up with, is in keeping with the Miesian principle, and not in competition with it.

Blum: Well, were there other types?

Iyengar: Well, I think the Exchange House, with the exposed steel architecture was another breakthrough project, in the sense that we were able to express steel with all its character. And Bruce very much got involved in that, in that kind of an architecture. And he was very much interested in pursuing that further. So there were two other buildings: one building in London also, Ludgate Center. It followed the frame principle.

Blum: What principle did you say it followed?

Iyengar: Frame principle. Very similar to the BMA building, but in exposed steel. This is all exposed steel, and then the building follows his example with the Sol Lewitt type frame into which you can introduce office spaces. And some were left open, and some were filled in. So this was again a notion of a frame building, clearly expressing it, and the ability to expose the steel was very much in keeping with this architecture.

Blum: Why did it matter whether a building was built either in steel or in concrete?

Iyengar: Well, they are two different building materials. They have different characters. And concrete, of course, has a masonry character. It’s a wall

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kind of an element, wall kind of a character. The most natural way to build a wall is with concrete. Steel is much more articulated, and it’s much more expressive as an individual member. So when we talk about the tubular structure with the closely spaced column, the more natural material for it would be the concrete, because you could mold it into that form. Whereas a frame form with crisp expression of the beams and the columns would be better fitted with steel structure. So, this building, again, in Ludgate Center, and immediately following the Exchange House, used the exposed steel architecture. And there was another project called Stockley Park, in the U. K. [Uxbridge]. It also used exposed steel, but they were not tall buildings. It was two- three- or four-story buildings. There are many, many buildings there, designed by different architects. It clearly expresses again the nature of the exposed steel in its architecture. In Stockley Park there were many architects. It was kind of a showcase, I believe, that each—there were several buildings two-stories tall, and about two hundred thousand square feet each one. And there were several buildings that were designed by people like Norman Foster and other architects. And Bruce had a couple of buildings in that complex. Cesar Pelli had a building there too. I believe there are about five or six different architects that were given different buildings to design.

Blum: We’re looking at a brochure with the buildings you’re talking about, where they’re illustrated and pictured. What about this one? This is Gehry's fish.

Iyengar: Well, that is a complex in Barcelona called Hotel de las Artes. It used to be called Olympica, because it’s related to the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. And the whole area in front of the ocean had been cleared up, and then it was being developed. And the gateway to this development were two towers. One tower was designed by Bruce, another tower by a Spanish architect.

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Blum: Who?

Iyengar: I don’t recall at this particular time. So, again, Bruce pursued the idea of exposed steel, in a tower form. And exposed steel architecture for the Exchange House was for a bridge kind of a format, where the building had to span two hundred and sixty feet. Down here you had this clear tower form, forty-five stories tall, a hotel and apartment building. And then connected with it was a huge retail. And the retail had varieties of exposed steel elements, and there was a huge fish architecture. And Bruce thought that he would bring in Frank Gehry to design the retail part, and Bruce would design the tower. So there was a combination of Bruce, and Frank Gehry designing the retail part. The fish sculpture that you pointed out was designed by Gehry.

Blum: It was sort of one of his trademarks.

Iyengar: It’s one of the trademarks. He had several fish sculptures, one in Tokyo. And he was always fascinated with fish, I guess. But anyway, the tower form is clearly an exoskeletal form, in the sense that the structural steel is pulled out of the plane of the facade of the building. This was also a requirement for the fire engineering now, so we don’t have to fireproof it, that the steel be on the outside of the cladding and the window wall. So, clearly, the corners: they are diagonalized vertical legs, and they are interconnected by horizontal trusses at three different locations. And it’s kind of a super frame kind of an idea, super frame in the sense that the whole form is connected with interconnections and vertical legs. The vertical legs themselves are trusses, diagonalized elements, and they’re all exposed in this particular case.

Blum: This was Bruce’s project?

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Iyengar: This was Bruce’s project.

Blum: How did Bruce come to select Frank Gehry? Their work seems so different.

Iyengar: Well, I think they wanted something different for the retail part.

Blum: It seems philosophically they’re so different, almost incompatible.

Iyengar: Philosophically they are so different. They wanted to be philosophically different in this structure. There is the orderly structure, pure structure, logic, and all that kind of thing, for the tower with the exposed structural steel. They wanted much more playful and much more random, I would say, in different kinds of structures for the retail part.

Blum: Did Bruce ever discuss with you that he was going to invite Gehry to participate?

Iyengar: No. No, I didn’t realize that until one day I was called in, and then they were discussing the tower, and the retail part. And then he introduced me to Frank Gehry. And we started talking about various elements that Frank would be concerned with.

Blum: How did Frank Gehry strike you?

Iyengar: Well, Frank Gehry is, at this particular point, I thought he was more of an introvert. He didn’t express in detailed terms what his philosophy was, or what his principle was. He wouldn’t expound on it. He would just do it, and then he would look at it. But it’s not the kind of thing that you would sit down and discuss. He would discuss it after he came up with some ideas. Whereas with Bruce, you would sit down and start sketching some ideas, several different ideas, and would discuss those ideas: the

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developments of those ideas, and so on, and the logic of those ideas, and the rationale for it, and so on. But Frank, he did his own creation. And there was no particular explanation of it, in the sense of I’m doing this because of this, because of that.

Blum: Was this another Gordon Bunshaft method of working, where he pulls it all together, and then calls in other people?

Iyengar: Somewhat like that. But it was different from Gordon Bunshaft. Gordon Bunshaft still liked to discuss, and he still liked to use logic in his buildings, whether it is structural or not. He would be able to sketch certain things, and be able to talk about that, and what he was trying to create.

Blum: And Gehry?

Iyengar: And Gehry is more like an artist. And what he created was private. And he would do that sometimes, I’m told, in seclusion. And then he would come up with these ideas, and they would build models. He wouldn’t sketch. It would go directly from his ideas in his head into models. And the sketches would come later. So his method of working really was much different from anything I had been used to. But in this particular case, the elements were simple. The retail elements were not two stories tall. He did have a huge sculpture that he came up with, the fish sculpture is fronting the Mediterranean. It’s about a hundred and fifty feet long, and thirty feet wide and forty feet high, and it’s set above the retail, and just kind of hovers over it. And this was the first project that I worked on with Frank Gehry’s office. And then we came up with a structure for it. There are internal ribs in the fish, very similar to the fish form—fish bones, so to speak. And then it’s all clad with copper strips on the outside.

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Blum: How did you come to work on this project?

Iyengar: Well, it was kind of a transition from Exchange House, which I worked on, which had exposed steel architecture. And then Ludgate I worked on with Bruce. Again, this one had exposed steel architecture. By now we had kind of evolved a methodology for designing exposed steel buildings, using the fire engineering methods I talked about yesterday. And then after that, the Stockley Park buildings again used exposed steel. And then it was natural that Bruce was thinking about an iconish building, in exposed steel architecture again. So it was natural that he would talk to me, because we were all working on continual exposed steel buildings.

