Interview with Adrian Smith

Adrian Smith is a consulting design partner with the architecture firm of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, and is one of the most recognized architects in the world. His work includes several major skyscrapers, including Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. In the following conversation with Tom Finnegan in November 2003, Mr. Smith discusses his design philosophy, the economics and engineering of tall buildings, and his project history.

Mr. Smith, what was your role early on at Skidmore Owings & Merrill?

I started in 1967 while I was still a student at the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus. In the early years I was an apprentice architect. I worked with Bruce Graham in the 60s and early 70s.

On some of the bigger projects?

Yes, I worked on the basement and third floor levels of the, where I detailed some grilles and laid out a very tight mechanical room. Later I worked on the First Wisconsin Center [today known as the U.S. Bank Center] as a project architect under Jim DeStefano and Bruce Graham. In 1972 my wife and I decided to move to Europe while we were still highly mobile and SOM had a project in England – a headquarters for a tobacco factory for WD & HO Wills. It was an interesting project on a very fast track where all stages – design, construction documents and construction - were all being done at the same time. SOM was associated with a British architecture firm named York, Rosenberg and Mardall, who were primarily responsible for the construction phase services, but the project coordination effort needed help so they offered me a position as a project architect. My wife Nancy and I moved to London for two years and I worked on that project from the start of construction to its completion, which gave me some very good technical and field experience.

When I came back to Chicago I became a studio head, which means I had my own studio here at SOM. I worked on projects like Banco de Occidente in Guatemala, and Groupo Industrial Alfa Headquarters in Monterrey, Mexico where I met Luis Barragan and Ricardo Legorretta and learned a lot about contextualism from them. I was very interested in following through with the ideas I had learned, such as designing buildings that fit their time and their place and feel culturally relevant and connected to the location within which they are placed. So I started practicing these new principles on Banco de Occidente. I became a partner in 1980 and since that time I have been responsible for the philosophical conception and design of all work under my direction.

So this was happening just around the time that postmodern architecture was becoming popular?

Around 1982 I designed on Michigan Avenue. It was my first mixed-use project, and the Neiman Marcus department store was the element that controlled the nature of the development and its aesthetic character. The Michigan Avenue facade was probably my first postmodern building. It was trying to be a postmodern stage set, I guess you could say. The tower was quite rational and contemporary and expressed the fluidity of a concrete tube system with a mixed-use development where different use typologies required different lease spans. I worked with Fazlur Kahn on this concept and we were able to open up the structural tube at the top and in the center in order to create some more interesting and open spaces for the residential units.

In 1984 I started working on the in Bahrain and in Boston. On both projects I was exploring the contextual approach to architecture, each project having a very different context.

With the United Gulf Bank Building the context had more to do with climate and culture than with history. The culture was largely influenced by the nature of the nomadic Bedouin tribes and the pearl divers who until recently had a thriving pearl industry. They lived on large wooden pearl fishing boats called dhows, which were pulled up on the beaches in Manama when not in use. They were very interesting shaped boats with cloth canopies draped over them for sun protection. I drew upon these images for inspiration, and our site happens to look like a boat in its plan. I referenced several elements in the boat form and combined these with elements of solar control and thick deeply punched concrete walls to form the concept of the building. The wonderful emerald green water of the Arabian Gulf and the light beige sand of the desert dominate Bahrain's setting, and both of these form the basis for the materials used in the design. We used light trays throughout the building's exterior wall to bounce light onto the ceilings while using Solex heat absorbing glass fins to reduce solar heat gain from direct western sunlight. Although energy was very inexpensive in Bahrain, I was very interested in finding simple means to reduce energy consumption and increase the occupant's comfort through the mitigation of the effects of climate on the building.

In Boston, I was trying to make the design relevant to this city that has a very strong historical context. I delved into the history of the place and the city’s fabric. The use of material and detail was very different from Bahrain, but the philosophical approach of contextualism was very similar. I wanted a building that felt like it could only go in Boston and in that location, and that it would be so connected to the site that it felt like it was always there.

There’s been a transformation in my work since those days. I found that these buildings, and even and here in Chicago, were too representational of an earlier era. I started to look beyond location and the physical context for inspiration. This meant trying to relate the buildings to the technologies of the present time, and to add to the vocabulary of a city by using materials in more innovative ways.

