Adrian Smith

Adrian Smith (born August 19, 1944, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American architect recognized for designing some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, including Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Jeddah Tower (under construction in Saudi Arabia). His work with the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) transformed the Chicago urban landscape, as Smith collaborated with Mayor Richard M. Daley on the master plan for Millennium Park and served as the head architect on NBC Tower and Trump International Hotel and Tower. He is also noted for his contributions to the sustainable design and decarbonization of tall buildings.

Early life and architectural training

Smith was born in Chicago, the site of many of his future architectural projects. A few years after his birth, his family moved to San Clemente, California, where his father, Alfred, an executive with Montgomery Ward, opened a store of his own. He recalls his childhood home being at the highest elevation in town, a soaring viewpoint that would inspire his building designs. Observing that Smith was artistically inclined and fond of drawing, his mother, Hazel, encouraged him to pursue architectural drafting as a career. He eventually enrolled in the bachelor’s program in architecture at Texas A&M University, where he was mentored by professors Cecil Steward, Edward Romieniec, and John Greer. Steward helped Smith land an internship at Perkins & Will, a Chicago architecture firm.

The return journey to Chicago further portended an interest in building skyward. As Smith recounted in a 2025 interview with Chicago magazine, “I hitchhiked from Texas A&M to Missouri, then my brother, who was a lawyer there, drove me to Chicago. When you’re coming in from the southwest on Route 80, the city emerges as monolithic. At that time, in the ’60s, it was all stone, like manmade mountains. It made a very powerful impression, and I said to myself: I want to be a part of that.”

Smith was so enchanted by his work in Chicago that he took a part-time job at SOM after his internship, opting to work there while completing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). After receiving a degree from UIC in 1969, he continued to work at SOM under the tutelage of architect Bruce Graham. Graham, noted for his design of monumental high-rises including Sears Tower (now Willis Tower), primed Smith for his own specialization in that realm.

Projects with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Smith was credited with reviving the reputation of SOM during a period of waning interest in the firm’s projects in the 1980s. His buildings shifted from a prevailing house style of austere, Miesian modernism toward an approach to building design that he calls “global contextualism.” In Smith’s view buildings should inhabit the culture, geography, and personality of their surroundings. “When I designed a building, I wanted it to look as if it could only exist in this location—it would be out of place anywhere else,” he told Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic Kevin Nance in an interview.

Those ideas drove the drafting of Chicago projects including NBC Tower (1989), a building that incorporates Art Deco flourishes reminiscent of the historic skyscrapers in its vicinity, such as Tribune Tower. Another signature Smith design is Trump Tower, the city’s second tallest structure and a fixture along the Chicago River. But when 20-foot-tall letters spelling out “Trump” were installed on the building’s edifice in 2014, Smith made it clear he saw them as an eyesore, saying that the new sign was “in poor taste, it hurts the image of the building, [and] hurts the image of Chicago.”

During his tenure at SOM, Smith made significant contributions to the life and character of the Chicago Loop, a 35-block area of downtown. His master plan for Millennium Park (2002), created in consultation with Daley, helped cultivate a beloved public space in the city. Smith and SOM oversaw the entire space, and superstar architect Frank Gehry was enlisted to design the band shell that is a centerpiece of the park.

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“Supertall” and sustainable

A focus on sustainability fueled Smith’s practice after he left SOM in 2006 to form his own firm, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, with partners Gordon Gill and Robert Forest. Smith views skyscraper construction as an opportunity to encourage denser (and therefore, he argues, more energy-efficient) housing and businesses. As he said in an interview with Texas A&M Stories:

If you build a John Hancock Center or Sears Tower or Burj Dubai, that actually saves 700 acres of suburban development. Now you can take the 700 acres and put it into farmland or wind farms or agriculture or tree growth and forestation and it becomes very sustainable. Added to that, if you build several tall buildings adjacent to each other or near each other, you create a city within a city where people are walking to work and living in or near the places they are working in, so they are not commuting 10 to 20 miles.

Smith was also a coauthor of the Chicago Central Area DeCarbonization Plan (2010), a document setting guidelines for more sustainable downtown development and infrastructure in response to the impacts of climate change.

Some critics, however, have said that positions such as those held by Smith are intended to greenwash excessive corporate spending on high-rise projects that offer little in the way of affordable housing or broader public benefit. (Smith acknowledged that “supertall” buildings are primarily designed as “landmarks.”)

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, demand for ultra high-rise buildings waned. As a result, Smith became increasingly involved in international projects, designing structures in China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Canada, England, Germany, Indonesia, and numerous other countries.

Several of these projects rank among the tallest buildings in the world, earning the designations of “supertall” (984 feet [300 meters] and above) and “megatall” (1,968 feet [600 meters] and above) from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. The Smith-designed Burj Khalifa (originally known as Burj Dubai; “burj” means “tower” in Arabic) in Dubai holds the title of world’s tallest building and freestanding structure at 2,717 feet (828 meters) and 163 floors. Another Smith project, Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia (scheduled for completion in 2028), is poised to displace Burj Khalifa in the number one spot, with plans to reach slightly more than a kilometer in height (3,280 feet).

Funded by Saudi prince al-Waleed bin Talal, the building will stand at the threshold of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Smith has grappled with the considerable technical challenges of designing such mammoth structures, particularly in desert regions such as Saudi Arabia, where the sandy soil presents a less-than-stable foundation upon which to build. Such buildings must also be carefully constructed to withstand the destabilizing effects of eddying winds. In 2024 Jeddah Tower resumed construction after a yearslong delay, though Smith retired that year, allowing collaborators at Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture to see the project to completion.