Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

SOM was formed in 1936 by two architects and an engineer, an early bet that architecture and structural engineering belong in the same room. That premise produced Lever House, the first modernist office tower on New York’s Park Avenue, completed in 1952; the John Hancock Center and Sears Tower in Chicago; the trusses of San Francisco International Airport; and the engineering of Burj Khalifa.

The firm calls itself a collective of architects, designers, engineers and planners, with urban designers and sustainability specialists alongside structural engineers. SOM reports net-zero emissions in its own operations and targets net-zero whole-life carbon across all active design by 2040, and leads WorldGBC Advancing Net Zero and the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge. Recent work includes One Manhattan West and JTI Headquarters in Geneva.