Not Your Daddy's SOM

At Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), a firm known for its skyscrapers and sprawling corporate campuses, Roger Duffy has designed a series of small projects--from a grade school to a science museum--that are innovative, stylish, and well crafted. And where collaborating with artists once meant choosing the right Picasso or Calder for a plaza, Duffy has delved deeper. At Connecticut's Greenwich Academy he worked with James Turrell to turn the lobby and library of a new building into glowing "light chambers." At the same time Duffy's commercial projects seem surprisingly uncompromised by market pressures.

Thanks to Julie Taraska