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Book Review: Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism

Book Review: Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism book reviews 433 Nicholas Adams, Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 296 pp. incl. 45 colour ills, 159 b&w ills, ISBN 9780300227475, £50 doi:10.1017/arh.2021.31 Reviewed by MURRAY FRASER It has been plausibly estimated that the United States in its heyday, sometime in the mid-1960s, comprised 50 per cent of the global economy — equal to all other countries combined. Never before or since has any nation or empire controlled so much of global wealth. Equally remarkable is that the US did so with negligible imports and exports, which were no more than 5 per cent of its total GDP back then. The US became supremely rich without really needing the rest of the planet. This context is not explained in Nicholas Adams’s new book about the role of Gordon Bunshaft (1909–90) in Skidmore, Owings and Merrill — widely known as SOM — yet it frames the discussion throughout. The book offers a decidedly US-centric view of the world in which giant corporations dominated the post-war consumer boom, serviced by architectural firms such as SOM and talented designers such as Gordon Bunshaft. Adams describes his book as a ‘critical biography’. The term http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Architectural History Cambridge University Press

Book Review: Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism

Fraser, Murray
Architectural History , Volume 64: 3 – Jan 1, 2021
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Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Copyright
© The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2021
ISSN
2059-5670
eISSN
0066-622X
DOI
10.1017/arh.2021.31
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

book reviews 433 Nicholas Adams, Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 296 pp. incl. 45 colour ills, 159 b&w ills, ISBN 9780300227475, £50 doi:10.1017/arh.2021.31 Reviewed by MURRAY FRASER It has been plausibly estimated that the United States in its heyday, sometime in the mid-1960s, comprised 50 per cent of the global economy — equal to all other countries combined. Never before or since has any nation or empire controlled so much of global wealth. Equally remarkable is that the US did so with negligible imports and exports, which were no more than 5 per cent of its total GDP back then. The US became supremely rich without really needing the rest of the planet. This context is not explained in Nicholas Adams’s new book about the role of Gordon Bunshaft (1909–90) in Skidmore, Owings and Merrill — widely known as SOM — yet it frames the discussion throughout. The book offers a decidedly US-centric view of the world in which giant corporations dominated the post-war consumer boom, serviced by architectural firms such as SOM and talented designers such as Gordon Bunshaft. Adams describes his book as a ‘critical biography’. The term

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Architectural History – Cambridge University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2021

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