Abstract
Through a reconstruction of the murky process involved in the design of the Hajj Terminal at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Matthew Allen examines how computational expertise negotiated a new role for itself within the hierarchy of late twentieth-century corporate architecture. In The Genius of Bureaucracy: SOM’s Hajj Terminal and Geiger Berger Associates’ Form-Finding Software he explores how Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s rubric of “the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy” played out in a situation where the two ideals converged. Unusual among other large corporate firms, SOM not only invested in computation early on but also leveraged computer-generated images to promote its practice. Examination of SOM’s printouts from the Hajj Terminal project reveals the pervasive presence of the lower ranks of the corporate hierarchy—particularly the engineering subconsultants Geiger Berger Associates, who developed unique software for engineering tensile structures. In this contest between decisive SOM designers such as Gordon Bunshaft and Fazlur Khan and engineering paperwork, a new understanding of “the computer” emerged that congealed around the concept of form-finding, or “smart” digital modeling.
University of California Press