Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design partner Roger Duffy, FAIA, describes his SOM Education Lab as “a studio that is both independent and dependent on the bigger whole.” Although it capitalizes on the resources of a firm large enough to have its own annual compendium of best work (SOM Journal, a publication that Duffy also devised), the Ed Lab purposefully maintains a boutique perspective, employing only a handful of core associates and focusing mostly on smaller-scale building projects. And although the soft-spoken Duffy seems more likely to step away from the mic than to hog the spotlight, his work leaps ahead of the mainstream—raising the ambitions of his SOM colleagues, and changing popular perception of the giant firm.
Ed Lab’s hallmarkis its intense collaborations with artists. “I came to New York in ’85 and I became really taken by the Dia and American conceptual art from the ’60s and ’70s,” he explains. “As I got the opportunity to develop my own voice, I took the risk of doing smaller works in a collaborative fashion. I thought these artists could contribute in a way that could challenge the boundaries of formal architecture.”“Roger involves artists like Bob Irwin, James Turrell, Leo Villareal, and Lawrence Wiener in the process from the very beginning,” says associate Darrell Puffer, one of Duffy’s senior teammates. “And the results are integral. They don’t look like a One Percent project in which art is tacked on.”
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