Having joined our L.A. office first as a summer intern and then as a full-time designer, Jad Ismail is now part of the team working on LACMA, the largest museum in the city he now calls home. For this edition of “Spotlight,” a series on personal and professional journeys at SOM, Jad shares his thoughts on how architecture shapes our lives every day.

I’m the youngest of five children. The second oldest, my sister, is an architect as well. I saw her going through architecture school and I remember being so amazed by what she did. …

Since joining SOM’s New York office just over two years ago, Adede Amenyah has worked on the design and renovation of two of the city’s most iconic and storied buildings — the historic Farley Post Office (soon to open as Moynihan Train Hall) and the reimagined Waldorf Astoria. That’s just the beginning of her ongoing architectural education. In the next profile in our Spotlight series, Adede tells us why every day on the job offers a new chance to learn.

In my last year of architecture school, I took a studio course called “Super-Tall” led by Nicole Dosso, who at the time was a director at SOM. Most of my studies up until then were very conceptual and abstract — Nicole’s studio was very much grounded in the real world. She brought in consultants who talked us through everything you need to consider when designing super-tall buildings, from facades and structural engineering to wind performance studies. It was the first opportunity I had to do technical design work, to understand the entire process of how you go from an initial concept to a physical structure. …

Earlier this year, two members of our New York team contributed an article to Architecture Philosophy, the journal of the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture (ISPA). In the piece, Frank Mahan and Van Kluytenaar reflect on SOM’s work preserving, renovating, and adapting the firm’s own iconic mid-century projects. The practice of adaptive reuse, it turns out, raises a number of thorny questions: What does it mean to modify an existing building to serve in the present? And what, exactly, confers a building’s historic value?

Nearly 20 years ago, SOM took on the task to replace and restore Lever House’s curtain wall — a delicate operation that required substituting the original materials of the 1952 building, New York City’s first modernist landmark. The seamless integration of a new state-of-the-art facade set a precedent for the preservation of 20th-century architecture. What philosophies have emerged since, and how have they been applied to other buildings? …

by Kent Jackson

The climate crisis is no longer a distant alarm — it’s already becoming an immediate reality. As wildfires rage on the west coast of the United States, millions of residents are breathing polluted air. The scenes of devastation recall the unprecedented brushfires we witnessed in Australia last year. Floodwaters from a record hurricane season inundate cities and towns in the southeastern U.S., while earlier this month Japan and Korea were battered by two of the earliest and strongest typhoons on record. Here in the U.K., increased flooding now places one in six homes, or 2.4 million people, at risk.

Natural disasters are nothing new, but we are now witnessing climate events of a harrowing scale and intensity—while scientists predict that hurricanes and wildfires will only become more devastating in the coming decades. It’s clear that climate change is no longer a matter of remote concern. For people around the world, the consequences of inaction are already hitting close to home. …

Right out of architecture school, Ingedia Sanchez landed on the design team for the world’s tallest building. Since joining SOM in 2003, her career has been a steady rise. In addition to her work as a technical architect, Ingedia is a mentor and community leader. In July she was elected the president of the nonprofit organization Arquitectos; she is the first licensed woman architect to hold this role.

I’m a technical architect in our Chicago office. My role is to take a project from the later stages of schematic design through construction administration, coordinating with consultants and with the client. …

Chicago native Morgynn Wiley got a head start as a summer intern at SOM, hit the ground running out of architecture school, and hasn’t broken stride since. For the first profile in our Spotlight series, Morgynn takes a break from her design job to tell us about working in her hometown, the opportunities she’s found as an entry-level designer, and why one portfolio does not fit all.

I’ve been working full time at SOM for a little over two years; it’s my first job out of architecture school. …

by Derek A. R. Moore

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended all of life’s rituals and routines — great and small, sacred and secular. So, the news in late June that the Hajj — the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina that is one of the “five pillars” of the faith, and considered an obligation for those physically and financially capable to make once in their lifetime—would be canceled came as a surprise to probably no one, although it certainly disappointed millions of Muslims and others around the world.

Since 1981, the world’s gateway to the holy cities has been the Hajj Terminal at Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah. Imagining that vast, largely open-air terminal during pandemic conditions has actually revealed the significant public health advantages of its design. In fact, this only adds to a list of innovations — in operations, flexible planning, structural engineering, mechanical engineering and ventilation, not to mention cultural resonance — which took their first monumental form in the Hajj Terminal. Due perhaps to its unique use — mainly during a single, intensive six-week period each year — and its very open-air format, the Hajj Terminal has gone largely unrecognized as the seminal airport terminal of our time. …

What does inclusive design mean today? When it comes to buildings and public spaces, equal access has not only become expected — it’s written into law.

Thirty years ago, a landmark civil rights legislation was passed that would forever change architecture and urban design in the United States. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), signed on July 26, 1990, aimed to guarantee equal rights for 40 million Americans living with physical and mental disabilities.

Born out of a grassroots movement, the ADA barred discrimination in many areas of life, including employment, schools, transportation, and public services. …