Bruce Graham

Bruce Graham spoke at Washington University's School of Architecture when I was a student there in the second half of the 1960s. He was cosmopolitan, not the terror I've heard described subsequently. He talked quite a bit about Latin America as a market. (He was born there, but it may have been the China of that era: Maki came by the school, too - on his way back from Latin America.) Graham had a late period that included a respectable tower in Barcelona (built during the Olympics) and Exchange House at Broadgate in London - a remarkable office tower that spans the tracks at Liverpool Street Station with its bridge-like structure. Both buildings were an anomaly for SOM, which was mired in (mostly bad) postmodernism at the time. His Inland Steel Building (designed with Walter Netsch) always struck me as the best of the three "towers" (with Crown Zellerbach and Lever House) that put SOM on the map in the 1950s.