April 23, 2020 25
Modernism, Inc.
Martin Filler
Gordon Bunshaft and SOM:
Building Corporate Modernism
by Nicholas Adams.
Yale University Press, 288 pp., $65.00
During the Great Depression, among
the few opportunities for nongovern-
mental architectural work in America
were temporary exhibition buildings
for the world’s fairs and regional ex-
positions that proliferated even while
the country’s economic recovery lan-
guished. Ready to seize upon this niche
market were two enterprising young
Indiana-born architects, Louis Skid-
more and Nathaniel Owings. Owings
vaulted to prominence at age thirty
when he was named head of design for
Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress
Exhibition after the fair’s celebrated
master planner, Raymond Hood, under
whom he worked, became fatally ill.
Three years later the pair established
a Chicago office with a branch in New
York City, where their firm—renamed
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
with the arrival of a third partner, the
engineer John Merrill—scored no
fewer than thirteen commissions for
pavilions at the forthcoming 1939 New
York World’s Fair.
A year after SOM’s founding, a rel-
atively inexperienced but formida-
bly ambitious twenty-eight-year-old
named Gordon Bunshaft joined the
fledgling operation and would re-
main there (save for a four-year hiatus
during World War II) until he retired in
- Although Bunshaft’s name never
appeared on the firm’s front door, his
shrewd instinct for self-promotion and
press relations ensured his recogni-
tion despite SOM’s egalitarian prac-
tice of not according design credit to
individuals.
The return to large-scale civilian
construction after the war saw a new
acknowledgment of architectural team-
work that reflected the ethos of the
all-out military effort, during which
the personal was subordinate to the
greater good of victory. This attitude
inspired the nonhierarchical organi-
zation of Walter Gropius’s Cambridge
consortium, the Architects Collabora-
tive (TAC), which was founded in 1945
and specialized in buildings for edu-
cational, cultural, and governmental
institutions until it disbanded almost
sixty years later.* But the biggest mid-
century American architectural op-
eration was SOM, which developed a
special rapport with large commercial
clients and still thrives as an interna-
tional behemoth with ten offices in five
countries and 650 employees.
Yet despite the far-from-reticent per-
sonalities of SOM’s principals (espe-
cially Owings, an ebullient, go-getting
rainmaker who brought in the clients),
they all were dependent on Bunshaft.
He was their ever-reliable Mr. Fixit,
who, even with his truculence and lack
of social finesse, reigned supreme as
the firm’s principal design partner and
dominant—not to say domineering—
force. The architectural historian Nich-
olas Adams’s exhaustively researched
and psychologically probing new mono-
graph on Bunshaft seeks to reposition
him as a central creative figure after
decades of critical neglect and will
likely improve his much- diminished
posthumous standing.Gordon Bunshaft was born in Buf-
falo in 1909, a year after his par-
ents—Ukrainian Jews and first
cousins—immigrated to the United
States. His father started a wholesaleegg business (“Fresh, Broken and Fro-
zen eggs”) that prospered, and Gordon
later described himself as having been
“a spoiled, self-indulgent boy.... I was
not the sort of fellow that mingled. I
was sort of a loner.” He did poorly in
school because of difficulty reading
and writing—Adams suspects he was
dyslexic—and even when he attained
prominence refused to write or lecture
about his designs (unlike the many
other modernists who felt it essential to
explicate their unfamiliar ideas). Bun-
shaft did develop early proficiency in
mechanical drawing, however, thanks
to a middle school draftsmanship
course, and around then he resolved to
become an architect and attend MIT, a
wise choice at a time when Ivy League
architecture schools had quotas limit-
ing Jewish enrollment.
When he entered MIT in 1928, its
curriculum had already begun to shift
away from historical revivalism and
toward modernism. One professor in
particular—Jacques Carlu, a product
of the École des Beaux-Arts—still pur-
sued a simplified version of Classicism
that one of his students later described
as “very clean and abstract” with “no
historical details at all.” Those qual-
ities would be evident in Bunshaft’s
mature work, which often possessed a
classical regularity and equipoise with-
out any direct reference to the past.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree
in 1933, Bunshaft continued in MIT’s
master’s program, at the end of which
he won the coveted Rotch Traveling
Scholarship. This stipend paid for a
yearlong European sojourn, during
which he visited many early landmarksof modern architecture, as well as the
obligatory monuments of past ages.
