This famed architecture firm is bringing rare designs from its archive back to life

Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, the giant of corporate office architecture in the mid-20th century, has its fingerprints on some of the most iconic buildings in American business. From Sears Tower in Chicago to IBM’s New York headquarters to Lever House in midtown Manhattan, these towers became skyline definers, and symbols of postwar American economic power. But zoom in from those skyline views, and you’ll see that SOM‘s designs were more encompassing than the buildings themselves. Taking a total design approach, the firm designed the buildings and their interiors, but also their furnishings and even objects like ashtrays. Specific to the project, these furnishings and objects were never made commercially available. IBM Offices [Photo: Ezra Stoller] Now, those bespoke objects are getting a chance at a larger audience. SOM has opened its archives and collaborated with the furniture maker Teknion’s IkonStudio to create production versions of some of its deep portfolio of corporate furniture from the past. “When we realized that we should do this, we actually opened up the archives and said let’s pull everything out of the cupboards and look at it holistically,” says Chris Cooper, a partner at SOM. SOM and Teknion worked to curate a group of items for broader release, combing through archival images, designs, and even preserved pieces of furniture to find items that felt both timeless and relevant to the needs of people today. [Photo: David Peterson] “We did this culling down from hundreds to maybe 80 to now there’s probably a dozen pieces that are going into production,” Cooper says. “It’s a very privileged position to be in looking back at 100 chairs and seeing which ones percolate to the top as being exceptional.” The first items to be announced are a sofa and easy chair designed for IBM’s headquarters in the late 1950s and a tubular chrome table and chair set designed for the Americ