FEATURE STORY — July/August 2007

Unfinished Business

Now at an age when most are winding down their careers, Adrian Smith, designer of the world’s tallest building, is beginning anew with Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture. His goals include working 15 more years and making “zero-energy” buildings the paradigm of the 21st century

By Kevin McKeough
Photography By Lloyd Degrane

It’s mid-March, and Adrian Smith ’69 AA is still shopping for a new office table. In October of last year, Smith left Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the famed Chicago architecture firm where he gained international renown for his innovative designs. Smith had spent nearly 40 years with SOM, as the firm is universally known, but he didn’t spend much time looking back after his departure.

By November, he had started his own architecture practice with his former SOM colleague Gordon Gill. Now Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture occupies the entire 23rd floor of an office building in downtown Chicago, and the firm is still in the process of setting up its offices.

Smith is used to planning big—he has, after all, designed some of the world’s tallest buildings—and he has similarly lofty ambitions for Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture: To establish environmentally sustainable architecture as the new standard of design, and in the process, address a major cause of global warming. At the same time, he has to deal with some of the more prosaic aspects of running a start-up firm, such as ordering office furniture. “We’re juggling [with] getting our space ready [and] informing everybody ... we’re starting a new firm,” says the 62-year-old Smith.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Chicago’s skyline

As a child, Smith was drawing and making models of buildings before he even knew what architecture was. Born on Chicago’s far West Side, he spent his early childhood in Evanston before his family moved to San Clemente, Calif., where his father opened a department store. At his mother’s suggestion, Smith began looking into a career in architecture when he was in high school. Soon he was enraptured with Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs, making pilgrimages to view works such as the Unity Temple in Oak Park.

“It spurred a sense of thrill and awe in me,” he says with a hearty chuckle and a wide smile. “I still have that today.”

After beginning his architecture studies at Texas A&M University in 1966, he took a summer job with Perkins and Will, a Chicago-based architecture firm. As Smith drove up the Dan Ryan Expressway into downtown Chicago for the first time, he says the skyline cast a spell on him.

“There was the city in front of me. It was magical,” Smith recalls. “I’d been used to Los Angeles and Texas, where there were very few tall buildings, so it was very impressive. I was drawn here for architecture, for no other reason than the power of the city.”

He decided to remain at his job when the summer ended, moved to SOM the following spring, and in the fall of 1967 enrolled in UIC’s architecture program. A design course taught by Stanley Tigerman, later director of the School of Architecture, made a particular impression on him.

“Stanley was teaching the course like it was a thesis course,” Smith recalls. “It was a mind-expanding approach to architecture that was much more urban in nature than anything I had previously had, and much more analytical in the specifics of design.”

While attending UIC, Smith continued working at SOM, and in 1968 he married his wife, Nancy, with whom he has a son and daughter.

His trademark: Contextualism

At SOM, Smith first toiled in a design studio on projects for Bruce Graham, architect of both the John Hancock Center and Sears Tower, Chicago’s two tallest and most revered skyscrapers. One of Smith’s first tasks was to integrate the air-conditioning system into the constricted spaces of the Hancock building’s second-floor mezzanine. During the next few years, he honed his skills working on a variety of office and industrial buildings, developing ideas put forward by Graham and other design studio heads and adding his own.

In 1975, Smith began work on the project that would profoundly influence his approach to architecture to this day, the Grupo Industrial Alfa Headquarters in Monterrey, Mexico. Ricardo Legorreta, one of the Mexican architects working with Smith on the project, stressed the importance of contextualism—designing buildings to fit into their cultural, architectural and environmental surroundings, rather than following the prevailing style of international modernism, which was based on the glass and steel boxes championed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

That project “introduced me to an ideology that I hadn’t experienced before,” says Smith. “It made a whole lot of sense, and it gave me new tools to manipulate form, space and technology in different ways.”

Contextualism soon became Smiths’ trademark, beginning with his work for Banco de Occidente in Guatemala City from 1977 to 1981. By now an associate partner and design studio head, Smith designed the bank’s branches and headquarters to incorporate local materials and colors, open courtyards, fountains and natural ventilation (the latter eliminated the need for air conditioning in the buildings). He even worked with local weavers to design fabrics for the chairs.

“Those buildings still remain the benchmark for me in terms of relating a building to the region’s culture. It was very indigenous,” Smith says.

This work earned Smith the first of his eight National American Institute of Architecture Honor Awards. In 1980, as the project neared completion, he was elected an SOM design partner.

With each of his subsequent projects, Smith designed buildings in response to their settings. In 1982, he began work on another of his career-defining projects, a mixed-use development along Boston’s waterfront called Rowes Wharf. Smith echoed the city’s prevalent red brick and colonial architecture by incorporating red facades, rounded domes and an arched passageway into his design for which he received yet another AIA award.