Blum: So that was when you worked on the building with Bruce. How did you come to work with Gehry on the sculpture?

Iyengar: Well, because this is all the retail part. Gehry didn’t have any particular problem in using us as engineers with him.

Blum: Well, were you still with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill?

Iyengar: I was with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill at that time.

Blum: How is it you worked with another office, if you were still with Skidmore?

Iyengar: I was still with Skidmore. But there was no hard and fast rule that I shouldn’t work with other architects, only that I had to gain the permission of some of the SOM architects, to see whether or not they had objections to it.

Blum: And what was the result of that?

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Iyengar: There was no objection to me working with Frank Gehry, because his architecture was so different from what we had been doing. And there would be no element of competition between SOM and Gehry, so it was appropriate that… We were doing the tower and we were doing the foundations; we were doing many of the structural elements for it, because it was all one part of the one contract. And the retail part, we thought—Frank thought it was okay if we continued the structural design of it, because since we were already involved in the tower. And then the fish sculpture grew out of it, and then he said, “Would you like to do the fish?” So I said, “Fine. We’ll do the fish as well.”

Blum: You’ve called architecture of the type that Bruce does “rational,” and the type that Gehry does “irrational.” Would you explain that?

Iyengar: Well, irrational in the sense that every time I would come up with some ideas which seemed very orderly, very systematized, he would immediately say, “No, that’s not what I want.”

Blum: How would you deal with that?

Iyengar: Gehry would say that. And then I immediately realized that he was looking for some other conflict. He is looking for conflict in the structure, in the sense that if it was too orderly and harmonious with each other, it’s something that he didn’t like. He wanted something that is disharmonious. And there was a conflict always. The structure came and butted with something else, and didn’t complete itself. So his rationale was irrational, I guess. It didn’t fit any particular structural logic. If it did fit a structural logic, he didn’t want it, in terms of an expression. But his notion was to celebrate steel, not in a logical sense of buildings that we had been used to, but in its various forms. In other words, he would create—in the fish a joint where we had members coming from different

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angles, maybe eight members would be coming in, clashing in, into a central point. He would say, “Can we get twelve members in there?” He wanted more members clashing in, so they’re all colliding at this particular point. So, he was very much interested in exploring conflict in a structure.

Blum: How did you discover that about him, which was so different from what you were used to?

Iyengar: Well, at first I didn’t understand it. And he would bring on these, and then we would make some suggestions like, couldn’t this be this way or that way, to bring some order to the structure? He would say, “No, that’s not what we want.” Being a retail structure, he was more interested in the sculptural aspect of steel. He wanted to express steel, but more in a sculptural aspect. That means he didn’t want any particular logic to it. So, the fish—of all the structures that I’ve dealt with, the fish is more regular, more organized, than other structures. There are a series of ribs inside, inside the fish, and then the copper stripping on the outside. It’s fairly orderly. But when it came to take the fish and put it on the ground, he wanted varieties of steel formations there that would support it.

Blum: And did that have to be orderly?

Iyengar: No, it was not partly orderly, but it also got some conflicts with many other members coming in.

Blum: Did that trouble you, to work in a mode that was so different from what you had been working in?

Iyengar: No, it didn’t bother me. I think we—very quickly, I understood that Gehry is looking for a different aspect of architecture. He was looking for a sculptural effect. He was looking for play of light and shade, and things

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like that, and how the steel would appear. Gehry wanted to use steel because it had crisp flange forms. He wanted to express the thickness of steel; in other words, an I-section. It’s not a solid section; it’s an open section. You see the thinness of the flanges, and light would shine in a certain way on it. And he was interested in expressing all these different forms of the steel.

Blum: Did you use a computer for this job?

Iyengar: We used a computer for the fish, but the rest of it was not that complicated, even though it was disorderly. He gave us much more than what we needed for the structure. So it wasn’t that difficult. We didn’t need to use the computer for that. But for the fish, to do all the fish form, yes, certainly we used the computer. Both Gehry’s office and we used it. Gehry’s office also used the computer and we used the computer too.

Blum: I read somewhere that someone said, “Isn’t it ironic that to execute this very new concept you had to go back to the computer to realize this hand-crafted piece.”

Iyengar: Well, I think Frank had realized–—he and his team had realized––that in order to express his geometric forms it wouldn’t be possible to communicate that just through paper media, in two-dimensional paper form. You needed models, certainly. And most of his schemes that I worked with were conceived in model form. And then somehow they were translated into the two-dimensional paper form and made into drawings.

Blum: But that was a subsequent step.

Iyengar: That was a subsequent step. But when he discovered that you could have a computer that could take this form and rationalize it, and then treat it as

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a mathematical proposition, he was very much interested in it. By that I mean the surface could be defined in an analytical fashion. Many of the surfaces that artists come up with you can’t define, it’s not a piece of an arc, it’s not a piece of a circle, it’s not a piece of an ellipse. And so you had to take a piece of each one of these different types of forms, and then join them together to create the whole form. It’s very difficult to do it manually. But there was a computer program called CATIA that the French had come up with.

Blum: C-A-T-I-A?

Iyengar: C-A-T-I-A. The French had come up with it that they used for the design of planes and automobile shapes—forms, that could take an approximate hand-molded form and then rationalize it into bits and pieces of geometry that were analytically feasible. And you would take a piece of a curve with a piece of a straight line, and rationalize it, and you would be able to define it mathematically. Once you define it mathematically, then you could go ahead and build it. How do you communicate the certain geometric form, which is very complicated? You start with one complete circle, or one complete ellipse, or it undulates in some fashion. You either communicate it by means of a model, or by means of curvatures with radii focal point at different places. So, it’s very difficult to do it manually, but the computer was able to do it. So whatever Gehry came up with, using the CATIA, it became much more obvious when we started working on the Guggenheim in Bilbao with Frank Gehry that you certainly needed the computer to be able to communicate, and to be able to define the shapes.

Blum: When you worked on the Guggenheim Museum, were you still with SOM?

Iyengar: I was still with SOM.

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Blum: Wasn't that very close to your retirement?

Iyengar: Very close to my retirement. And Frank had known me from working with him in the fish sculpture. And then, to some extent, I believe he was interested in pursuing maybe some exposed structure, something of that nature in Bilbao. And then, he was also interested in the kind of discussions that we had. When we met, Frank, I and Bruce, Bruce and I would discuss the structure quite readily. And Frank would listen to it. At one point, he told me he was amazed that we were able to communicate with each other these ideas, because perhaps this is something he was not used to. He was not used to talking to engineers. He was used to coming up with each new thing, and then engineers would come up with their system. So, he was motivated to work with me, from that sense. And then when they won the competition for the Bilbao Museum, Jim Glymph, from their office—he’s the project manager; he was also the designer, and the senior designer in Gehry’s office who worked on the fish—he called me and then asked would we work with him on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao?

Blum: What was the timing of that invitation to work on the Guggenheim Museum and your retirement?

