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CHAPTER 3

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CHAPTER 12

Skidmore, Owings & MerrillBuilding on the legacy of technological and architectural innovation

Daniel Cashen and Neil Katz

Cashen and Katz

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

inform key aspects of SOM’s current culture and practice. In recent years, the firm has leveraged the speed and flexibility afforded by technologically enhanced methods of communication, experimenting with new combinations of software that allow for studio members of different disciplines to visualize and respond to each others’ workflows. In its search for new opportunities for exchange and collaboration, the firm has consistently turned to fields and discourses adjacent to architecture – such as structural engineering, computer science, information science, sustainability engineering, and urban planning – to generate and guide architectural invention.

With its size and reputation, SOM is uniquely positioned to conduct architectural research. While anchoring its research initiatives to the real-life constraints of actual projects, the firm has consistently made space in its practice for more open-ended experimentation. This chapter will first highlight episodes in the firm’s history in which studio members chose to integrate the architectural design process in new ways to generate original solutions and gains in knowledge. Moving to the present, the chapter will then outline ways in which the firm continues to uncover opportunities for innovation by opening up pathways for the exchange of ideas, introducing new considerations and types of information into the design process, and experimenting with new technology and methods of organization. Finally, it will consider some primary areas of research that hold the potential to shape the future of the firm.

A TRADITION OF INNOVATION

Given its long history, SOM has a unique imperative to respond to its own legacy. Already well known are the strides made in the

Since its foundation in 1936, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has pushed the idea that architectural production thrives on collaboration. The firm has incubated historic alliances among practitioners of varied expertise, leveraging the creative energy of these interactions to keep the firm at the forefront of the industry. Over the decades, these moments of synchrony among SOM studio members have yielded prolific results, from the development of the glass curtain wall, the structural tube, and computer-aided design, to iconic built works such as the Lever House in New York City, the Sears Tower and Hancock Center in Chicago, and the Hajj Terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport. With a more than 80-year legacy of innovation, SOM continues to strive to establish and improve industry standards and shape the twenty-first-century cityscape. The longevity of the firm attests to its efforts to anticipate and respond to new demands from clients and, importantly, to envision and initiate changes in the profession.

Despite having undergone shifts in size, leadership, and areas of focus, SOM has consistently upheld one of Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings’s original imperatives: to hire talented individuals and encourage the exchange of ideas across disciplines and levels of experience. The lateral growth of the firm – which has expanded to include services in interior design, digital design, MEP engineering, structural engineering, civil engineering, and urban design and planning – has allowed for a remarkable concentration of skills, knowledge, and research, generating new opportunities for interdisciplinary dialogue. While maintaining firm-wide standards of practice, SOM continues to promote a spirit of enquiry, encouraging its studio members to invent new approaches and workflows.

SOM’s commitment to uniting different perspectives began early on with efforts to diffuse traditional office hierarchy and promote dialogue between adjacent disciplines such as architecture and structural engineering. This methodology has since evolved to

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of a program known as Building Optimization Program (BOP), for instance, significantly reduced the time needed to process variable specifications for mechanical equipment such as elevators, giving the firm a critical competitive advantage at the time. SOM began taking on projects of unprecedented scale and complexity, leveraging the computer’s speed, precision, and capacity for coordination to design projects such as the iconic Hajj Terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport, celebrated for its scheme of mass-multiplied, tensile-fabric modules, and the master plan for the King Abdulaziz University, a sprawling campus designed to accommodate 5,000 students. Convinced of the revolutionary potential of their work, the Computer Group pursued independent research in tandem with their agenda of responding to project-based prompts, making strides in the development of architectural drafting and modeling software and effectively anticipating the role of computers in contemporary architectural practice.

SOM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Over the decades, SOM has consistently returned to its foundational principles to guide the evolution of its practice. Determined to stay on the frontlines of the industry, the firm continues to explore the innovative potential of collaboration, interdisciplinary dialogue, and open-ended experimentation with new technology. Now with ten offices worldwide, SOM has upheld its role as a leader in the industry by balancing the advantages of its global, multidisciplinary network with the focused, localized activities of its individual offices.

Recently, in efforts to maintain the experimental dynamism of the Computer Group, SOM has encouraged the formation of a more fluid network of research clusters now known as the Digital Design Group. Instead of sequestering research initiatives within a designated research arm – which would then bear the responsibility of both developing and integrating their work with the rest of the firm – SOM’s Digital Design Group inverts the organizing principle of its late-century predecessor, operating by openly inviting members of different design studios within the firm to periodically meet and present ideas that can be applied to multiple projects or used to seed independent research initiatives.

