Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is a collective of architects, designers, engineers, and planners working together to build a better future. Founded in 1936, when two architects and an engineer formed a partnership, the firm was built on interdisciplinary practice long before the term became common. For more than 90 years that founding principle has defined how SOM works, as a collective endeavour.

SOM's teams bring together designers with an artistic sensibility, architects and engineers with highly specialised technical knowledge, and planners with a deep understanding of policy and economics. The synthesis of these viewpoints produces design solutions no single person could have imagined alone, across expertise spanning sustainable engineering, healthcare design, and regenerative city planning.

The merger of architecture and structural engineering has been SOM's hallmark for decades, from Lever House, completed in 1952 as the first modernist office building in New York City, to the record-breaking Sears Tower and John Hancock Center that redefined the Chicago skyline, to the engineering of Burj Khalifa, which stands as the world's tallest building.

The practice works from a network of creative studios across the globe, applying international expertise at a local level. In the UK, SOM's London studio is based at The Broadgate Tower, a building the firm designed. SOM is a net-zero emissions business and is targeting net-zero whole life carbon across 100 percent of its active design work by 2040.

SOM was named No. 1 on Architizer's 2024 list of the Best Architecture and Design Firms in the United States.