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Senior designer and the man responsible for eight of the firm's 13 top A.I.A. awards is Gordon Bunshaft, 59, whom Owings calls "the great classicist." Shock-haired and explosive, a bon vivant and art lover, "Bun" set the firm on the high road to quality with Lever House, most recently has turned out the Hirshhorn Gallery for Washington, and the L.B.J. library for Austin, Texas. Notably outspoken, he has been known to tell a client: "Take it all or nothing." In Chicago, Walter Netsch, 48, is dubbed "the professor" by Owings. Research-oriented, he appeals especially to institutions, designed the Air Force Academy. Counterbalancing him is Bruce Graham, 42, a towering, beardless Lincoln who firmly believes that "this is a technocratic age, and technocracy pulls us together." He designed the highly engineered John Hancock building in Chicago, likes to use computers to figure out the precise calculations, such as how much aluminum can be pared from window frames (the answer saved Shell $200,000 in Houston). The driving force in the San Francisco office is Charles Bassett, 46, a touseled six-footer who came to S.O.M. from the office of the late Eero Saarinen. He ranges widely in styles, designed the Alcoa building, the Mauna Kea Hotel in Hawaii, and the bare-boned Oakland-Alameda County stadium, which he boasts is a beauty "with no rouge on her cheeks."
S.O.M.'s impressive depth in talent has captured superb commissions. The firm now has $750 million worth of building under construction, including Dallas' Main Place office complex, the home office of the Georgia-Pacific Corp. in Portland, Ore., and the Art and Architecture building at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle Campus—and there is another $1.2 billion of projects on the drafting boards. To each job S.O.M. will bring its proven methodology. Explains Owings: "You first ask if the building is needed or if it is possible to save the old one. Then you ask where it should be. How will it affect the environment of the surroundings? It should make a contribution to the community just as the community provides it with services." The last step in the process is design.
The Grand Axis. "My life is architecture," says Owings. For him it means operating with a telephone grafted to his ear and a suitcase ever handy for a dash from California's Big Sur. Often he is on the road for weeks on end, racks up 20,000 air miles a month. He drops in on each S.O.M. office, tramps through national parks as a special consultant to the Department of the Interior, returns to California to help plan a Victorian-style convention center for Monterey, meets actual and potential clients everywhere. Such total absorption led to divorce from his first wife, Emily, by whom he had four children. It also precipitated a drinking problem, which Owings conquered in 1964. He is now married to Margaret Wentworth, a skilled craftswoman (mosaics and stitchery).