“It’s very site-specific. It could not be done any place else,” Smith observes of Rowes Wharf. “It connects with the way the height of the buildings step down from the center of the city to the waterfront, and [with the way] the buildings jut out into the water, all the way up and down Boston Harbor.”

The Chinese pagoda and Jin Mao Tower

As Smith’s accomplishments grew, so did his prominence at SOM. For years, his office served as the five o’clock gathering place where the firm’s design partners would discuss the day’s events over drinks before heading home—or back to work.

In 1993, he was elected to a two-year term as SOM’s chairman and CEO (a rotating position that was eliminated later in the decade). The recession in the early ’90s had all the firm’s offices outside of Chicago bleeding red ink; Smith returned them to profitability by reducing staff while feeding the offices enough work to keep their core talent pool intact.

It was around this time that Gordon Gill first met his future partner. A Harvard graduate who began working at SOM in 1993, Gill had a workstation just outside Smith’s office and would often see him darting in and out of it.

“One day he was leaving and I just blurted out, ‘Hi, Adrian,’” Gill recalls. “He walked over, took off his coat and sat on a desk, and talked to [me and my colleagues] for an hour-and-a-half about design; how important it was for us to bring new ideas to the table; and not to be afraid of being wrong.”

During the ’90s, Smith’s biggest project—and biggest contribution to SOM’s bottom line—was the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, a hotel and office building that evokes the Chinese pagoda with its flared sections that climb to 1,381 feet, making it China’s tallest building.

“Jin Mao [uses] an identifiable symbol for China, one that’s seen as very friendly,” Smith reflects. “When you’re next to the building, you don’t feel the pagoda, but when you’re three miles away, you do feel it, see it.”

Clouds began appearing on the horizon early in the new millennium, though, as partners in SOM’s New York City office sought additional control over the firm. In 2003, Smith accepted a position as a consulting partner, giving up his SOM voting rights. He says he agreed to the arrangement rather than engage in a battle that could have harmed other partners in the Chicago office.

Designing the world’s tallest building

Despite that change of status, the following year Smith began his most high-profile project yet: the design of the Burj Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which, when completed in 2009, will be the world’s tallest building. The skyscraper’s exact height remains a secret, but Smith says the tower will be more than 160 stories and 2,300 feet high. (By comparison, the Sears Tower—which reigned as the world’s tallest building from its completion in 1973 until 1996, is 110 stories and 1,450 feet high, not including the television antennae that rise from the top of the building.)

Because so few “super-tall” buildings—structures more than 80 stories in height—have been built, there’s a limited body of knowledge about how they perform structurally. As a result, Smith and his engineering colleagues on the Burj Dubai project conducted extensive testing and simulations to assess the impact of such variables as wind and building weight.

“The whole thing is going to [a height] that no one’s gone before,” explains Robert Booth, executive director of Dubai-based Emaar Properties, the project’s developer. “The technical leap it’s taking is something that hasn’t been done since the Empire State Building.”

As usual, Smith’s design takes inspiration from the building’s context; it draws on the geometrics of a desert flower and the onion domes and spiral imagery found in Middle Eastern architecture.

However, Smith did not remain at SOM long enough to celebrate the Burj Dubai’s completion with his team. As the end of his consulting partner contract approached last year, he began to explore the possibility of starting his own firm. Although Smith received what he describes as “a very good offer” from SOM, his excitement about opening his own firm, coupled with SOM’s expectation that he would hand over more of his work to other partners, led to his departure.

Jeffrey McCarthy, a SOM partner in the Chicago office and 30-year veteran of the firm, says that Smith’s own late-career goals ultimately were incompatible with the procedures the 71-year-old company uses to maintain its longevity. “SOM is a firm that’s built on succession and renewal,” McCarthy says, noting that the company has a mandatory retirement age of 65. “Sooner or later, all of us have the responsibility to pass on the mantel. Adrian was at that juncture in his life and he didn’t want to pass that on. That’s where we agreed to disagree.”

Launching his own firm

Now at an age when most people are winding down their careers, Smith is beginning anew. He says he wants to work another 10 to 15 years. “What I really enjoy doing is architecture; that is my life and my love,” he explains. “I love making a difference in cities. I love to create architecture that is going to make life better and more meaningful for its occupants.”

Comments Gill: “He’s happiest when we’re designing. You can see it in his face.”

