Practice

SOM

Founded 1936 · American, based in Chicago · 16 buildings on the wall

SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) is an American architecture, engineering and urban planning firm founded in Chicago in 1936 by Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings, joined in 1939 by the engineer John O. Merrill. It helped bring modernism to the United States and is known above all for skyscrapers. The firm twice received the AIA Architecture Firm Award, in 1962 and 1996, and its partner Gordon Bunshaft won the Pritzker Prize in 1988.

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Lever House in New York (1952), by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois, was the city's first International Style office building: a curtain wall of glass and stainless steel on an avenue of masonry. The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale in New Haven (1963) has walls of marble only 32 millimetres thick that glow amber in daylight. The Hajj Terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah (1981) was built for the pilgrimage season alone. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai (2010), the world's tallest building at 828 metres, stands on a buttressed central core and three wings. SOM's projects are studied for how closely its architects and engineers design together.

See the 16 buildings ↓