Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

A survey of thirty of the most iconic buildings designed by the legendary American architecture firm.

This monograph surveys thirty of the most iconic buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the legendary American architecture firm, since its founding in Chicago in 1936. In addition to Chicago, SOM now has offices in New York; Washington, DC; San Francisco; Los Angeles; London; Hong Kong,;and Shanghai and has completed 10,000 projects in 50 countries. Along with such architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, SOM is largely credited with propagating the Internationalist style of architecture that filled the New York skyline with such midcentury masterworks as Lever House (1952) and Chase Manhattan Plaza (1961). Before the current age of the super skyscraper, SOM raised what was for almost thirty years the world's tallest building, Chicago's Sears Tower (1973), as well as the city's John Hancock Center (1970). With an essay by the American critic Nicholas Adams that contextualizes the importance of SOM's contribution to the globalization of architecture - and the technical achievements of particular structures, such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (1962) and the l'Hajj Terminal at King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jedda, Saudi Arabia (1981) - this title provides an overview on a firm that continues to make headlines to this day.