A Banned Book and two Articles. The Individual and the Collective at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (1955–1959)

A 1955 pot-boiler novel, Edwin Gilbert’s Native Stone described Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s New York office and its lead architect Gordon Bunshaft in unflattering terms: domineering, dishonest, a womanizer. SOM threatened a lawsuit to suppress Gilbert’s book and the book was withdrawn. Yet the issues raised in the book, most notably the relationship between the individual and collective continued to resonate leading to two significant articles about the firm. In the first, published in Fortune magazine (1958) entitled “The Architects from ‘Skid’s Row’,” the firm attempted to paint a picture of a happy collective. Its goal was to provide a healthy counter-narrative to the novel. Happy employees given a chance to express themselves within the context of the group were at the center of the story. A year later (1959) Gordon Bunshaft sponsored his own self-aggrandizing narrative in Newsweek striking back at the myth of the collectivity. There he claimed that he was the firm’s leader and the others worked for him. The issues raised in this sequence of novel and two articles echoes important issues raised by William H. Whyte in his best-selling study of corporate America, The Organization Man (1956). Whyte, describes the tension between the collective and the individual in corporate America fearing that the rise of a group conformity would stifle the innovation and originality that originally gave rise to the corporation itself.