Dispersed across multiple SOM offices, the various manifestations of the Digital Design Group have gravitated toward different areas of research, from initiatives that continue SOM’s longstanding experimentation with structural engineering, to investigations that explore new approaches to designing buildings for contemporary hospitality, healthcare, transportation, education, offices, and urban planning projects. In recent years, SOM has emphasized research and development in BIM and data documentation and

midcentury, namely the firm’s contributions to the development of the modern skyscraper. SOM’s ethic of teamwork and distributed authorship yoked together extraordinary partnerships, such as that between Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois, whose creative rapport gave rise to the prototype of the glass-sheathed office tower. Projects like the Lever House and the Pepsi-Cola building captivated popular imagination with their aesthetic of weightlessness and transparency, influencing an entire generation of American high-rise construction and marking SOM as a leader in modern design.

SOM continued its search for new ways to promote innovation in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the firm foregrounded the research initiatives of structural engineer Fazlur Khan. Khan’s theoretical experiments with tubular structural systems emerged out of academic settings at the University of Illinois, from which he had two masters’ degrees and a PhD, and found fertile ground in SOM’s Chicago office, where his research flourished alongside the ambitions of SOM architects like Myron Goldsmith and Bruce Graham. With the completion of the John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower in 1970 and 1974, which both clear a historically significant one hundred stories and bear the imprint of Khan’s expressively rendered structural considerations, SOM announced new possibilities for late-century supertall construction and elevated a method of working that rigorously integrated structural engineering into the design process.

SOM’s growing reputation as an innovator in the industry made the firm particularly receptive to experimenting with new technology. Also in the 1960s and 1970s, SOM made early forays into the development of computer-aided design, which quickly proved valuable in the generation of structural analysis tools that were embraced by Khan and his engineering team. The activity of an experimental research group known as the Computer Group exemplifies a particularly productive effort within the firm to incorporate technological research into its practice. Through the 1970s and 1980s, members of the relatively small, dedicated group pushed to integrate the computer’s enhanced data-storing and analytical abilities into various phases of the design process. Through these initiatives, SOM was able to identify the potential of the computer to not only expedite necessary calculations but also introduce new ways of representing and sharing information. Just as structural engineering came to be seen early on at SOM as a means of generating rather than simply realizing architectural ideas, with concerted effort, computers gained credence at the firm, and eventually in the industry, as a potential catalyst for architectural innovation.

In the spirit of earlier generations of SOM members, the Computer Group was motivated to galvanize project-driven research into broader, industry-changing advances. The in-house development

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

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

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forces with a diagonally braced structural tube system. The structural engineering team sought to combine the advantages of two existing structural concepts: the tapered diagonal braced tube, which excels in absorbing seismic energy and found iconic expression in the John Hancock Center, and the stepped superframe, which eliminates transfers induced by wind forces. The hypothesized result became known as the “articulated superframe system,” which fortifies a conventional ductile, reinforced concrete core with a lattice-like perimeter structure known as a superframe girder, comprised of multi-story modules with materially reinforced corners designed to absorb gravity and lateral loads.

standardization, high performance design, computational design, and visualization and simulation techniques, along with its continued focus on structural engineering. Several recent projects illustrate new design solutions and strategies catalyzed by these deliberately overlapping research interests.

For the Guiyang Cultural Plaza (GCP) Tower in Guiyang, the team of SOM architects and engineers saw an opportunity to advance the study of supertall construction that had thrived under the direction of Fazlur Khan. Having surveyed the solar, wind, and soil conditions of the Guiyang site, the team proposed a structural system that would address both seismic and wind

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

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a monumental building that would mesmerize visitors with a vast, long-span, open space covered by a massive, seventeen-acre mega-roof, the Mumbai terminal is defined by its mushrooming mega-columns, which appear to merge seamlessly with the monolithic roof they support by virtue of a customized paneling system that covers the contoured surface of the superstructure. Through a sophisticated application of CATIA and Rhino, the SOM team was able to integrate the process of structural analysis with the modeling of the building’s panelized surface, allowing for structural and architectural concerns to simultaneously inform one another. The resulting Rhino/CATIA model of the paneling system at Terminal 2 was precise enough that manufacturers were able to use the model to fabricate the custom, interlocking GFRC (exterior) and GFRG (interior) panels so critical to

As in Khan’s skyscrapers, the GCP Tower found a distinct visual and spatial identity through efforts to architecturally express its structural system. To determine the building’s final form, a parametric platform was set up to facilitate a dynamic workflow among representatives of different disciplines: the studio members established a live link to transfer data from Grasshopper into a central REVIT model, within which the team – including structural and MEP team members – could visualize the architectural concept and actively participate in generating and reconfiguring the geometry of the design via a custom plug-in developed through the REVIT API.

