Not Your Daddy's SOM
Roger Duffy's quiet demeanor masks a steely determination to remake one
of architecture's behemoths.
By Fred A. Bernstein
December 2003
When Roger Duffy arrived at the New York offices of Skidmore, Owings
& Merrill (SOM) for a job interview in 1985, he found himself in "a
sea of travertine. I thought it was a period piece," he says. "Then
I found out it had been done three years before." The firm that
had created iconic corporate headquarters for Lever Bros., Chase Manhattan
Bank, and Union Carbide in the 1950s and '60s was in a rut. But Duffy objected
to more than just the retro sensibility. "I didn't like the impression
of opulence," he says. At the time SOM had a haughtiness that the soft-spoken
Pennsylvanian (who had already spent four years in the firm's Washington
office) couldn't abide.
And so, before he even got to the elevator, Duffy had an agenda: to make
both SOM, and the buildings it creates, less monolithic. Twenty years later
the extent to which he is accomplishing that goal surprises everyone--except
perhaps Duffy. In a firm known for its skyscrapers and sprawling corporate
campuses, he has designed a series of small projects--from a grade school
to a science museum--that are innovative, stylish, and well crafted. And
where collaborating with artists once meant choosing the right Picasso or
Calder for a plaza, Duffy has delved deeper. At Connecticut's Greenwich
Academy he worked with James Turrell to turn the lobby and library of a
new building into glowing "light chambers." At the same time Duffy's
commercial projects seem surprisingly uncompromised by market pressures.
The New York Times's Herbert Muschamp, no fan of SOM, called Duffy's
design for a gossamer addition to a Madison Avenue office building
"heavenly stuff."
But Duffy's efforts to remake SOM are at least as impressive as his buildings.
In the seven years since he became a partner, Duffy has shaken up the firm,
bringing in outside critics to measure the work of its 33 partners and hundreds
of associates, and using his place on the firm's Evaluation and Compensation
committee to prod designers whose work he doesn't think is up to par. According
to SOM partner David Childs, "He's come right out swinging, telling
people, 'You're not living up to our standards; you're not doing good buildings.'"
As if to symbolize the firm's new direction, Duffy helped take SOM's
largest office, on three floors of a building on Wall Street,
from travertine to plywood. "What I wanted was a laboratory for architectural
experimentation," he says, showing a visitor around the four-year-old
suite (designed by SOM interior-design partner Stephen Apking, with input
from Duffy and others). "I didn't get everything I wanted"--Duffy
points to the carpet where he says he'd prefer to see concrete--"but
I got most of it."
While some of the older partners, including Duffy's mentor Childs, have
conventional offices, Duffy occupies part of a "bull pen"
that, he says, "invites people to come by and talk." The design
also allows his space to become a conference room when he's away, which
suits the egalitarian Duffy. (He and his wife live in Manhattan's middle-class
Stuyvesant Town and send their children to the United Nations International
School, Duffy says, "so they'll learn that there are other kinds of
people in the world.")
When Childs became SOM's chairman in 1990, a slump had brought the firm
to the brink of bankruptcy. And its pallid postmodernist buildings weren't
about to save it. "There were some very poor projects," Childs
concedes. He spent years working to restore SOM's financial health--an
accomplishment that he says is nearly as significant as anything he's
done as an architect--but knew that a real turnaround depended on improving
the firm's reputation. And that meant encouraging its best designers.
Architect Christopher Stienon, who worked at SOM in the mid-1990s, before
going to Beyer Blinder Belle, says, "Roger is literally obsessed with
design, and he instills that in the younger people working with him."
As a designer Duffy has been compared to Herzog & de Meuron, whose elegant,
compact buildings are difficult to categorize and can be best appreciated
up close. Certainly his work doesn't look like anything else coming out
of SOM. "Each partner runs his own show," Duffy says. More surprising,
his buildings don't resemble one another. The Deerfield Academy science
building--in which sinuous ribbonlike brick walls mediate a 15-foot grade
change--couldn't be more different from the Greenwich Academy project, with
Turrell's crystalline light chambers penetrating a grass roof, which in
turn bears no resemblance to the performing-arts high school he's planning
for rundown Camden, New Jersey. There Duffy hopes to create an auditorium
of translucent stone. "When it's used at night, it would beckon people
to the building," he says. The auditorium will be Duffy's version of
Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book Library, designed by SOM's legendary
midcentury partner Gordon Bunshaft. It's fitting that what Bunshaft
did for the Ivy League, Duffy would like to do for the Urban League.
If his buildings run the gamut aesthetically, it may be because Duffy brings
in outsiders and then actually listens to them. In Greenwich the collaboration
with Turrell added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the building's cost--muntins
are fitted with fiber optics to the artist's specifications--and
required educating school administrators and trustees about developments
in contemporary art.
Duffy says collaborating with artists is more ethical than the alternative--co-opting
artists' ideas--but, he notes, "you never know how these collaborations
are going to turn out. It's like swimming in the deep end of the pool."
Turrell says, "For Roger to be willing to take on problems they didn't
have before, for the sake of art, is a big deal."
Duffy's science building for Deerfield Academy, a Massachusetts prep
school with a neo-Georgian campus, is more ambitious. There Duffy began
not by sketching but by instigating a symposium at which Michael Govan,
director of the Dia Art Foundation; Richard Walker, an observational astronomer;
and artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle offered ideas for how the building
could express artistic and scientific ideas. Duffy worked with Walker
and Turrell on turning the building into a science experiment writ large.