Like any start-up venture, Smith’s new firm entails a significant financial risk. It’s taken $3.1 million just for Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture to set up shop—opening an office with enough space, furnishings and equipment to accommodate a staff of 70. The firm currently employs 25, but Smith envisions undertaking the same kind of large projects he led at SOM.

“With age and 40 years of experience doing the world’s largest buildings, there comes a credibility and a knowledge of how to get this accomplished. If I retired, I wouldn’t be able to use that,” he says. “I think it’s important that I keep going and try to make the world better.”

“It was a conscious effort and a gamble to put that kind of effort into a facility without any promise of work,” Smith says, who along with Gill visited prospective clients in London, Dubai and several cities in China last December. Although he declines to disclose the amount of personal assets he’s invested in his firm, Smith says, “I’m able to carry the cost for as long as it takes to make it work.”

It’s hardly the sort of conservative investment most people in their 60s would favor. Smith is betting a lot on his ability and his reputation—and so far, the response to the firm seems to be justifying his boldness. The practice’s business plan calls for Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture to generate $5 million in fees during its first year, and Smith says the work the firm already has received could exceed that amount.

The projects, still in their initial phases, include a feasibility study for a downtown Chicago office building; an office building outside Philadelphia; a mixed-use development along the Danube River in Belgrade, Yugoslavia; and a 70-story condominium building adjacent to the Burj Dubai, which Smith is designing for Emaar Properties.

Booth expects Emaar to continue working with Smith on projects in Dubai and worldwide. “He’s a great designer, he understands the complexities of putting together major projects, and he’s a treat to work with,” says Booth.

Zero-energy design

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture plans to specialize in designing zero-energy buildings—structures that generate as much energy as they consume—and these projects represent the firm’s first test cases. “We want to design buildings [that are] not a burden on the environment,” Smith says, his typically understated tone belying the enormity of his words. “We want to pursue new paradigms for buildings that will change the way we think about architecture.”

Although condominiums and office towers don’t feature smokestacks spewing fumes, they are one of the environment’s greatest polluters. A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimate attributes 39 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States to office buildings and residences, as opposed to one-third from transportation.

The widespread consensus among scientific experts is that these CO2 emissions are contributing to global warming, which is resulting in droughts, severe storms, species extinction, disease epidemics and other threats. The rapid economic growth in China and India, the world’s two most populous nations, is also contributing to the problem.

“Everybody seems to be focused on industrial chimneys and automobiles, because they seem to be the most obvious polluters,” Smith observes. “But, in fact, the buildings we all live and work in are just as [substantial] in their CO2 emissions, and [the challenges with] buildings are probably easier to solve than automobiles.”

Smith and Gill’s first attempt at a zero-energy building came during their final year at SOM, when they designed the 71-floor Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, China, which will serve as headquarters for the China National Tobacco Guangdong Co. Curves in the building’s façade funnel prevailing winds from the south into turbines located on two mechanical floors. These turbines generate electricity that can be used directly or stored in fuel cells located in the basement. Other environmentally friendly design features include a south-facing façade designed to maximize natural day-lighting and an embedded photovoltaic system to generate electricity.

While subsequent design changes prevented the Pearl River Tower from generating all its own energy, it has set a benchmark for Smith and Gill. “In the future, we hope to advance the thinking we put into Pearl by using energy-producing elements that are site-specific,” Smith says.

For example, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture is investigating the concept of incorporating features such as geothermal heating and cooling systems, which take advantage of the earth’s constant underground temperature, and double-paned glass enclosures to trap and circulate sun-warmed air. Smith believes that as architecture incorporates such innovations, new visual forms will emerge.

“They’re being used to create new shapes, new images for buildings,” he declares. The designs are “based on a rational use of technology, not stylistic sculpting of a building based on one’s own gratification.”

Smith knows that environmental virtue and visual innovation alone won’t be enough for his clients to absorb the added construction costs that zero-energy architecture entails. Instead, he must use a combination of tax credits, reduced building operating expenses and other economies to make these designs pay for themselves. (In fact, it was the economic considerations that first prompted Smith to explore zero-energy design more than a decade ago.)

“All these things will have to be evaluated and priced and worked through, and we have to have a client that is willing to go through this process,” he explains.

Although it will be several years before the first of his projects is completed, Smith believes that if he can demonstrate that zero-energy architecture’s environmental and financial benefits go hand in hand, such design will quickly become universal. “Once one is built, it will become the model; it will become the paradigm,” he declares.

Once again, Smith is aiming high, as he both literally and figuratively builds on his reputation. “With age and 40 years of experience doing the world’s largest buildings, there comes a credibility and a knowledge of how to get this accomplished. If I retired, I wouldn’t be able to use that,” he says. “I think it’s important that I keep going and try to make the world better.”