I did a project in London in the early 90s called 10 Fleet Place, where I experimented with using granite in a different way. Here, the granite facade hangs in perpendicular slabs instead of being conventionally supported onto the face of the building as is typically done. I chose to express the thickness of the granite and to express it as a real curtain wall, and to open up the building’s skin to expose the method of exterior wall construction. By doing so, it not only developed a new language for exterior wall expression, but did so in a manner sympathetic to the British mentality of Constructivism since it related to their idea of composing the building out of parts rather than sculpting it out of a block. Less organic and more constructivist, the British loved it. I learned a lot about using materials and construction techniques in unique ways to achieve more meaning.

That was probably my first significant departure from a traditional approach to contextualism. I don’t shy away from the word postmodernism but I was really looking for something more contextual, and the thing I disliked about most postmodernism at that time is that it was a sort of cartoon classicism. Many of the postmodern buildings of that era took materials and cut them almost like foam core into cartoon shapes, without the richness of detail and shadowing that more traditional architecture embodied. I think the richness of detail is what’s so wonderful about most of the older buildings – not necessarily the fact that they have a pediment or a pitched roof or some other thing. I was very interested in working the detail into the facade at a human scale, the kind of scale that one could envision a craftsman being able to pick up and place on the building, like a brick or a piece of terracotta.

AT&T Corporate Center was your tallest building in the 1980s, and in the 1990s you designed Jin Mao, the tallest building in China. Between these two buildings there seems to be a very different approach to contextualism. What are some of the motivations that drove your contextual approach?

When we designed the in 1985 with our site very close to the I felt that if we did a modern building it would be overpowered by Sears. I also felt at that time that Chicago had undergone a long period of excessive modern intervention to the point where the historical fabric of the city was becoming eroded. The specialness of the modern vernacular was in jeopardy of becoming commonplace. The city was turning into a collage of buildings rather than a synthesis, so with both NBC and AT&T I wanted to re-balance the urban fabric. I was not trying to make icons out of them, but to make them part of a larger assemblage. NBC, designed in 1985, was very sympathetic to its neighbors because it uses the same materials and level of detail. I was trying to make it part of a larger assemblage around the Michigan Avenue Bridge. AT&T was placed in another context where it is meant to connect with the art deco buildings of the central Loop, like 135 South LaSalle Street and the Chicago Board of Trade, and yet to do it in a way that Eliel Saarinen might have done it.

SOM has always been associated with structural engineering marvels such as the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. How does structural engineering play a role in the design of your work?

Structural engineering and mechanical engineering are both integral to the design of my work. I always start a project by brainstorming with my partners Bill Baker (in structural engineering) and Ray Clark (mechanical). What I don't do is let them lead me into a solution where a structural engineering paradigm becomes the predominant idea of what the structure should be, because that approach is not always sympathetic to the context and use of a building. One of the signficant challenges of the 21st Century for architects will be to recognize the important contributions that can be made to architecture through the total integration of sustainable building concepts achievable by innovation in HVAC and structural systems.

One of the complaints I have about buildings like the – here you have one of the world’s tallest buildings and yet the windows are only 5 feet wide. You have height, but you are boxed in with walls and can’t really see out. It was the same with the World Trade Center. So I said, "Why not design towers with as much openness viewing capacity as possible?" It’s been my challenge to engineers to devise structural systems that allow permeability. It started as far back as. When Fazlur Kahn and I were working on the building I said, "Can’t we open some of this up and reduce the structure as we go higher where the gravity loads are less?" And Kahn said, "Yes, we can make it more like a basket as it gets towards the top; we can thin it out." So I put in some duplex units with much larger windows, which produced the unique open top of that building.

Another project in Chicago called was designed in 1989. Its structural system had a solid concrete core with only eight super frame columns and eight corner columns around the perimeter so its typical floor was extremely open. Although Dearborn Center didn't get built, it had a strong influence on Jin Mao, designed in 1993. Except for the top, the shape and the floor plates are very similar. One of the main massing attitutes that Jin Mao borrowed from Dearborn Center and AT&T was the way the building wall steps back as it rises to the sky. On AT&T there are steps at the 15th, 30th and 45th floors. On Jin Mao, I tried stepping in 8 floor segments but determined that this was too static. So I tried modulating from larger stepped segments at the bottom of the tower to progressively shorter segments at the top. This approach solved the issue of the tower feeling complete even when the view of the lower levels was blocked by adjacent structures. The side effect of this stepping system is that it resembles the pagoda forms used in ancient China. These were actually the first form of high rise buildings.

A lot of people have made that comparison, which I suppose comes as no surprise.