Iyengar: My retirement was about six months away.

Blum: In 1992. So the invitation preceded your retirement.

Iyengar: That’s right. So I said yes. And I talked to Bruce. No, Bruce wasn’t there at that time. I talked to some of the other partners, and they didn’t have any objections to it, so I went ahead.

Blum: Who was running the office at that time? Was it Adrian?

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Iyengar: Adrian and Jeff McCarthy.

Blum: And they agreed?

Iyengar: And they said, “There’s no problem with that.” So I told Gehry’s office that we would be interested in it. And then they wanted a proposal. And they said, Well, we’d like to see some drawings. And what we got was this, this sketch of the elevation. They had developed some plans to show. But they had developed models, some models.

Blum: Well, the models do give you a much better idea of what to expect, certainly in terms of inside space.

Iyengar: They did go through the programmatic requirement of the different galleries, and they had some notion of how the shapes would occur; but not in a fashion that you could really understand. So we made some kind of a proposal, and it was accepted. We were widely off the mark, of course.

Blum: Was the proposal made by you alone? Or you with SOM?

Iyengar: Me with SOM, with SOM.

Blum: Could you defer your retirement until this job was completed?

Iyengar: I had determined that I would retire, even prior to this commitment. I wanted to retire the end of the next year. I had planned to do that. And then I had indicated to Jim Glymph, I may possibly retire, but I would continue working on the project as a consulting partner for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. And they said, There’s no problem as long as there’s continuity. So that’s exactly what happened.

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Blum: So the invitation to participate came before your official retirement and you continued on as an advisor.

Iyengar: I continued afterwards.

Blum: So what was it like working with Gehry on this very important project?

Iyengar: Well, from the very beginning when we looked at some of the three- dimensional models, pictures that he had sent, the first thing that went through our mind was that we really had to understand what’s happening here.

Blum: You mean you couldn’t understand it from that sketch?

Iyengar: No. You understand in the sense that… but we couldn’t understand how we were going to structure it, what kind of a structure would be feasible. You know. Where would we place the columns? How would they interact with the galleries? You know, galleries basically wanted to be column-free. So where do we put the support system? It was not obvious—like many other structures–where we’d come up with the structural grid for the plan form, and it would stack one above the other. It was not that kind of a possibility here at all. So, we said, Well, this is highly geometric. There are a lot of forms that are sitting on each other, and then we would need to understand how they all relate to each other. But we also need to pursue thinking about the structure, and how we can structure it. Gehry, of course—you know, this was the initial proposal they had for the competition. And then they really went to work. You know. This wasn’t the final form. So they would have for each iteration they would have a model. In Gehry’s office they would mount it on the wall. Like a painting, it would be attached to the wall. There were about seventeen or eighteen of these.

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Blum: All different stages, or all different variations?

Iyengar: All different stages: some variations, and all different stages. So they would examine the forms and their relationship to each other through models.

Blum: Did working with the model help you with what you had to do?

Iyengar: Oh yes. Oh yeah. Well, that was the only way we could understand it, because there were no drawings that we could… I could take a look at a plan, but that doesn’t tell me much. That doesn’t tell me much as to what the eventual three-dimensional form of the whole complex was. So we had to—for nearly six months, while this design development was occurring, all we did was observe. All we did was go around the model, tried to understand what each one of these shapes are. What is this curve, and what is that line? And how does that relate to this particular other line? And we were following also the developments as Gehry changed each one of these. You know. And Gehry kept asking, How do we structure it? And we said, Well, we need to understand the forms first before we start jumping into defining the structure. And at one point, when it was fairly well developed, we started thinking about, initially, a stick approach. By that I mean beams and columns, and some inclined beams and some inclined columns within the forms. And we came to the conclusion that he couldn’t really do it that way. You needed a much stronger logic. For instance, most of the elements that the structure would be composed of would be somewhat linear elements, and if you composed it for a beam and column kind of a stick system, you could take an approach that, here is my structure and here is your cladding, you can do whatever you want to do with it.

Blum: How did the two meet?

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Iyengar: Well, how do the two meet? This is the question. And then chord space. If a structure is here and the cladding is five feet away, it comes together at some other point with each other. Then, that’s all wasted space. You know. In other words, you’re building a wall with variable thickness, depending on how the curvatures work. And Frank had worked with this on some other project, I think the Weisman Institute, or something like that, in Minneapolis.

Blum: Was it a museum of art, the Weisman Art Museum?

Iyengar: Weisman Museum of Art. And he had used concrete bearing walls. Each one of these curved forms was a wall onto which you would attach the panels. We thought about that, and Gehry suggested that we think about it. But the scale of the things was so big—this is an enormous scale—that just coming up with building the concrete walls into these forms would have been a chore in itself: to define the geometry, to define the form work, and so on. So we thought we needed a structure where we could prefabricate it in the shop to the position that we wanted, and then be able to assemble it in the field. There is no vertical and horizontal, everything is—they’re all in different angles. So anybody who was erecting it would not have a proper reference. So they would have to fit the structure, which is already predetermined, to develop that shape. So we thought about it and we quickly came to the conclusion that we had to use the form itself. Since there were solid forms—solid looking forms on the outside, we had to use the form itself. We had to use it as if we’d, say, a thin sheet of steel. If we took a thin sheet of steel and wrapped it around each one of these forms, and supported it, it would work. It would support itself. The question is how do we make this sheet of steel? So what we came up with was a discretizing this solid form, this sheet, into a lattice work of members: vertical and horizontal and diagonals, in such a small scale that you can fit it within the curve. In other words, we came

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up with a three-meter by three-meter module on this lattice frame. Then you can go around each one of these, and then fit that matrix, and then fit that lattice work. And then it would more or less correspond to the curvatures and the shapes that this form required. And it would be structurally stable. Then you could attach the final titanium cladding to it. So this was the scheme we came up with, after a lot of observation of the forms, and studying the forms. They also had fiberoptics, fiberoptic wands. In other words, you could introduce a wand inside the forms, and be able to look at it on the TV, like you’re looking at the inside of a person, or something like that in medical technology. The same technology was being used here. So we were able to examine the inside surfaces, and how each one of these things relate to each other on the inside.

Blum: That all sounds very, very challenging.

Iyengar: It’s very challenging. And we had a hole in the model, based on the model. It was mounted on a platform.

[Tape 5: Side A] Iyengar: The structure was molded to the architecture. The architectural walls, which are the walls of these forms, were gridded, three-meter by three meters. And the lattice framework was fitted in with the linear members using very conventional steel. As you can see, there’s a jumble of steel up in here, fitting each one of these forms. At some point, we wanted to organize it even further. One approach was for us to take a three-meter grid, three-meter spacing in two directions. And then pierce the forms with three-meter grids. Then, this defined the framework of horizontals and verticals and diagonals. And that was how the forms were fit in with the beams and the columns on a three-meter grid.

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Blum: Now was this system that you devised for this very flamboyant kind of architecture, a system that you could use again, or Gehry would use again, with or without you?

