Sometimes it’s better just to pretend you understand. Conversations littered with words like “parametric” and “curvilinear.” Mentions of the Miesian and the Corbusian. Smith in front of one of his Chicago creations, the Trump Tower Photo: Chris Strong
Still, when we meet at his firm’s offices in the BMO Harris Bank complex, we are a mere 23 floors above the streets of Chicago, far below the surrounding rooftops. But it’s his overseas structures that have made him the go-to guy for sky-piercing construction.Īt 71, he’s the Prince of the Precipice. Here in Chicago, Smith, who spent almost three decades at the iconic firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill before striking out on his own with SOM colleague Gordon Gill in 2006, is best known for signature pieces like the AT&T Corporate Center (now Franklin Center), NBC Tower, Trump International Hotel & Tower, and Millennium Park. That’s right, Adrian Smith will soon have to his name three of the four tallest occupiable buildings in the world. Smith is also working on another massive creation, the 2,087-foot Wuhan Greenland Center in China, which will rank fourth. That’s an entirely different scale of endeavor, its height pushing just slightly short of three John Hancock Centers (if you lose the antennas) stacked one on top of the other.
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When the exterior is completed in 2018, it will top out at more than a full kilometer (or 3,281 feet, for those who live in a country that thinks it’s too smart for the metric system). Now he has designed the next world’s tallest, the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia. The man leading the upward push is Adrian Smith, the legendary Chicago architect who designed the Burj Khalifa, completed in 2010. Some ask: How high should we build? How high is too high? But these towers, and their persistent climb, stand on a distant edge of architecture’s horizon, buildings that ask and answer a better, beautifully human question: What’s possible? It seems certain the list will never be fixed or finished. The towers I loved as a kid have been dwarfed. At 2,717 feet, it’s more than 1,200 feet higher than Chicago’s one-time titleholder. The new tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, sits on the other side of the planet, in Dubai. Now, after two decades of ambitious building in the Middle East and Asia, the former Sears Tower is 14th on the list. And my house on Vick Park B-pretty tall, as houses go-my very own omega. Next to those, I drew the 17-story Midtown Tower, which my dad helped design, in my hometown of Rochester, New York. I drew them once, to my own vague scale, standing side by side. “Besides, they can always go higher.”īack then, I could tell you the top 10 skyscrapers in the world. “That’s not going anywhere,” my dad told me. I remember standing with my pops in the World Trade Center observatory, whining that we weren’t in Chicago at the Sears Tower, which had just become the new world’s tallest. That was the ’70s, and it seemed to matter to everyone. Maybe because my father was an architect, I sweated the whole World’s Tallest Building thing pretty hard when I was a kid. Projects designed by Smith have won more than 125 architecture awards, including global titles.Above: A rendering of the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, expected to be erected by 2018 Prior to establishing Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architecture in 2006, Smith had been a design partner at Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill from 1980 to 2003 and a consulting design partner from 2004 to 2006. The latter may never be built as the project has been stalled since 2008. Elsewhere in the region, he worked on the design for the Masdar City headquarters, part of Abu Dhabis sustainability initiatives, and 1 Dubai, part of Meraas Developments Jumeirah Garden City scheme. He has also worked on the design of Kingdom Tower Jeddah, which is set to take over the title when completed in 2017. Position Co-founder & partner, Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architectureīiography American architect Adrian Smith has been involved in several of the regions most iconic projects, most famously Dubais Burj Khalifa, currently the worlds tallest building.
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