The comparison is direct. It wasn’t meant to look like a pagoda, but it was intended to evoke the memory of pagodas, much the same way I.M. Pei's pyramid at the Louvre is a modern depiction of the ancient pyramids in Egypt.

How does contextualism relate to Trump Tower and Burj Dubai?

That’s a good question. On Trump Tower the heights of the surrounding buildings have an influence on the massing. The first setback relates to the Wrigley Building, the second setback relates to the height of Marina City, and the third setback relates to the IBM Building.

The texture of IBM influenced the texture of Trump, and the rhythm and lightness of the influenced the materials and mullion spacing. I think the challenge in making this a contextual piece is that it’s located in the midst of several dynamic buildings that each have their own importance to the city and to the field of architecture in general.

In your interview on Chicago Tonight you mentioned that the spire was decorative and was designed to help "uplift" the building.

Yes, to give it a higher visual aspect ratio. I want to make the spire more dominant than it is as we move forward on the design.

There was a prior rendering that had a taller spire than what is on there now.

Yes... well, we’re going to make it taller than it is now.

What’s the color of the skin going to be when finished?

It’s going to read as a silver building with stainless steel and natural anodized aluminum.

Sort of like the Inland Steel Building?

Yes, but without the green glass. It’s going to have textured stainless steel spandrels with horizontal polished stainless steel tubes projecting about a foot out from the façade. The anchorage system for those tubes will be intricate, and the shadows and reflection from the tubes will give the skin a very lattice-like or lacy quality. Similar to what was done at Jin Mao but not nearly as vociferous.

I think it’s all right to be glassy, but I want an expression of depth to the wall and a lace-like filigree texture. With a glass wall that’s fairly reflective, one can use the reflective nature of the glass to increase the sense of depth by hanging elements away from the glass so those elements will reflect in the glass and give the illussion of depth. In this case, it will reflect the projected tubes that surround the building, so it will seem as though the wall is two feet thick. The depth will give it a more solid but delicate appearance.

Burj Dubai is an interesting project because there is very little context for a building of this height to draw from in Dubai. The city has a heritage similar to Bahrain – it’s a historic Middle Eastern trading port with lots of desert and the same water conditions, but here I am trying to connect on a more organic level. You know the onion dome shapes that you see in mosques and other buildings in Dubai, for example; we used these shapes but in plan, not in elevation. The onion dome shapes will only be seen when looking up from near the base at certain angles.

At the setbacks?

Yes, so if you point it out to someone who doesn’t know about it they might say, "Ah-ha! I see what you’re talking about!" The other aspect that relates to Dubai is the desert flower - the shape of the desert flower has three major petals and three minor petals. This is seen in plan and is a central organizing force in the building.

Will the building have lobes as you might see it from the top view?

Yes, the lobes at the base of the building are the entry vestibules to the various functions. Looking down from the sky you would be able to see these elements and discern the shape of the flower. The base of the building will be very dense with a stainless steel latticework, which will have characteristics similar to the traditional mashrabiyya screens used in Islamic architecture. The traditional screens are typically made of wood, and they are used to block a lot of light and heat from coming into the spaces they contain, giving a filtered light quality to the interior space. Usually you can open pieces of the screen if you want to look out. The base of Burj Dubai will be heavily screened on the first three or four levels to give it a dense metallic texture.

Will the building be a mix of concrete and steel?

The structure is all reinforced concrete below the spire. The spire above the observation floors will be steel. Architecturally, the building will transition from a solid base expression to a vertically expressed midddle section of polished stainless steel projected metal fins and glass. I wanted to use only vertical elements here because the fine dust in Dubai's air will build up on any horizontal projecting elements of the wall. They have sandstorms quite frequently so in order to reduce maintenance costs this tower will have virtually no horizontal ledges.

Burj Dubai is going to be an incredibly tall building from the renderings I’ve seen. Can you tell us how tall you’re going to build it?

Well, we want to keep it purposely under wraps so that nobody knows the height until it’s finished. Emaar, our client, definitely wants Burj Dubai to be the tallest building in the world upon completion. We may include elements that can grow during construction, if needed. You know from the history of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building that height can be added to the design during construction.

When you’re building that tall, what kinds of challenges do you face? It seems to me that when you take it to that next level the economic challenges must be astronomical compared to other super-tall buildings such as Sears Tower?

