The Heyday of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill

This year marks the 70^th anniversary of architectural megafirm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The firm was founded in 1936 by three Midwesterners: Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings, both architects, and John O. Merrill, an architect and engineer. Although they had their first office in Chicago, they immediately set up a second office in New York, and it was there that SOM built its first significant building, Lever House (right). The designer was a young partner named Gordon Bunshaft, who would chart the firm's stylistic course over the next two decades (and would win a Pritzker Prize). Lever House opened in 1952. The blue-green slab rested on a lower block, the roof of which was an employees' garden overlooking Park Avenue; it signaled the arrival of Modernist architecture in New York. By chance, the building stands across 53^rd Street from the venerable Racquet and Tennis Club. This exemplar of the American Renaissance was designed by McKim, Mead & White, which dominated Neoclassical architecture during the early 1900s in much the same way that SOM dominated Modernist architecture in the 1960s.
Photograph by Blake Wilson/CREDIT: Slate.
At its height (1890-1915), McKim, Mead & White was the largest architectural firm in the country, perhaps in the world, famous for Neoclassical urban landmarks as well as country houses. Charles Follen McKim and Stanford White were its architectural stars; William Rutherford Mead was the office manager. The flamboyant White was responsible for the firm's extensive residential work—town houses in Manhattan, mansions in Newport, country villas on Long Island—although he also built the wonderful old Madison Square Garden. McKim designed the Morgan Library, the University Club, the Metropolitan Museum, and Boston's Symphony Hall. His masterpiece was Pennsylvania Station, whose stupendous concourse was based on the ancient Roman baths of Caracalla (right). The building was torn down in 1963. You can catch a glimpse of the monumental concourse in Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train.
Correction, Nov. 13, 2006: This article originally and incorrectly identified the opening scene of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train as set in New York's old Pennsylvania Station. In fact, it was set in Washington, D.C.'s, Union Station, designed by Charles Follen McKim's chum Daniel Burnham. Penn Station does not appear until later in the film.
Photo c. 1911.CREDIT: Image courtesy www.wikipedia.org.
McKim, Mead & White continued in existence until the 1950s, but its active period was over by the 1930s—a long, 50-year run. One of the most striking commissions of the post-McKim era—striking because McKim had avoided building skyscrapers—is the Municipal Building in downtown Manhattan. The 40-story tower, designed in 1907 by partner William Mitchell Kendall, suggests how City Beautiful-era classicists conceived of a vertical civic building. The arcaded base remains one of the city's most memorable public outdoor spaces. The longevity of the firm lay in its ability to attract talented young architects, many of whom later became well known: Cass Gilbert (Woolworth Building), John Carrère and Thomas Hastings (New York Public Library), Whitney Warren (Grand Central Station), and Henry Bacon (the Lincoln Memorial).
Photo by FPG/Getty Images.
SOM likewise attracted talented designers who, in the 1950s, built a string of memorable office buildings across the country: John Hancock in San Francisco (Chuck Bassett), Inland Steel in Chicago (Bruce Graham, Walter Netsch), Manufacturers Trust in New York (Bunshaft), as well as an exquisite, tiny office block on Park Avenue for Pepsi-Cola (right). As with Lever House, this design, also by Bunshaft, owed a large debt to Mies van der Rohe, who virtually invented the steel-and-glass curtain wall—although the Pepsi-Cola building, with its "floating" corners and horizontal proportions, is both more dramatic and more delicate than anything Mies would have done. But while SOM was ready to modify the Modernist idiom, it was distrustful of radical change. A profusely illustrated monograph, published in honor of SOM's 70^th birthday, is subtitled "the experiment since 1936." But this phrase misses the point. In its heyday—like McKim, Mead & White—SOM was not about experimentation. It was about competence fueled by strong convictions.
Photograph © Ezra Stoller/Esto.
While SOM's early commissions were chiefly commercial, they soon included other types of buildings. In 1954, the firm won a competition to build the new Air Force Academy outside Colorado Springs, Colo. The proposed campus eventually grew to 100 buildings, all conceived by SOM. But the Modernist style of the architecture engendered controversy. At that time, important public buildings in the United States, such as John Russell Pope's National Gallery and Jefferson Memorial, were Neoclassical. Moreover, SOM's boxy design seemed alien to the Academy's mountainous Western setting. (Frank Lloyd Wright, testifying before a congressional subcommittee about the project, called it a "factory for birdmen.") But SOM's design was finally approved, and its construction signaled the official arrival of the New Architecture. Modernism was now the architectural mainstream, and SOM was the biggest boat in the water.
Photograph by Hedrich-Blessing, courtesy SOM.
One of the SOM's best buildings of the '60s was the 100-story John Hancock Center, the tallest skyscraper in the world when it was completed. The tapering design, by Graham with engineer Fazlur R. Kahnwas, was dictated by functional and structural considerations. (The duo later designed the Sears Tower together.) But like other SOM buildings of the time, such as the chapel of the Air Force Academy and the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Hancock tower incorporated a new quality: showmanship. Pressed by the more flamboyant architecture of Eero Saarinen, Edward Durrell Stone, and Philip Johnson, in its careful way, SOM started to move away from its rational and functionalist roots.
Photograph by Tim Hursley, courtesy SOM.
McKim, Mead & White was off the stage by the time architectural Modernism arrived, so it never had to face that most difficult of challenges for an architect: What to do when fashion changes? SOM was not so lucky. By the 1980s, the design direction that had been pioneered by architects such as Saarinen had developed into full-blown Postmodernism, its arrival famously marked by Philip Johnson's 1984 Chippendale-topped AT&T Building. Historicism, decoration, and flashier buildings were in; sober Modernism was out. Most architects went along with the shift (I.M. Pei was a rare exception). SOM held back but eventually jumped on the bandwagon with designs such as the Broadgate Development in London, Worldwide Plaza in New York, and Rowes Wharf in Boston (right), with its giant Neoclassical arch and its "contextual" brick facades. The copper-domed gazebo took the form of a little temple. While the firm never lost its proficiency, during this period, it lost many of its convictions.
Photograph courtesy SOM/Wheeler Photographics.
The shift in architectural fashion was not good for SOM's business. It turned out that many architects could design flashy buildings, so the technical know-how that had always been the firm's core competence counted for less than in the past. Around 1990, SOM almost went bankrupt. It later rebounded and is now the third-largest architectural practice in the country (in terms of billing), but it has a way to go to recapture its former design pre-eminence. One is hard-pressed to point to a recent SOM building that has stirred the architectural world as Lever House and Pepsi-Cola once did. It's certainly not the Time-Warner Center in New York (right), which the firm designed in 2004. The building frames Columbus Circle nicely, and from Central Park the twin towers appear in a memorable silhouette, but from close-up, the buildings are a disappointment. Competence without conviction has produced a glib version of SOM's earlier, earnest Modernism.
Photo by Stephen Chernin/Getty Images.
SOM is on firmer ground when it is not trying so hard. 7 World Trade Center, designed by David Childs, is something of a sleeper. Overshadowed by the controversy that has swirled around Childs' proposals for the Freedom Tower, 7 World Trade Center, the first building to be rebuilt at Ground Zero, is a straightforward commercial high-rise, without any external bells and whistles. It doesn't curve or twist or bend. The deceptively simple all-glass facade demonstrates a high degree of what Nat Owings once called "tailored excellence of building detail." Sometimes that's all you need. If SOM can survive our current media-driven period of architectural extravagance, tailored excellence may even be enough to help the firm recover some of its past glory.
Photograph licensed per Creative Commons CREDIT: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5, courtesy www.wikipedia.org.