In 1942, two U.S. Army soldiers arrived at the office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) with a request: the government wanted to hire the firm to build a city in complete secrecy. Within months, John Merrill was standing in the mountains of Tennessee, pacing out streets and buildings.
The resulting city, Oak Ridge, was one of three built from scratch to house technicians working on the Manhattan Project, the government’s top-secret initiative to develop the atomic bomb. In time, designing Oak Ridge would prove a watershed project for SOM, and the trio of towns, a milestone in the history of American urban planning.
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