www.som.com

SOM offers architects, engineers, planners, interior and graphic designers, and administrative staff a rewarding work experience at all levels. If you are interested in working for SOM full-time, part-time, or as an intern, please send your resume, salary requirements, and position to the appropriate office location.

Check out our current career opportunities.

Equal Employment Opportunity
SOM is an equal employment opportunity employer. We conduct all employment-related activities without regard to sex, race, color, religion, national origin, citizenship status, ancestry, age, medical condition, disability, sexual orientation, familial status, marital status, veteran status, or any other classification protected by applicable state or federal employment discrimination laws. SOM welcomes diversity in the workplace.

Inside the Blackbox: SOM's Technological Trajectory

Introduction

For an architecture firm to remain competitive, perhaps nothing is more critical than the pursuit of emerging technology. In its best buildings, SOM has used technological advances to establish new systems of architecture, from supertall engineering to large-scale sustainable urban plans.

Today the pursuit of technology applies, in particular, to computational systems. In May 2007, SOM made a significant commitment to exploring the nascent field of computational design when it established the BlackBox studio in the Chicago office. Under the direction of design partner Ross Wimer, four graduates of the Product Architecture and Engineering Program at the Stevens Institute of Technology joined the SOM team with the purpose of developing and leveraging parametric and algorithmic processes to generate new approaches to architectural, interior, and urban design within the firm’s own “black box”.

BlackBox’s incubation within SOM marks a significant (re)turn to technical mediation in the service of rational form-making, recalling investigations of earlier SOM studios. Several of the firm’s most well-known architects and engineers—including Walter Netsch, Fazlur Khan, and Bruce Graham—foreshadowed similar methods of algorithmic design as early as the 1960s.

Inside the Black Box: Using BIM

One of the first programs adopted by the new studio was Gehry Technologies’ parametric BIM software, Digital Project. Built on the Catia software platform which was developed to service the high-performance aerospace and automotive industries, Digital Project has the ability to parametrically define, track, and modify the entire lifecycle performance of a project. BlackBox is not only exploiting the extraordinary capabilities within Digital Project; they are also connecting Digital Project with other software platforms such as Ecotect (environmental analysis), Strand (structural analysis), Excel (financial proforma analysis), and Revit (project documentation). By integrating these various technologies, SOM is able to more efficiently adapt its projects to the particular needs of a client, drawing upon this workflow to address a wide range of design parameters and constraints. A design’s fulfillment of its stated goals may be directly and easily surveyed not only by the architect and the engineer, but also by the client, the contractor, and any other critical stakeholder.

The constraints and objectives in play with BIM and other digital design tools allow the architect or engineer to relinquish some degree of control; design collaboration can become more direct by integrating client requirements as parameters in the BlackBox “database.”

The Space Between Discovery & Practice

The resultant form of Plot 16 may be considered a convergence of many disparate ideas, physical elements, and environmental factors—this is design as an open-ended process. By developing parametric models side by side with studio heads before handing them off to the studio architects, BlackBox helps to frame the essential logic for the remainder of the design process and directly impacts the gestation of the building. As a result, studios are experiencing a major task shift from drafting and other modes of representation to more intelligent design systems.

In addition to working with architects on current projects, BlackBox also researches theoretical systems, operating in the space between discovery and practice. In a discussion about a phenomenon of complexity known as Emergence, Besserud references two different research projects the group has undertaken to explore this “bottom-up,” “rules-based” frontier of artificial intelligence. “Ants” is a program which seeks to simulate the interactions and behavior of an ant colony, while “Growing Cities” seeks to simulate patterns of growth and decay in an urban context. Besserud describes the rationale behind these investigations as a counterpoint to traditional “visionary” approaches to design. “The idea,” he says, “is to create a framework or game system in which you have a few simple rules that are encoded into a whole bunch of agents. Then, assuming you’ve set it up properly, when you hit ”go” you can sit back and watch all these things interacting with each other, resolving conflicts, and evolving in interesting patterns. Of course, the patterns that develop are a function of the rules you created, so if you play with the rules you can create new patterns of interaction and evolution. What’s really interesting is when you get something that is totally unexpected and it causes you to really think about why that happened.” Design in this “rules-based” paradigm is very much the outcome of a process, not a predefined condition.