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Plans in Paddington Station. Owings attended the University of Illinois and Cornell, worked his way through by waiting on the athletes' training tables, earned degrees in both architecture and engineering. He leaped wholeheartedly into campus life, says, "I wasn't one of those drab, grey students. I was in debt to my tailor for four years." In retrospect, he realizes, "it was the end of an era. The Bauhaus had already started in Germany, and Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were already having an influence in Europe." For a young graduate, one of the most dynamic U.S. architects was Raymond Hood, then helping to design Rockefeller Center. Owings gravitated to Hood's office, still recalls the thrill of the 70-story RCA building: "You have this tall tree, this knife edge, presenting its narrow dimension to Fifth Avenue. It is breathtaking."
His own chance to discover where his abilities lay came when he was sent by Hood to Chicago to work on the 1933 World's Fair. With him went a brilliant young designer, Louis Skidmore. As the Depression deepened, the elaborate plans drawn up by the U.S.'s leading architects had to be discarded. "Skid and I took the fair over," says Owings, who does not suffer from modesty. "We had to devise solutions, do a bare minimum, use the simplest materials—we built the pavilions out of beaverboard." In the process Owings found that his strengths lay in making big plans and in rounding up and cajoling clients to effect them. "I'd go crazy doing the design details," he says. Adds a contemporary: "Skid and Owings worked like a bulldozer and finish grader. Skidmore was the grader."
After the fair was over, Owings and Skidmore took a trip abroad, then met by prearrangement in London's Paddington Station. There, perched on steamer trunks, they decided to become partners (Structural Engineer John O. Merrill, now retired, joined the firm in 1939). They also decided on the novel team concept that was to prove as important as any of S.O.M.'s buildings. As Owings explains it, "We decided that the young designer would be free to try anything. We would guide him, but we would not inhibit him." Backing up the designer would be a project manager to handle finances and a partner-in-charge to deal with the client. "It has worked," says Owings, "and it has worked fabulously."