Iyengar: He could if he wanted to. But, he didn’t.

Blum: Well, he went on to do the bandshell at Millennium Park.

Iyengar: Millennium Park. We kind of used a similar approach in the trusses of the bandshell forms. We used a similar approach, but not quite exactly that. We wanted to conform to the shapes that he came up with.

Blum: But did it not have the latticework?

Iyengar: It did have the latticework. It was very similar. But this was much more extensive, because we not only had to fit each one of the forms, these forms had to be supported on each other. And there were places where we needed more curvature, because it could act like a shell, like a dome in the horizontal plane. And a dome derives its strength from its form. And this is a piece of dome, and that’s a piece of a dome. So we said we don’t quite have enough curvature, can you give me more curvature? And then Gehry was able to accommodate us in many cases with more curvature, more curves.

Blum: You mentioned yesterday that the steel industry participated in certain projects, in certain ways. Did they have an interest in this kind of work, for example, Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum?

Iyengar: Well that was one of our concerns, whether the steel industry would be interested in it. It’s not a super structure mega project—in terms of the steel, the amount of steel being involved.

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Blum: But it’s so spectacular.

Iyengar: It’s spectacular. It’s an image building. So they were able to participate, not only to do this, but also to improve the steel company's own state of the art because we also related to them. Look, we are going to give you computer files of the members of the geometric form, in addition to the paperwork—drawings. And we said that the drawings may be only incidental, you would be better off using the computer database to generate your structure. They were very much interested in that, because they were able to take that database and be able to have a numerically controlled machine that could manufacture these elements of this latticework to the exact lengths they wanted. So they were able to advance the state of the art in the sense that the computer not only went from Gehry’s office to the structure, and the structural grid was on the database; but also it went on further. All the depictions of the members went on further to the contractor, who could then use the computer again to manufacture the steel pieces. So it was a process that was driven by computer linkage, for the most part. Because when they fitted in the steel they couldn’t plumb it or level it, and stuff like that. Because you don’t know how the curves come, you know, in the field. So once you fit it in, you hope everything is appropriately fitted in to the form, so that it will come to this particular form that they wanted.

Blum: While this was being constructed, were you in transit often to Bilbao from Chicago?

Iyengar: Yeah, I visited the jobsite a few times. Fortunately we had very good associate engineers who followed it, Spanish engineers that followed it very carefully on the site. And we interacted. We checked the shop drawings in Chicago, and then we traveled back and forth.

Blum: Were there any problems getting this up?

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Iyengar: No. No, I think Gehry was amazed how orderly the structure was. I thought, My goodness, he’s not going to like it. But then again, he said, “Well, it’s very orderly.” He was very pleased with that.

Blum: Well that must have been an exciting project.

Iyengar: It is a very exciting project. It’s quite different. It’s a different kind of participation. And I think we were able to come up with a nice solution as contrasted with, for instance, at the same time, Gehry was working on the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. That took the other approach: the sticks, beams and columns approach. And had a great deal of difficulty with it. It was billed initially, and the steel prices came out very high, and had to be redone two or three times.

Blum: Did you participate in that at all?

Iyengar: No, we didn’t participate in that.

Blum: The Bilbao commission was 1997. Had you completely retired by then?

Iyengar: Yeah, I was completely retired. I was still consulting, on a project by project basis.

Blum: And then in 2003 you were working on the Millennium Park project.

Iyengar: Millennium Park, right.

Blum: How did that come to you?

Iyengar: Well, I think initially it was an SOM project. Adrian Smith was the design partner for the Millennium Park. Skidmore had participated with other

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associate engineers and architects to come up with the entire thing above the railroad and the garage, with various elements.

Blum: Oh, do you mean the underground parking?

Iyengar: Underground parking. And they had come up with a scheme for the ground floor and then the Millennium Park, with the bandstand and everything else.

Blum: Did SOM do the planning of the area?

Iyengar: SOM did the planning of the area.

Blum: Oh, I see. And that was the way you came to the project? But you had been retired for four years by then.

Iyengar: I came into the project through Skidmore when the Millennium Park authorities determined because of the connection with the Pritzkers they wanted to bring Frank Gehry to design the bandshell.

Blum: Whose idea was that? The city’s or the Pritzkers’?

Iyengar: Pritzkers. I think they were the big donors for the performing hall, the park. And so they said they didn’t want Skidmore to do the concert shell. They wanted Gehry. They wanted something exuberant and flamboyant, in the style of Gehry. And by that time we had completed Bilbao.

Blum: Did Bilbao take from 1997 until 2003 to complete?

Iyengar: Until 2002, 2001—something like that.

Blum: Oh, so you were still connected to SOM.

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Iyengar: Although retired. So, since I had this working relationship with Gehry, Skidmore asked me would I want to consult on this project, and work with Gehry. And I said, “Sure.” So that’s how come I got involved with that.

Blum: So you were familiar with his mode of operation.

Iyengar: With his mode of operation.

Blum: That must have made it a little easier. You didn’t first have to understand him; you already did.

Iyengar: Yeah. We knew what we were up to, and it was much easier. So this was a continuation—this was a different kind of a project, of course. There’s the park itself, the performing part is the lawn part that is defined by this overhead trellis. He had the notion of defining the space by means of an open trellis. And then the rationale that was given was that–—I don’t know if it really had to be that–—he didn’t like the idea of loudspeaker towers like in, for instance, Ravinia Park, he had these towers that once in a while that you had loudspeakers on them. And he wanted recommendations from the consultants where you needed more speakers, many more speakers to get the surround sound kind of acoustics. And it would be appropriate to have a basket-weave, which not only defined the space, but it would give you a means of suspending these speakers. So that was the rationale for it.

Blum: Do you think the trellis was an effective solution for the problem?

Iyengar: Yeah, I think so.

Blum: Everyone says the acoustics are very good.

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Iyengar: Yeah, I think it was driven by the acoustics from the very beginning. And then we had to come up with a very minimum structure for it; you know, with pipes at forty to sixty feet on centers, and a basket-weave that would just about do the job, nothing more.

Blum: Well it defines the space also.

Iyengar: It defines the space. It is designed to carry the load of the speakers, and the wind loads and the ice loads, and all those things. But at some point, after the completion of the project they wanted us to cover it, part of it.

Blum: What would be the purpose of covering it?

Iyengar: Well, they were concerned that during inclement weather—rain, and so on and so forth—people wouldn’t be able to sit there and…

Blum: Oh, do you mean to cover the entire space, not cover only the equipment?

Iyengar: No, to cover the seated area. So we said, No, we didn’t design for it. We just designed for the wind load and the ice load, and we didn’t design for the whole thing to be covered. So we said no, we couldn’t do it. You would have to make major changes to it. You had to come up with an entirely different structure. Of course, Gehry didn’t want to do anything of that kind.

Blum: I see. But Gehry’s work in Millennium Park was not limited to just the bandshell and the trellis over the lawn. He also did the bridge that spans Columbus Drive.

