Skidmore Owings and Merrill has no face. Of course not.

SOM was founded in 1936. From the starting gun, SOM took an integrated, corporate, economically efficient and very American team approach to selling buildings. They were uniquely positioned to take full advantage of the postwar US building boom and in that now-familiar spare Modernist vocabulary, and that's what they did. If Mies was the Yves Saint Laurent producing simple, ethereal and rhythmically tense customized dresses for a select clientel, and Johnson was the back-stabbing knock-off artist from Cleveland, then SOM was the well-organized department store who ran the sweatshop and penetrated the market. Put another way, SOM presided over the degeneration of Modernism from an aesthetic, to a style, to a commodity.

The standardized elements of the International Style of building pushed the cost-per-square-foot dramatically downwards ("it was cheap"). The style is indifferent to the surroundings, so no need to customize for place ("it was cheap"). The style is indifferent to the function of the building, so no need for tiresome tinkering with the programming ("it was cheap").

Credentials:

SOM's credentials are impeccable. It's responsible for so many buildings - valuable ones (the weirdly blissful branch bank of the Manufacturers Hanover Trust in New York early on, the John Hancock Center in Chicago), dangerous ones (the James R. Thompson Center), and thousands of acceptable ones, like the Sears Tower. There's a long, long list, probably an example in every major US city, and lots of landmarks, including the distinctive chapel of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, which was described by an especially perceptive group of Congressmen in 1958 as 'an insult to the Almighty.'

SOM and its formidable big-office imitators continue to dominate the market. And corporate entities are immortal. So you and your grandchildren have lots of SOM to look forward to. Cheers!

Crimes:

The crime of SOM is that the minor flaws of Mies got magnified to superhuman scale. Modernism became an inescapable steady diet in the American landscape. It was an accident. The virus escaped from the lab and grew until it took over.

For one thing, the tight stripped-down quality of Mies buildings, after the SOM Xeroxing process, loosened into an inhumane and pervasive emptiness, the spatial aesthetic many of us American schoolkids have never really recovered from, empty cubical volumes overhead, stainless steel checkerboard window frames with sharp edges, and the overpowering smell of hairspray. We didn't know what we were missing. Attractive visual detail, sociofugal spaces, sensitivity to human scale, all that prewar nonsense went out the window, replaced by an isolating spatial grammar proportioned for service vehicles. Blank planes and sensory deprivation. We rolled around in those school cafeterias like marbles.

Another flaw was that Modernism never put any value on comfort. Mies didn't mind suffering, which was fine for him if he chose to imperially freeze or imperially swat mosquitoes in his magnificent Farnsworth House, but not fine for a crop of students freezing at IIT. After the SOM Xeroxing process, this ascetic tendency became a total disregard for the user experience. Even the most refined SOM buildings are rough on the fingertips.

And the last unavoidable shortcoming of Modernism was that Mies, nor Johnson, nor SOM ever wanted to look next door. This whole stream of architecture was produced with an insulting disregard for the surroundings. One plugs these buildings into the landscape and the landscape has to adjust.

See, Modernism is only fun when you're the architect.