Avery Drawings & Archives recently acquired a collection of oral memoirs documenting the reminiscences and reflections of twenty-five Skidmore, Owings & Merrill partners including Gordon Bunshaft and David M. Childs, Srinivasa Iygenar and J. Walter Severinghaus.

Founded in 1936, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) is one of the world’s largest and most influential architecture, urban design, engineering, and interior firms. SOM came to national prominence by the early 1940’s led in part by commissions from the United States government to build a number of military complexes, including the U.S. Naval Postgraduate College in Monterey, California, the Great Lakes Naval Station near Chicago, and the Atomic Energy Commission facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. After World War II, the firm designed buildings in a range of styles, including the International Style, brutalism, and postmodernism. While especially well known for its many iterations of the “glass box” skyscraper, historians also credit SOM as the design pioneer of the suburban “corporate campus.” Originally based in Chicago with sister offices in New York and San Francisco, this international firm has built in over 50 countries, often designing for U.S.-based corporations expanding operations in developing countries.

Although SOM prefers to emphasize the firm rather than any individual practitioner, some of its more prominent architects have included Charles Bassett, Natalie de Blois, Gordon Bunshaft, Myron Goldsmith, Bruce Graham, Bill Hartmann, Fazlur Khan and Walter Netsch. Drawings & Archives already holds important SOM materials most notably the Gordon Bunshaft architectural drawings and papers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bunshaft’s papers frequently reinforce the narrative of Bunshaft as the lone visionary behind the SOM style. Recent acquisitions complicate this narrative, including a collection of approximately 140 bound albums of SOM buildings and interiors photographed by Ezra Stoller. The oral memoirs offer a multifaceted view of a large firm where numerous individuals and departments collaborate to complete projects. These memoirs provide essential counter-narratives to our existing holdings, as well as internal contrasts between the collected memoirs themselves. Overall, this acquisition will illuminate the corporate culture of one of premiere architectural firms.