A Banned Book and two Articles. The Individual and the Collective at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (1955–1959)

Nicholas Adams

doi:10.6092/issn.2611-0075/20396

Authors

Nicholas Adams Vassar College

Nicholas Adams is Mary Conover Mellon professor emeritus in the Art Department at Vassar College where he taught the history of architecture (1989–2018). He received an A.B. from Cornell University (1970) and a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (1978). He has been visiting professor at McGill University, Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Rome.

Adams is the author of Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism (2019) and the first independently authored study of Skidmore Owings & Merrill: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: SOM since 1936 (2007). He has published more than a dozen articles on the firm in Casabella, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and elsewhere.

Other books include Gunnar Asplund's Gothenburg and the Transformation of Public Architecture in Interwar Europe (2014); Gunnar Asplund (2011); a collection of the writings of the historian Lucy Maynard Salmon (2001) ed. with Bonnie Smith; Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth Century Siena (1986) with Simon Pepper. He edited two volumes of the Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1994 and 2000). He co-curated an exhibition of architectural books entitled Building Buffalo: Books from Buildings, Buildings from Books (2017) with Francis Kowsky. His article “The Early Years of Nathaniel A. Owings: A Portrait of the Architect as a Storyteller,” in the Indiana Magazine of History (2022) was awarded the Madison prize for the best article to appear in 2021.

He served as editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and his essays and reviews have appeared in national and international magazines and journals. He has been a visiting fellow at the American Academy in Rome; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-0075/20396

Keywords:

Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Gordon Bunshaft, Corporate Architecture, Individualism and Collectivity, Large Architectural Offices

Abstract

A 1955 pot-boiler novel, Edwin Gilbert’s Native Stone described Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s New York office and its lead architect Gordon Bunshaft in unflattering terms: domineering, dishonest, a womanizer. SOM threatened a lawsuit to suppress Gilbert’s book and the book was withdrawn. Yet the issues raised in the book, most notably the relationship between the individual and collective continued to resonate leading to two significant articles about the firm. In the first, published in Fortune magazine (1958) entitled “The Architects from ‘Skid’s Row’,” the firm attempted to paint a picture of a happy collective. Its goal was to provide a healthy counter-narrative to the novel. Happy employees given a chance to express themselves within the context of the group were at the center of the story. A year later (1959) Gordon Bunshaft sponsored his own self-aggrandizing narrative in Newsweek striking back at the myth of the collectivity. There he claimed that he was the firm’s leader and the others worked for him.

The issues raised in this sequence of novel and two articles echoes important issues raised by William H. Whyte in his best-selling study of corporate America, The Organization Man (1956). Whyte, describes the tension between the collective and the individual in corporate America fearing that the rise of a group conformity would stifle the innovation and originality that originally gave rise to the corporation itself.

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References

Adams, Nicholas. “Belonging as a Corporate Ideal: Nathaniel A. Owings of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill writes The Spaces in

Between,” in L’architetto: ruolo, volto, mito, edited by Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns. Venice: Marsilio, 2009, 323–342.

Adams, Nicholas. “Gordon Bunshaft: What Convinces is Conviction,” SOM Journal, no. 9 (2014): 8-19.

Adams, Nicholas. “William S. Brown’s ‘SOM The Formative Years’ (1983): A New History of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill,”

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, no. 78 (September 2019): 254–258.

Adams, Nicholas. Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

Bernstein, Fred. “Not Your Daddy’s SOM: Roger Duffy’s Quiet Demeanor Masks a Steely Determination to Remake One of

Architecture’s Behemoths,” Metropolis 23, no. 4 (December 2003): 118–123, 162–163.

“Designers for a Busy World: Mood for Working,” Newsweek, no. 97 (May 4, 1959): 97–100.

Etkes, Asher B. and Raymond Dodd. “The Architect and Public Relations,” Progressive Architecture (September 1952): 19;

(October 1952): 114; (November 1952): 102–103; (December 1952); 104; (February 1953): 99; (March 1953): 116

Fuller, Buckminster. “Fuller’s House,” Fortune 33 (April 1946): 167.

Gilbert, Edwin. Native Stone. New York: Doubleday, 1955 (corrected second edition, 1956).

Larson, Magalli Sarfatti. Behind the Postmodern Façade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

McQuade, Walter. Architecture in the Real World: The Work of HOK. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984.

Netsch, Walter. “Oral History of Walter Netsch,” interviewed by Betty J. Blum (Chicago: Art Institute, 1997, revised edition,

.

Owings, Nathaniel A. The Spaces in Between: An Architect’s Journey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

Quality in Quantity: Manhattan House, a full block of new New York apartments,” Architectural Forum, no. 97 (July 1952):

Radford, Roger Nicholas. “Oral History of Roger Nicholas Radford,” interviewed by Sharon Zane (Chicago: Art Institute of

Chicago).

Stephens, Suzanne. “SOM at Midlife,” Progressive Architecture, no. 65 (May 1981): 138–149.

“The Architects from ‘Skid’s Row’,” Fortune, no. 57 (January 1958): 137–140; 210; 212–213.

Vanderlan, Robert. Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce’s Media Empire. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania, 2010.

Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1956.

Wyndham, Lee. Lady Architect. New York: Julian Messner, 1957.

“529 Degrees to be Awarded at M.S.C. June 12,” The Herald-Palladium (Benton Harbor, Michigan), May 25, 1933, 12.

Archival Sources

Edwin Gilbert collection, Howard Gotlieb Archive, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts.

Papers of Nathaniel A. Owings, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

A Banned Book and two Articles. The Individual and the Collective at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (1955–1959)

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