Joanna C. Diman (1901-91): A 'Cantankerous' Landscape Architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

摘要

Picking out the specific contribution of an individual within a large firm like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill presents formidable obstacles. Officially, credit is given to the firm; the signature of the individual is not recognized. In 1959, Gordon Bunshaft was censured by the partners at SOM after Newsweek published an interview in which he stated: "I'm in charge of design. The other partners also participate in designing, but by criticism." Still, we can distinguish the work of the partners one from the other, and from time to time we can identify the work of their underlings. Typically, the people we can identify were the specialists. From the interiors department, Jack Dunbar (1924-2017), for example, invented the vertical blinds used to echo the flashing mullions at the Union Carbide headquarters in New York (1960); the structural techniques for the John Hancock Center (1965-70) and the Sears Tower (1968-74) in Chicago were devised under the direction of, if not the direct result of calculations by, Fazlur Khan (1929-82). Partly because SOM's landscape department was a relatively small unit in the New York office, and partly because it was subsumed into larger departments (like urban planning and engineering), its work has largely been overlooked. The department's contributions may have escaped attention in part because SOM often brought in high-profile consultants (Dan Kiley, Lawrence Halprin, and Hideo Sasaki, to name three) who have attracted the attention of scholars. The work may also have been neglected because the department's leader, Joanna C. Diman (1901-91), was a woman.