Economics is a very important issue, and I’ll get back to that, but from a structural engineering perspective I believe we’re pushing the limits of the height at which structures can be built profitably at this time. This one happens to be a concrete core with concrete arms going out towards the three legs of the building. We do believe that we have a project here that can be justified economically. The building will offer terrific condominium units of the highest standard with incredible views at a very high efficiency ratio of net to gross area. The combination of residential and hotel uses makes this a viable project economically. We have learned this from both Tower Palace III in Seoul, Korea and Trump Tower Chicago, both very tall buildings which are predominantly residential.

Is there any similarity to the bundled tube concept of Sears Tower and Burj Dubai?

No, and the structural concept being used in structure could only be used in residential and hotel-type buildings because of the cellular nature of the floorplan. But it happens to be a very efficient and cost-effective structure because it's all concrete. Concrete is the least expensive and most rigid material for tall buildings. If this were done in steel it would move too much in the wind for a residential building. The structure will be very different from Sears and One Mag Mile.

I suppose it's no coincidence then that the highest residences you could have in a steel structure are those within the John Hancock Center.

Well, one could go taller than the Hancock Center in steel but the economics of the steel structure would be prohibitive given the stiffness that the structure would have to achieve. Super-tall building engineering is all about trying to eliminate the perception of movement within the building.

Does that have to do with a better quality of concrete?

Well, that’s interesting. This building has been engineered very carefully, and on super-tall buildings there are all sorts of factors that affect how the structure will work. For example, a building with the same shape of floor plate all the way up and down is not as good as a shape that changes as it goes up. And there’s a phenomenon when the wind blows on a building: let’s say the wind is blowing from the west – it will hit the west façade and it has to get around the building, so it starts moving up the wall, down, and around the sides. The wind actually accelerates because it has to move not only the air that’s blocked by the façade but also the air by the two sides, compressing the air as it moves around the tower. This compression at the tower's edge and subsequent decompression on the back side of the tower creates eddies, or vortexes, that can exert stronger forces on the building than the wind itself and these forces tend to pull or rock the building from side to side. It is this acceleration of movement that we design to control.

Was there anything remarkable about the way your design for in Seoul was designed to handle wind loads?

Yes, basically the shape and skin texture of the building play an important role in vortex shedding because they can help to prevent the forces from building up in a harmonious way. The three-legged shape of the floor plan on Tower Palace III and Burj Dubai give the buildings significant width to withstand horizontal movement and depth to buttress against the wind forces.

We’ve been through three wind tunnel tests on Burj Dubai. One of the important things we learned was that the taller legs need to be on the sides of the prevailing wind rather than the front face because that sheds the vortexes more effectively. The texture of the façade and the weight distribution also affect how wind impacts the structure – for instance how much weight is at the top of the building, and where the columns are placed.

When do they expect to start construction?

They want to start foundations in January 2004.

So the Trump building here in Chicago and the Burj Dubai could be going up at the same time?

Yes, very likely.

Both Dubai and Chicago are cities where skyscrapers are not a real necessity, as in cities like Hong Kong where land constraints force their construction. What do you think drives these cities to build tall?

Well, the Burj Dubai is being built for two reasons that I know. One, it's part of a much larger development where Emaar is developing many smaller housing towers, hotels and a very large shopping center on a 300-acre master plan, and they want the tower to create a critical mass for that whole development. This will add value to the rest of the parcels. They’re also doing it as part of the country’s desire to become a major tourist attraction. The city of Dubai wants to become a major hub in the Middle East and a tourist hub as well as a financial and trading hub.

More so than it already is I suppose?

Oh much more so, yes, they have big plans and the Emir of Dubai is doing everything he can to encourage great developments. He can do a substantial amount because he controls all the land.

And Donald Trump is, well... Donald Trump?

Yes, he’s definitely in it to make money and they’ve done incredible business so far; the sales are going very well and it has exceeded everyone's expectations except for Donald's. He knew it was going to be successful. They have already sold a substantial number of units.

Any idea how the commercial portion has been doing since it got scaled back?

They scaled it back, and they have a couple of tenants that are in pretty solid discussions now. The tower can’t grow that much more because of its structural system, but you could add two or three floors without it being a big problem. It also has a PUD in place that limits the height and size.

What have you learned from the design process of your more recent super-tall buildings such as, and what kind of influence has it had on the design of Trump International and Burj Dubai?

From the design process of 7 South Dearborn I learned that design is a constant search for new and innovative ways of solving complex problems. Design solutions seem to be infinite, and experience builds on past studies and opens up new possibilities as each new project presents itself.

Thank you very much for this conversation.

Interview by Tom Finnegan (November 2003).