By Blair Kamin, TRIBUNE CRITIC
It is fitting that 2009's Chicagoans of the Year in architecture are in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). This was the year when Chicago celebrated the 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett's Plan of Chicago -- and, with it, the notion that big plans can achieve spectacular payoffs for a city's quality of life. Few mega-firms do big buildings and big plans as consistently well as this one.
SOM Chicago demonstrated that attribute this year on multiple fronts, most notably the Trump International Hotel & Tower, the tallest American skyscraper since 1974, and its award-winning plans for the expansion of Chicago's downtown river walk and the city's unsuccessful bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
On Jan. 4, the biggest of its big projects can be expected to grab the world's attention with the opening ceremonies for the Burj Dubai, the world's tallest building. The thin, mixed-use skyscraper rises half a mile into the sky above Dubai, the debt-ridden city-state of the United Arab Emirates.
Its other major offices in New York and San Francisco, SOM was founded in 1936 by Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings, who helped plan Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-34. (The third name partner, John Merrill, joined them in 1939.) As architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock once observed, SOM was the first firm to apply the principles of modern American management to the spare, "less is more" architecture of European modernism. At its best, that synthesis produced such midcentury modernist icons as the glistening Inland Steel Building and the X-braced John Hancock Center.
The SOM Chicago office is a different animal from the corporate colossus of the late 1970s, which had hundreds of draftsmen sitting at row after row of parallel desks. The efficiencies promoted by computers (along with fluctuations in the market and a loss of business in Chicago) have shrunk the staff to about 250. At the same time, SOM's modernism has evolved to incorporate today's commitment to sustainable design as well as the freedom from right-angled orthodoxy made possible by the computer.
These influences are apparent globally, from Shanghai to Dubai to Brussels, where SOM Chicago designed the under-construction headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Yet the Chicago office's impact is still felt in its home city, as evidenced by the Trump Tower -- not a great building, but certainly a good one, whose luminous steel-and-glass exterior turned out to be better than anyone expected from flashy New York developer Donald Trump. Former Skidmore partner Adrian Smith, who left SOM in 2006 to start his own firm, led the designs for Trump and the upcoming Burj Dubai.
SOM Chicago has also distinguished itself in structural engineering, through the innovative work of partner William Baker, and in urban planning, through city-friendly designs of partner Phil Enquist. Perhaps it's a coincidence, but SOM's Chicago offices are in the Santa Fe Building at 224 S. Michigan Ave., the very building from which Burnham conceived the plan that would revolutionize the city.
"We've developed a reputation for being able to grapple with projects on a large urban scale," said Jeff McCarthy, the management partner for SOM Chicago. "It begets architecture of importance."
