The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, designed under Adrian Smith at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Photo: ECWiki1 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Adrian Smith’s name is attached to the tallest structure ever built, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Less widely known is that the Chicago architect spent his early childhood in Evanston, according to a Chicago Tribune profile republished by his firm.
Smith was born on Aug. 19, 1944, in Chicago, and his family later moved to Southern California. He studied architecture at Texas A&M, went to work at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in 1967, and finished his degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1969. He stayed at SOM for nearly four decades, serving as design partner from 1980 to 2003 and consulting design partner until 2006.
A tower shaped like a flower
The Burj Khalifa opened in 2010 and was designed at SOM under Smith. Its plan has three lobes, or petals, that step back as the tower rises. The form was inspired by the spider lily. The Chicago Architecture Center’s profile of Smith says the three-petal arrangement breaks up the wind and reduces vortex shedding, the swirling pattern that can set a tall, slender building swaying.
That is the engineering idea at the center of supertall design. Wind, not gravity, is often the harder problem once a tower passes a certain height. A smooth shaft lets the air peel off in a regular rhythm, and that rhythm can match the building’s natural motion. A shape that changes as it climbs gives the wind no single pattern to lock onto. The Tribune profile adds that the tower has 154 occupied floors, with an observatory on the 124th, and that its floor contours echo the pointed arches of Islamic architecture.
Chicago work and a second firm
Smith’s Chicago credits include NBC Tower (1989), AT&T Corporate Center (1991) and Trump International Hotel and Tower (2009). Overseas, his SOM work includes the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, finished in 1998.
In 2006 he left SOM and founded Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, a Chicago firm that emphasizes energy-efficient design. Two years later he co-founded PositivEnergy Practice, an engineering firm focused on low-energy building systems. Projects from the new firm include Central Park Tower in New York (2021), Wuhan Greenland Center (2022) and 830 Brickell in Miami (2023). Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, intended to surpass the Burj Khalifa, is still under construction.
His projects have won more than 125 awards, and the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat gave him its Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011. Texas A&M, where he did not finish his degree, gave him an honorary doctorate in 2013.
In the Tribune profile Smith traced his fascination with height back to high school, when one of his first drawings was a skyscraper about 40 stories tall. He said he was always interested in height. The same article notes that he designs with economical construction in mind and relies on others for much of the detail work.
Evanston’s piece of the story is small but real: a few early years in the suburb just north of the city where his career would later be built. Sources differ on some biographical details, so the Tribune account is the clearest published link.
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