Iyengar: Yeah, he did the bridge. Centennial Park. That’s adjacent to Lake Shore Drive. So we had to negotiate Columbus Drive, which is eighty feet wide.

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And then, there were some concerns, according to Gehry, about the street noise from Columbus Drive. Was there enough space, or separation, between Michigan Avenue and the performing center? But however, Columbus Drive came much closer to the performing center. There was concern there would be noise during the performance from the cars. So they wanted some kind of a buffer. Then Gehry thought of this serpentine form, if it was made solid enough, it would act as an acoustical buffer. I don’t know if it worked or not. But that was one of the rationale.

Blum: Well, I, personally, have never been disturbed by any automobile traffic during a concert.

Iyengar: So, instead of going to the bridge, and then getting up the bridge and going out to the other side, he came up with this long form, which not only served for the handicapped access, but also acted as a separation— an acoustical separation wall between Columbus Drive and the park.

Blum: Did you work on that with him?

Iyengar: Yeah. I worked on that with him. And they wanted, initially, to fly across, but we were not able to do that. We put a column in the center of the thing, and then it had to go into the underground garage, and we had to investigate all of that.

Blum: In some of the things I’ve read about Millennium Park and the BP bridge, they call the bridge a rain screen. What is that?

Iyengar: I haven’t heard that.

Blum: The article said the cladding for the bridge is a rain screen. What is the bridge clad in?

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Iyengar: It’s stainless steel, stainless steel sheets. I don’t know why they would call it a rain screen. Perhaps it’s called a rain screen because the water can go through the joints. That’s probably the reason. The structure inside it is two concrete walls, and the sloping surfaces are steel beams, and then you’ve got the cladding on top of it, the steel sheets on top of it. And then it’s one contiguous form. But the concrete walls terminate when we approached Columbus Drive, and then we have a steel truss that goes across in a curvilinear fashion, going over the top of the middle support to the other side. It’s all clad in stainless steel sheets, so you don’t see the structure. But you can see the solid form going through from one side to the other side, with kind of a slit underneath for the traffic in Columbus Drive.

Blum: Well, was that your last project?

Iyengar: That was the last project. And during that time, I also consulted on the Hong Kong Convention Center. You are already familiar with that?

Blum: Tell me about it. Was this Adrian’s work?

Iyengar: No, it was not. It was Larry Oltman'ss. I don’t know if you know him. He was a partner.

Blum: In which office?

Iyengar: He’s no longer with us. He was in the Chicago office. I don’t know how he got the commission, but he was involved with that particular project. He was the design partner. Then he went to London. And then, I think, he stayed there. He left Skidmore. I think he went to—he either stayed there, or went to Europe someplace. So, this design was very much like the symbol of the waterfront, very similar to the Opera House in Sydney Harbor.

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Blum: The Sydney Opera House by Jorn Utzon?

Iyengar: Yeah, the Opera House, with huge wings, and so on and so forth. It was a very exciting project. I acted as a consultant of that project as well.

Blum: As you look back over the span of your long and varied career, would you say that there were more exciting or less exciting projects that you worked on?

Iyengar: Oh, were there projects that are more exciting than others? Certainly. I think the five projects I most identify with, that gave me the most satisfaction was the Hancock, working as a project engineer with Faz; and then Sears Tower; and then the Exchange House in London; and Hotel de las Artes in Barcelona; and Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Blum: That’s a very impressive collection of award-winning buildings.

Iyengar: Yes.

Blum: When you were actively working in Chicago, were you a member of any clubs that would help promote your career as an engineer? Architect, slash, engineer?

Iyengar: Well I was involved in a lot of engineering organizations, structural engineering associations and civil engineering associations. But I was not a member of any architectural associations.

Blum: Why were you a member of the engineering groups? What benefit did you get from that?

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Iyengar: Well, it was to contribute to the profession, so to speak. And Faz always had an idea that whatever we came up with, we shouldn’t keep it to ourselves, that we should exhibit that—I mean, publicize that, publish articles. And he had published a lot of articles on the various projects that he had done.

Blum: And you?

Iyengar: I followed in a similar fashion. And we wrote about every single project that we thought was worthwhile publishing, but mostly in the engineering journals.

Blum: You might be interested to know that I spoke with someone who I think is the director of one of the engineering societies you belong to, and when I told her what we were going to do an oral history—she said, “Oh please, when you have it ready, please send us a copy.”

Iyengar: Well, we have gotten a lot of awards, and stuff like that from engineering firms and that’s no big deal.

Blum: Well, that’s your profession recognizing your contribution.

Iyengar: That’s right. I think the amazing thing was that we didn’t want to keep it to ourselves. So, it was satisfying not only to work on it, and also then after to tell the profession, this is what we’ve done. We didn’t have any sense that we wanted to keep all these ideas to ourselves. Architects, for instance, sometimes they don’t want to publish except in certain magazines, or certain things. They want to have a very exclusive kind of thing. We didn’t feel that way.

Blum: Well, what audience were you targeting when you wrote and published articles?

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Iyengar: Mostly engineers that were concerned with design of buildings.

Blum: Other engineers, your colleagues?

Iyengar: Other engineers. And every time it was always an interesting talk, to talk about the architecture and structural integration in the same office. How it all worked together, how did we work with the architects, and so on. And it was always an interesting discussion. Because much of the profession worked on the basis that the engineers and architects were separate; an architect does his work, and then the engineer comes and makes it work. And that arrangement still works, to some extent. But with the evolution of major buildings, you had a much closer relationship between the engineers and the architects. It has come to evolve that way, because they are dependent on each other, to some extent. So it was a very meaningful, very meaningful effort to publicize and write articles, and explore the technology.

Blum: As you look back, you look back at a very long career. What do you think has been the major change in the profession that you witnessed during that time?

Iyengar: Well, like I pointed out, the 1960s to 1980s were years of the structuralist period in tall building technology, where structural innovations, one after the other, were able to fit into different buildings. That type of logical evolution has stopped. It’s no longer there. Each building is an icon. Each building is a statement that requires a unique structure, not a structural system like we thought about—a complete system—but bits and pieces of structures that… Anything that you can throw into the mix that will make it work. That’s the technology, that’s the direction it seems to be going. And there are forms that are very difficult to engineer, but at the same time, they are coming onboard. For instance, the Chicago Spire

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project. And if somebody suggested that to me, I would say, this is completely anti-structural. And it’s not easy to form. They must have gone through hoops to make it work.

Blum: Do you think it works?

Iyengar: It must work, or else they wouldn’t build it.

Blum: Will it look like it looks in the photographs that have been published, when it’s up?

Iyengar: I’m sure it will. Santiago Calatrava is a good engineer and an architect, so. But it’s not a natural form for a tall building. And it’s not something we would have done in the 1980s and 1990s.

Blum: Did you ever teach?