The tapering of the tower – from a 50 by 50 meter base to a 29 by 29 meter crown – was calibrated to generate lease spans that would meet the programmatic needs of the office and hotel slated to occupy the building. Crucially, the 521-meter-tall form was translated into data that could be entered into the structural team’s ETABS model, allowing the team to tweak the form of the building to balance programmatic and structural concerns with remarkable precision. Here, SOM’s longstanding interest in integrating the design process inspired a resourceful networking of standard analytical and modeling programs to generate a unique design. The approaches and workflows developed for the GCP Tower were advanced further in the design of the Hangzhou Wangchao Center, for which SOM architects and engineers worked together to give sculptural expression to an innovative, high-performance structural system referred to as a diagonalized, braced mega-column system.

In a similar manner, separate computer programs and digital models were synthesized to develop the design for Terminal 2 at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai. Envisioned as

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

Figure 12.5 The ticketing hall at the new Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport Terminal 2 in Mumbai. Photo courtesy SOM / © Robert Polidori | Mumbai International Airport Pvt. Ltd.

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the building’s stunning architectural effect.

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

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

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

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set of unique design options with unprecedented efficiency. SOM has continued to refine the practice of integrating and tagging data from various disciplines in a central model with projects such as the 240-meter Karlatornet in Gothenburg, for which a BIM model, rather than drawings, became a core deliverable to be directly consulted by contractors.

SOM’s integrated approach to design has pushed studio members to incorporate new considerations during the conceptual phase of the design process. In recent years, the firm has prioritized concerns for sustainability, using analyses of site-specific energy, wind, and heat patterns to help generate architectural form. For the Pertamina Energy Tower in Jakarta, SOM studio members assessed the climate of the Indonesian capital and set out to

Well aware that these considerations each had their own particular parameters to fulfill, SOM studio members sought to first establish and script the relationships between these parameters in a central BIM model. The generative logic of the building’s structural, façade, and MEP systems were thus translated and integrated into software code, allowing for studio members of adjacent disciplines to work independently and then input values into the master BIM model. These changes would automatically alter a host of specifications in the BIM model based on prescribed parametric relationships, from which new values could be extracted and translated for studio members of other disciplines to independently analyze and work with. For the coordination of the curtain wall with the structural shell, the studio was able to test more than ten geometrical relationships, generating and thoroughly exploring a

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

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

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

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND THE EVOLVING NATURE OF ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE

SOM has long understood that new technology can catalyze sweeping changes in the architectural profession. In recent years, the firm has pursued multiple research initiatives, many of which

Figure 12.9 Rendering of Karlatornet, a 246-meter tower that will be Sweden’s tallest building. Image courtesy SOM / © Pixel�akes

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

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

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

With this open-ended, investigative attitude, SOM has begun exploring AI technology and machine learning. The firm is researching the potential development of a future modeling software that could integrate AI technology to learn human-implemented design processes and behaviors and carry them

Figure 12.11 Rendering of the Pertamina Energy Tower crown section with wind turbines. Image © SOM | 3D World.

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

continue earlier efforts to integrate the architectural design process. Part of these initiatives is also the publication of SOM Journal, a series of publications with the first issue in 2001 and the latest in 2017, where projects are presented and critically

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studio members could also use VR platforms to conduct virtual coordination meetings, where they could explore system interfaces and discover clashes. In addition to visualizing physical aspects of architectural designs, SOM is also experimenting with VR to visualize energy data, temperature, light levels, and glare – all information that is typically invisible – in false-color, rendering this data in three-dimensional space so that it can be more intuitively understood.

As the firm develops a greater familiarity with these techniques, integrating them into the design process, it will also explore new ways to use them – ways that exceed the current predictions. The culture of SOM is fundamentally rooted in collaborative thinking, which has helped the firm continuously reinvent itself over the last 80 years, and will help shape its future innovations to the architectural design process.

out to unprecedented stages. With this application of AI technology, computer software could effectively “complete the thought” for complex geometric models and generate an array of otherwise unforeseen design solutions. Incorporated into REVIT, AI technology could also assist in farsighted collision detection, anticipating conflicts among various A/E models and issuing recommendations to avoid them, which could potentially free up time and labor to explore radically alternative solutions.

SOM has also been actively researching the potential of virtual reality technology to both shape and represent their designs. As a working design tool, VR technology could allow studios to experience design options in an immersive, multi-sensory way, thereby creating immediate feedback that can be used to inform design decisions. Architects, engineers, and other

Figure 12.13 Aerial view of the new Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Photo courtesy SOM / © Iwan Baan.