Bunshaft’s ferociously competitive
side emerges in his early remarks about
the century’s greatest architect, Le
Corbusier, whom he spotted one day
at the Parisian café Les Deux Magots
and thought resembled “an American
beer hound.” Even more obtusely, Bun-
shaft’s lifelong lack of social awareness
or empathetic insight blinded him to
the superabundance of inventive ideas
in Le Corbusier’s revolutionary Cité
de Refuge of 1929–1933 in Paris, a Sal-
vation Army homeless shelter that the
pampered American denigrated as a“flop house... [with] a great many silly
details in it.” The breathtaking exper-
imentation Le Corbusier risked there
and throughout his oeuvre was alien
to this architectural synthesizer, whose
work never approached that level of
conceptual daring.
The first building Bunshaft took per-
sonal credit for on his highly redacted
SOM résumé was the Venezuela Pa-
vilion at the 1939 New York World’s
Fair—a striking International Style
glass box surmounted by an upswept
roof element, the underside of which
was vividly painted in the manner of
the Mexican muralistas. He omitted an
even better design for that exposition:
the ABC Continental Baking Company
Pavilion. Its biomorphic white façade
was dotted with the trademark red, yel-
low, and blue balloons that appeared
on the wrapper of ABC’s Wonder
Bread. Bunshaft, who had little sense
of humor, disowned this delightful ca-
price even when it was cited decades
later as an example of Pop Art avant
la lettre. It doubtless embarrassed him
by being too playful, not a quality this
tough-guy character wished to project.
During World War II he served in
the US Army Corps of Engineers in
London, Paris, and Germany, where
he was involved with hospital construc-
tion. That experience likely won SOM
the commission for the Fort Hamil-
ton Veterans Hospital of 1946–1950 in
Brooklyn, a gleaming, crisply detailed
International Style slab dramatically
positioned on the heights above the
Narrows of New York Harbor. (SOM
reiterated that siting and general for-
mat, with several notably Corbusianvariations, for its Hilton Hotel of 1953–
1955 in Istanbul, which serenely over-
looks the Bosphorus and punctuates a
skyline spiked by domes and minarets.)2.
Upon Bunshaft’s return from the war,
Owings wanted him to work in SOM’s
Chicago office, but he insisted on join-
ing the Manhattan contingent instead.
“Nat of course was very, very angry
to put it mildly,” Bunshaft recalled.
“There was some discussion whether I
ought to be kicked out of the firm. They
finally said I could start as an ordinary
designer in the New York office without
any rank or any authority.” This battle
of wills set the tone for the contentious
can’t-live-with-him, can’t-live-without-
him nature of Bunshaft’s relations
with his colleagues, who nonetheless
deemed him so valuable to SOM’s for-
tunes that he wielded outsized control
that even his nominal superiors dared
not challenge. This primacy was rat-
ified by their most renowned project,
Lever House of 1950 –1952 in Midtown
Manhattan, a sensation that made
Bunshaft’s career and established SOM
in the top tier of American architec-
tural practice.
Ever since Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe devised his visionary plans for
Minimalist steel-framed, glass-walled
skyscrapers he designed as hypothetical
projects in 1921–1922, other architects
dreamed of executing similar struc-
tures, the very incarnation of idealized
modern form and advanced technology
made manifest on an urban scale. In
the expansive years after World War II,
the household-cleaning products man-
ufacturer Lever Brothers wanted new
office headquarters that would embody
its self-image of progressive consumer-
ism, and it hired SOM precisely because
the firm had not yet done such a build-
ing and would therefore approach the
task without formulaic preconceptions.
Lever Brothers got the headline-
making corporate showplace it
wanted. In startling contrast to the
gray- masonry palisades of hotels and
apartment houses that lined both
sides of Park Avenue, SOM inserted a
twenty-four-story glass-skinned slab
that was rotated perpendicularly to
the avenue and hoisted atop a two-
story podium structure that seems to
float on piloti columns. This auda-
cious gesture worked brilliantly when
Lever House first opened, but as other
modernist structures multiplied along
the thoroughfare, the shock value of
this first heretical interloper steadily
diminished.
Although some enthusiasts saw Lever
House as the fulfillment of Mies’s vi-
sion, the architectural historian Henry-
Russell Hitchcock correctly insisted
that “Lever House is not the building
Mies would have done at all,” a judg-
ment based on his understanding of the
German architect’s primary focus on
structural expression and the Ameri-
can firm’s emphasis on surface—in this
case a blue-green glass skin that owed
much to the recently completed curtain
wall of the United Nations Secretariat
Building of 1947–1951 by Wallace K.
Harrison and others, several blocksGordon Bunshaft, 1957; behind him is the Connecticut General Life Insurance building,
designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1953 –1957Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images*See my “The Unsinkable Modernist,”
The New York Review, September 26,
2019.