Iyengar: I taught some courses early on. I participated with Faz at IIT, in the research projects, for a while. And then I used to teach at the Washington University in St. Louis. Bruce had a connection with the St. Louis University, and he wanted me to teach a course. So I flew every Wednesday to St. Louis, and taught a course in the afternoon on Wednesdays, and Thursday morning, and fly back. I did that for a couple of semesters. This was to teach architectural—structural concepts to architects, architectural graduate students.

Blum: Was that a good thing for you to do?

Iyengar: It was. But it didn’t work as well for me, because I wanted more collaboration. I just came and went.

Blum: You mean you wanted to team-teach?

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Iyengar: Team-teach, yes, I wanted more connection with the students. I just went in and taught the course, and came back. And if I wanted to discuss something, if they wanted to discuss something with me, I’m not there. So.

Blum: They had to do it by e-mail.

Iyengar: You had to do it by correspondence.

Blum: When was this that you were teaching?

Iyengar: That was about the same time that I was working on Hancock, in late 1970s. And then I taught at University of Illinois, a couple of courses— mostly engineering courses, still related to architecture, architectural concepts, and so on.

Blum: You were so closely connected to Bruce and Faz. What was the most important thing you learned from Bruce, for instance?

Iyengar: Well, the most important thing I learned, especially from both of them, is that you had to go beyond your own discipline. I think it is one of the pitfalls of engineers, that they’re so steeped in mathematics and the discipline requirements of their profession that they don’t go beyond that. It’s very important that they go beyond that.

Blum: Did Bruce do that?

Iyengar: Bruce did that.

Blum: Did Faz do that?

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Iyengar: Yeah, Faz did that, very much so. So he always said that, you know, “Look at all the architectural magazines, look at the different buildings, different types of architecture.” You know, travel was very much on everybody’s mind—Bruce’s and Faz’s. If you wanted to do good buildings, you have to go see buildings. You have to go see different types of buildings, whether they’re our buildings or somebody else’s buildings, and learn from that. And also learn from cultures, in traveling around the world. So you can’t just be doing structural analyses and structural designs in a vacuum. You have to do it openly. If you want to participate in architecture, then you had to understand architecture, understand what’s trying to be created. And then, even though our role is one of—it’s a secondary role, and the architect is the final decider of the form. But we can contribute to his vision in many ways. This was the message that was coming from Bruce and Faz both. And Bruce very much cultivated that. He didn’t exclude engineers, and come up with his concepts; he insisted that we come up with ideas first, sometimes, before he would even start thinking about the project. And then, we would have to come up with several ideas, and put it in front of him. Then he would be able to relate to it and then work on it. And then we would work on it together. The most profound statement that Bruce ever came up with after Faz’s demise was that we were able to think for each other. In other words, Faz knew exactly what Bruce wanted and Bruce knew what Faz wanted.

Blum: Well, that’s a remarkable situation, considering how independent each of the participants were.

Iyengar: That’s right. That’s right. So, that was the message from both of them.

Blum: Did your profession ever impact your family?

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Iyengar: Yes, quite a bit. I think I was very much involved with my profession, to a point that I was working long hours, and…

Blum: As almost all architects do, I understand.

Iyengar: And all engineers do. And more than anything else, travel took a big toll, between—especially when the London projects were going on, I traveled for five years, one week a month in London. So, it was quite demanding.

Blum: Of all the buildings that you built out of, say, the city of Chicago, particularly the overseas ones, have you seen them? For instance, the Exchange House?

Iyengar: I’ve seen all of them.

Blum: How did you feel when you saw them?

Iyengar: Well, it was more or less like we had imagined. You know, the scale of the things always is an amazing thing. You don’t realize how big a scale it is until you really walk around, and look at it. But the biggest surprise was the Bilbao museum.

Blum: What was the nature of the surprise?

Iyengar: The nature of the surprise was it’s so organically different that it was hard to imagine the shapes all colliding with each other. What would it look like? And it looked like it in a model, but it looked even more spectacular when you look at it in person, and especially from the inside to outside. The museum also was interesting—not only interesting from the outside, but it was interesting from the inside: the curves and the shapes, the play of light on the inside. It was pretty amazing. It’s something that you couldn’t possibly imagine until you go there and take a look.

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Blum: Are any of your children interested in architecture or engineering?

Iyengar: No. No, neither one of them. One of them, my daughter, is in public relations. She works for the hospital. My son is a computer engineer—not computer engineer, he’s in a computer field working with health care, in a health care area. So neither one of them are followers of mine.

Blum: Well, you had to be pretty good on the computer to do all your work. So, maybe that’s the legacy your son was influenced by.

Iyengar: That’s right. Faz had a remarkable commitment, and he spent the weekends at the IIT, working with students, and then also working in the office. I did that for a while. Then he asked me if it took a toll, and then I stopped after a while, because I wanted more time for myself on the weekend. So I didn’t want to participate on the weekends also.

Blum: As many architects do. If you had it to do over again, would you do it just the way you did?

Iyengar: Certainly. I’d be more than happy to do it, because of the great opportunities that I had. And it’s very accidental that I went to Skidmore, and it happened to be the second firm that I talked to, and then I stayed there. And then the remarkable period of 1960s through 1980s when all these things were happening, and Faz was there at the same time. I’m remarkably lucky.

Blum: Well, you were probably very good too at what you did, not only lucky. How would you like to be remembered in architectural and engineering circles?

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Iyengar: Oh, I don’t know if I have any particular… I would like to be remembered as a contributor to the architectural expressions, and architectural structures. And I’m still sort of sorry to see that structural notions have taken a back seat in architectural expressions today, even though I see once in a while that Norman Foster does buildings which clearly express his structure. I’d like to see much more integrated buildings. And I’d like to be remembered as somebody who contributed to certain types of architectural structural expressions.

Blum: Well, you’ve certainly earned your place there.

Iyengar: Thank you.

Blum: Hal, I’ve been really pleased with our recording sessions. I hope you have been too.

Iyengar: Okay. I hope it has some meaning for you.

Blum: I think your oral history will have great meaning for our entire collection of oral histories at the Art Institute; thus far, you are the only engineer in the collection. Up until now engineers have been silent contributors to architecture. So, I thank you very much for telling us about your work.

Iyengar: Okay. Thank you.

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SELECTED REFERENCES

Adams, Nicholas. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: the experiment since 1936. Milan, Italy: Mondadori Electa, 2006.

Ali, Mir M. Art of Skyscraper: The Genius of Fazlur Khan. New York: Rizzoli Publications International, 2001.

Anderson, John. "The Chicago Office of SOM." Interiors 118 (January 1959): 90-109.

"The Architects from 'Skid's Row'." Fortune. (January 1958): 137-40, 210, 212, 215.

Bruce Graham of SOM. Introduction by Stanley Tigerman. New York: Rizzolli International Publications, Inc. 1989.

Bush-Brown, Albert, ed. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: Architecture and Urbanism 1973-1983. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1983.

Bussel, Abby, ed. SOM Evolutions: Recent Work of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Boston: Burkhauser, 2000.

