Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Trip!

So this Friday my iTeam, AED, went on a field trip to visit SOM, a world-renowned architecture firm, in downtown Chicago! We woke up before 6 in the morning in order to make a 7 am bus ride to the city. Once we arrived downtown, we took the subway and walked to Michigan Avenue where SOM is located. There we were welcomed by Keith Besserud, our iCOA at SOM. After introductions, he gave us a tour of the office and described some of the projects that the firm is currently working on, many pictures and models of which were displayed at the office.

We then took seats in a conference room where Keith introduced us to two of his colleagues, a structural engineer and an sustainability designer who both gave very interesting presentations addressing the correlation of their respective fields to architecture. The structural engineer talked about the relationship of math to design and how a greater understanding of the way forces flow, known by mathematical formulas, can lead to more efficient structural design. The sustainability designer talked about the optimization of different building schemes in order to minimize carbon emissions and overall power usage. Especially interesting in his presentation was the design process which he described that led to the innovative wind turbines in the Pearl Wind Tower, an SOM-designed structure world renowned for it's implementation of energy-saving techniques.

Then, over lunch, Keith gave a presentation about his group, the Blackbox Team, which is small team within SOM which focuses on designing through advanced computational methods. He gave us a brief crash course in the process, often involving genetic algorithms, and showed us some remarkable results from his work with these processes. After these presentations we thanked Keith for a wonderful experience and left the office to do some walking around Millennium Park and downtown. Several of our group members visited the Art Museum and then we jumped back on a train to Champaign, arriving back around 7 pm. All in all, a great day to establish a firm connection with our iCOA, Keith Besserud at SOM, and learn about some really cool architectural design processes along the way!