At noon each day, the students will mark the position of the sun on a wall;
over the course of the year, the points will form a figure-eight, called
an analemma. That project "will open the minds of the students,"
Duffy has said, "and connect the building to the universe."
In fact Duffy's buildings seem to relate more to the cosmos than to the
architecture around them. Often, Duffy admits, "the surrounding buildings
aren't worth relating to." But the topography is, and by studying the
earth artists Robert Smithson and Turrell, Duffy has learned to create what
he calls "hybrids between buildings and landscape solutions."
If they succeed, he says, they won't necessarily be beautiful, "but
they will expose the beauty of their sites." They will also, Duffy
says, "function at a very high level." On each project he spends
months (or years) analyzing the best buildings of the type--a process he
calls "benchmarking." For Deerfield, he says, "we looked
at the best classrooms and laboratories in New England--and then began to
think about ways to supersede them."
But grass-covered "earthwork" buildings, no matter how functional,
are difficult to represent in two dimensions. Deerfield, essentially
a series of brick retaining walls stepping down a hill, has been published
twice, Duffy says, but "from renderings it's hard to tell what you're
looking at." The completed Greenwich Academy building, with a lawn
for a roof, is tough to photograph (except when Turrell's lights are glowing).
Which means Duffy didn't help his own reputation when he invited the press
to see Greenwich in daylight before the Turrell installation was complete.
But who can blame him? At 46 he is bristling with ambition but has only
a few built projects. (Even the vaunted 350 Madison Avenue scheme has, except
for its lobby portion, been shelved.)
Duffy spent most of his twenties and thirties laboring in the shadows--mostly
for Childs. His Tel Aviv airport project--a collaboration with Israeli architect
Ram Karmi--required him to make 35 trips to Israel. "I missed the first
two years of my son's life," Duffy says. When he finally made
partner, one of the first things he did was have lunch with Terrence
Riley, MoMA's chief curator of architecture and design, who, Duffy says,
was "also trying to use the power of an institution to do something
special."
Both men were interested in the meeting of art and architecture. Duffy later
approached Fred Sandback, an artist known for defining volumes with
lengths of yarn, about working with him on the lobby of 350 Madison; Sandback
declined, because, Duffy says, "he preferred contemplative spaces."
Then Duffy went after Turrell, who agreed to work with him on the Kuwait
Police Academy (which remains unbuilt). After Turrell contributed to the
Greenwich and Deerfield projects, Duffy reciprocated by producing technical
drawings for the next phase of Turrell's Roden Crater project.
Duffy's most famous collaboration came in the competition, sponsored by the
Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), to redevelop Ground Zero.
Figuring he didn't have a chance of being selected for the finals on his
own--400 firms were vying for 7 spots--he put together a team that included
SANAA (the firm that includes the Japanese phenom Kazuyo Sejima), Michael
Maltzan, Field Operations (with James Corner and Princeton architecture dean
Stan Allen), and the artists Rita McBride and Manglano-Ovalle.
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Greenwich Academy
Greenwich, CT
The academy's new Upper School (shown in section, below, and in photo, above)
houses 20 classrooms, five science laboratories, a student center, a media
center, a visual arts complex, and a library. By placing fiber optics in the
muntins on the facade, James Turrell--an artist Duffy often collaborates
with--transformed the straightforward structure into a glowing dematerialized
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Partner Roger Duffy is striving to change the firm's image from monolithic to
pioneering. Photos of SOM's legendary buildings from the 1950s and '60s hang in
the background.
Photo by Chris Mueller |
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Greenwich Academy
Greenwich, CT
The North side of the Upper School (above) is designed to maximize
sunlight and merge structure with landscape. |
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Computer sensors automatically adjust light levels inside, and the building can
be made transparent by opening the shades (above). |
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At night (when the shades are down) the entire structure appears to glow from
within, and individual light chambers that relate to various disciplines poke
out of the green roof (above).
Photos by Florian Holzherr/courtesy SOM |
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Skyscraper Museum
New York, NY
Located at street level in the tower that houses the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, the
museum (shown above) traces the three phases of skyscraper history--the
pre-1916, the post-1916 set-back, and the tower and plaza model. While the
museum displays physical artifacts relating to the three phases, it is also
designed as a living museum that turns Manhattan into a laboratory. |
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European Central Bank
Frankfurt, Germany
Duffy's competition entry takes the ideal of institutional transparency as its
guiding principle. A glass shell encloses an existing structure--the
Grossmarkthalle--and incorporates it into a larger scheme of lucent adjacent
towers (rendered in perspective above). Red horizontal rectangles woven
throughout (shown in axonometric, below) represent floral landscapes. |
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350 Madison Avenue
New York, NY
An unbuilt scheme expands the 1924 building located at 350 Madison Avenue by
50,000 square feet. A lobby with a glass ceiling is fit into a 25-foot gap
located between the building and the tower south of it (rendering, above).
Extending upwards 20 stories, a metal and glass curtain wall meets a
cantilevered addition, forming a hybrid structure that juxtaposes old with new. |
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Top photo, © dbox; bottom photo, © Edward Hueber/Arch photo. All
other photos--unless otherwise indicated--courtesy SOM. |
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