Crump, Joseph. "Less is Skidmore." Chicago (February 1981): 76-81, 114.

Curtis, J. R. William. "Authentic Regionalism." Mimar 19 (1986): 24-31.

Danz, Ernst. Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 1950-1962. Introduction by Henry Russell Hitchcock. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963.

Davidson-Powers, Cynthia. "Middle West Meets Middle East." Inland Architect 28 (November/December 1984): 19-26.

Davidson-Powers, Cynthia. "SOM 50 and Counting." Inland Architect 31 (March/April 1987): 28- 35.

Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer. " Evaluation: Trussed Tube Towering Over Chicago." AIA Journal 69 (October 1980): 68-73.

Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer. Profile: SOM, a Legend in Transition." Architecture 78 (February 1989): 52-59.

Ghirardo, Diane, ed. "Pin-Fuse Joint." SOM Journal 4 (2006): 68-79.

Goldberger, Paul. "Three Distinct Approaches to Skyscraper Design." New York Times. (30 January 1983): 27, 29.

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Greer, Nora Richter. "Huge Roof Hung from Pylon-Ducts." Architecture 77 (March 1988):100-105.

Hill, Timothy W. "McCormick Place II." Inland Architect 29 (January/February 1985): 10, 38.

Hoyt, Charles K. "SOM's New Tower in Jeddah." Architectural Record 165 (February 1979): 102- 106.

"Huge, Soaring Tents on the Desert."AIA Journal 72 (May 1983): 102-106.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. "When Americans Design Abroad." New York Times. (28 June 1981): 25- 26.

Iyengar, H. "Bundled-tube Structure for Sears Tower." Civil Engineering––ASCE (November 1972): 71-75.

Iyengar, H. "Concrete Core Braced System for Ultra-tall Buildings." Structural Engineering International 2 (August 1992): 168-169.

Iyengar, H. "The Guggenheim Museum." Structural Engineering International 6 (November 1996): 227-229.

Iyengar, H. "Millennium Park BP Pedestrian Crossing, Chicago, USA." The Structural Engineer 84 (4 July 2004): 33-37.

Iyengar, H. "Recent Developments in Tall Buildings." Unpublished manuscript. Proceedings of International Conference on Tall Buildings, Singapore (October 1984).

Iyengar, Hal. "Hotel De Las Artes Tower, Barcelona, Spain." Structural Engineering International 2 (August 1992): 172-173.

Iyengar, S. H. "Tall Building Systems for the Next Century." In Structures in the New Millennium: Proceedings of Fourth International Kerensky Conference Held in Hong Kong, 3-5 September 1977.

Iyengar, H., W. F. Baker, R. C. Sinn. "Broadgate Exchange House: Structural Systems." The Structural Engineer 71 (May 1993): 149-159.

Iyengar, H., John Zils, Robert Sinn. "Exposed Steel Frame Creates Architectural Excitement." Modern Steel Construction (March 1993): 18-28.

Iyengar, H., John Zils, Robert Sinn. "Steel Exo-skeleton Defines Architecture." Civil Engineering (August 1993): 42-45.

Khan, Fazlur R. "The John Hancock Center." Civil Engineering––ASCE. (October 1967): 38-42.

Khan, Fazlur R. "The Future of Highrise Structures." P/A 53 (October 1972): 78-85.

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Khan, Fazlur R., Srinivasa Iyengar and Joseph P. Colaco. "Computer Design of 100-Story John Hancock Center," Journal of the Structurral Division American Society of Civil Engineers 92 (December 1966): 55-73.

Khan, Yasmin Sabina. Engineering Architecture: the vision of Fazlur R. Khan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Krinsky, Carol Herselle. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. New York: The Architectural History Foundation of New York, and Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 1988.

Kuh, Katharine. "Homage to Chicago." Saturday Review (28 December 1968): 40-42.

Menges, Axel. Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Introduction by Arthur Drexler. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1974.

Miller, Nory. "Staying on Top or Just Staying Alive." Chicago (May 1982): 156-157.

Owings, Nathaniel Alexander. The Spaces In Between. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973.

Pridmore, Jay. "A New Order." Chicago (February 2007): 61-65, 98-104.

Richardson, Ambrose. "Skidmore and Owings: The Early Days." Threshold 2 (Autumn 1983): 66- 71.

Rottenberg, Dan. "SOM: The Big, The Bad." Chicago (May 1982): 151-155, 196-199, 201-202.

"Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Architects U.S.A." Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 18 (Fall 1950).

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Introduction by Joan Ockman. Mulgrave, Australia: The Images Publishing Group, Ltd., 1995.

Snoonian, Deborah. "Engineers Find New Ways to Quake-proof High-rises." Architectural Record Innovation 192 (November 2004): 15.

"Span Roofs." The Chicago Architectural Journal 1 (1981): 40-41.

Stephens, Suzanne. "SOM at Midlife." P/A 62 (May 1980): 138-141.

"Tent Structures: Are They Architecture?" Architectural Review 167 (May 1980): 127-134.

Terry, Clifford. "The Hancock––Lovers, Leapers, Gawkers, and all." Chicago Tribune Magazine (2 November 1980): 35-38.

Tracy, Maria. "Corporate Architecture." Crits 8 (Fall 1980): 14-15,

Truppin, Andrea. "SOM at 50." Interiors 146 (December 1986): 145-167.

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"Two Billion Worth of Design by Conference." Business Week (4 December 1954): 96, 97, 100-104.

Woodward, Christopher. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.

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SRINIVASA (HAL) IYENGAR

Born: 6 May 1934, French Rocks, India

Education: University of Mysore, Bangalore, India, Bachelor of Civil Engineering, 1955 Indian Institute of Science, Master of Hydraulic and Civil Engineering, 1957 University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, Master of Structures, 1957-1960

Work Experience: Road Research Laboratory, Delhi, India, 1956 Graduate Research Assistant, University of Illinois, 1957-1960 SOM Chicago, 1960-92 Associate Partner, Director Structural Engineering 1969-1975 Partner, Chief Structural Engineering, 1975-1992. Consulting Partner, 1992+

Teaching: Washington University, St. Louis, 1966 University of Illinois Chicago Circle, between 1968 and 1972

Honors and Awards: Fellow, American Society of Civil Engineers Fellow, Institution of Structural Engineers, London Lifetime Achievement Award, American Society of Steel Construction, 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award, American Society of Civil Engineers, Illinois, 1995 Fazlur Khan Award, Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, 2006 John Palmer Award, Structural Engineers Association, Illinois, 1992 Ernest E. Howard Award, American Society of Civil Engineers, 1999 Murray Buxton Award, The Institution of Structural Engineers, 1993

Selected Award-Winning Projects: John Hancock Center, Chicago, AIA 25 Year Award, 1999 King Abdul Aziz International Airport, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, AIA Honor Award, 1983; AIA, New York Chapter, 1982; P/A Award, 1981 National Commercial Bank, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. AIA, New York, Award, 1985; AIA Honor Award, 1987 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain Outstanding Structure Award of International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering, 2001; Innovations in Civil

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Engineering Award, American Society of Civil Engineers, 1999; Engineering News Record, Newsmaker Award, 1996.

