Skidmore, Owings and Merrill

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Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP

logo
legal form Limited Liability Partnership
founding 1936
Seat Chicago , Illinois , United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
Branch architecture office
Website www.som.com

Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP ( SOM ) is one of the largest architecture firms in the world based in Chicago , with offices in Los Angeles , New York , San Francisco , Washington, DC , London , Hong Kong , Shanghai , Dubai and Mumbai .

Lever House on Park Avenue in New York. Was responsible Gordon Bunshaft . Built 1951 to 1952.

history

The office emerged from the collaboration between Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings in Chicago . Skidmore was hired by Raymond Hood to plan the 1933 World's Fair A Century of Progress , for which he recruited his brother-in-law Owings. In 1936 they founded a joint office, and John Merrill joined them three years later . The most famous architects were Gordon Bunshaft , Natalie de Blois , Myron Goldsmith, Bruce J. Graham , Gertrude Kerbis, Walter Netsch , Pietro Belluschi , Adrian Smith , Ferdinand Gottlieb , Larry Oltmanns, Fazlur Khan and David Childs . Furniture designer Nicos Zographos worked for the office from 1957 to 1962 .

meaning

The SOM office will u. a. in New York represented by buildings of classic post-war modernism that could refer to the influences of Mies van der Rohe . With buildings like the Lever House , glass and steel high-rise buildings were created that served as icons of the functionalist office architecture era of the 1950s and 1960s and served as a pictorial statement for the concept of international style . At the same time, SOM is the office that was able to plan most of the world's high-rise records: Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) , for some time the tallest building in the world, John Hancock Center , both Chicago , at times the second tallest building in the world, Jin Mao Tower , Shanghai , as well as the Burj Khalifa , currently the tallest building in the world (executive architect Adrian Smith , who is considered the author of the building after leaving SOM). The skyscrapers planned by SOM are also considered to be groundbreaking from a structural point of view, as they incorporated static problems of particularly high buildings (bracing, representation of the buckling length by tapering the building geometry) into the architectural design at an early stage. David Childs also planned the new One World Trade Center at Ground Zero New York (former name of the Freedom Tower design) for SOM , which has also been one of the five tallest buildings in the world since it opened in late 2014.

Important buildings from SOM

John Hancock Center in Chicago (1969)
The Willis Tower in Chicago (1974)
China World Trade Center, Beijing (2009)
Chicago's Trump Tower (2009)
Greenland Square Zifeng Tower in Nanjing (2010)
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai (2010)
One World Trade Center in New York (2014)

Building under construction / in planning

literature

Web links

Commons : Skidmore, Owings & Merrill  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jay Merrick: "The architecture firm that reached for the sky" , in: The Independent , February 15, 2010 (English)