Professional Memberships: Council on Tall Buildings Building Seismic Safety Council National Academy of Engineering, 2000 Honorary Member, American Society of Civil Engineers, 1998

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INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

33 West Monroe, Chicago, Illinois 109, Chase Manhattan Bank, New York City, 117 New York 116 60 State Street, Boston, Massachusetts Citibank, New York City, New York 69 105 444 Ontario Street Building, Chicago, Dearborn Center, Chicago, Illinois 47-48 Illinois 98, 101 De Blois, Natalie 50-51 780 Third Avenue, New York City, New Dewitt-Chestnut Building, Chicago, York 101-2 Illinois 25, 36, 39, 46, 66 860 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 28, 71 California 172 Drake Hotel, Chicago, Illinois 130-31 Allen, Davis 83 Duberg, John 8, 13 Allied Plaza Building, Houston, Texas 99, 103 Empire State Building, New York City, Arab International Trade Center, Cairo, New York 86 Egypt 118, 120-21 Equitable Building, Chicago, Illinois 51, 53 Bank of China, Hong Kong, China 79 Exchange House, Broadgate Center, Bank of the Southeast, Miami, Florida London, England 21-22, 125, 144, 103 146, 154-56, 159, 178, 184 Bassett, Charles (Chuck) 99, 103 Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Deerfield, First Wisconsin Bank, Milwaukee, Illinois 141 Wisconsin 46-47 Boots Pure Drug Company, Foster, Norman 41, 186 Nottingham, England 143 BP Bridge, Millennium Park, Chicago, Gehry, Frank 41, 155-64, 166-68, 170, Illinois 175-76 172-75 Brunswick Building, Chicago, Illinois Giedion, Sigfried 35 36, 46, 53, 64, 115, 152 Glymph, James (Jim) 164-65 Bunshaft, Gordon 29, 50, 73, 74, 116, Goldsmith, Myron 22-24, 29, 35, 36, 64, 125-27, 129, 132, 134-36, 158 65, 72, 98, 141 Business Men's Assurance Building Graham, Bruce 16-22, 27, 29, 31-34, 36, (BMA), Kansas City, Missouri 18-21, 39, 47, 51, 52, 55, 57, 58, 70-73, 75-77, 46, 152, 154 83, 90, 95, 99, 100, 107-8, 113, 122, 129, 139-144, 147, 150-52, 154-57, 159- Calatrava, Santiago 181 60, 164, 182-83 Canary Wharf, Isle of Wight, London, Gropius, Walter 104 England 125 Guggenheim Museum, Bilboa, Spain Carson Pirie Scott & Co. Building (36 163-64, 170, 178, 184 South Wabash), Chicago, Illinois 54 Charles, Prince of Wales 149 Hancock Center, Chicago, Illinois 23, Charnley, James (house), Chicago, 25, 26, 30, 42, 45, 46, 49, 53-55, 61, 62, Illinois 112 64, 66-67, 70, 75-81, 83-84, 86-88, 92,

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96, 98, 102, 115, 102, 115, 150, 152, McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois 139- 178, 182 40 Hartford Life Insurance Building, McCormick Place II, Chicago, Illinois Chicago, Illinois 20 138, 141 Hartmann, William (Bill) 113 McMath Solar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Hearst Building, New York City, New Arizona 29 York 79-80 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 6, 27, 28, Hines, Gerald (Jerry) 122 35, 71-73, 104, 142, 153 Holabird & Root 1-2, 14 Millennium Park, Chicago, Illinois 172 Home Insurance Building, Chicago, Murphy, C.F. 84 Illinois 28 Hong Kong Convention Centre, Hong National Commercial Bank, Jeddah, Kong, China 177 Saudi Arabia 117, 125, 127, 129, 131, Hotel de las Arts, Barcelona, Spain 155, 132 178 Nervi, Pier Luigi 23 Huxtable, Ada Louise 134, 137 Netsch, Walter 30-33, 36, 76, 111, 119 Newmark, Nathan 13 Inland Steel Building, Chicago, Illinois New World Centre, Hong Kong, China 15, 16, 36, 54, 95 110

Jahn, Helmut 34, 108 Ohio National Bank, Columbus, Ohio Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai, China 47 98 Oltmans, Larry 177 Keating, Richard (Rick) 108 One First National Bank, Chicago, Kemp, Diana Legge 140 Illinois 115 Khan, Fazlur 16, 18, 19, 22-26, 32, 34, 35, One Mag {Magnificent] Mile Building, 38, 39, 44-45, 49, 54, 55, 59, 63, 64, 75, Chicago, Illinois 98, 130 80, 83-85, 90, 94, 95, 98-100, 124, 126, One Shell Plaza, Houston, Texas 46, 152 129, 136, 150-54, 178-79, 181-83, 185 One Shell Square, New Orleans, Louisiana 46, 152 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 75, 104-5 Jeanneret 35, 104, 118 Lever House, New York City, New York Pei, Ieo Ming 153 29, 55, 116 Pelli, Cesar 155 Lewitt, Sol 20, 21, 154 Perimeter Center, Atlanta, Georgia 20, Lindheimer Telescope Structure, 117 Northwestern University, Evanston, Peterhans, Brigitte 121, 123 Illinois 30 Picardi, Alfred (Al) 2, 18 Lipton, Stuart 142 Pritzker Family 173 Liverpool Street Station, London, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, England 125, 145 Chicago, Illinois 170 Lohan, Diane Legge See: Kemp, Diane Legge Richardson, Ambrose 75 Love, Donald (Don) 113 Rothman, Herbert (Herb) 96 Ludgate Center, London, England 21, 154-55, 159 Sarkisian, Mark 83 Macy's (parking structure), New York City, New York 128 McCarthy, Jeffery J. (Jeff) 165

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Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois 30, 42, 46, Three First National Plaza, Chicago, 49, 67, 78, 79, 83, 86-92, 94, 96-98, Illinois 115 103, 115, 152, 178 Skidmore, Louis 104 Weidlinger, Paul 96 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) 1, Weisman Museum of Art, Minneapolis, 2, 4, 14-16, 22, 27,45, 49, 54, 72-75, Minnesota 168 77, 82, 83, 85, 104, 105, 107, 110, 114, Wildermuth, Gordon 127 116, 120 Wills Tobacco Company, Bristol, Siess, Chester P. 96 England 143 Smith, Adrian 47-48, 107-8, 117, 130-31, Wolman, Jerry 54-55, 58, 61, 63 164, 165, 172 World Trade Center, New York City, Smith, Donald (Don) 113 New York 26, 66, 81, 86, 91-92 Solow Building, New York City, New York 29 Stockley Park, Uxbridge, England 155, 159 Swan, Patricia 50-51 Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia 178

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