Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is an elite architecture firm with a global footprint ranging from the Olympic Village to JPMorganChase’s innovative trading floor. But its own digital presence didn’t reflect the scale, intelligence or ambition of its work. The existing flagship site reduced a deeply interconnected practice into a conventional project catalog, flattening the ideas, people, and research behind the architecture. Simultaneously, the website was running on legacy architecture, making it cumbersome for the team to evolve or optimize consistently. The platform required a full migration to WordPress, a large-scale content restructuring and multiple backend integrations. All of this needed to support an image-heavy experience without sacrificing performance or clarity.

SOM partnered with Code and Theory to rebuild the site in WordPress with a structured content system that connects projects, people, research and insights into a cohesive ecosystem. This allowed SOM’s work to be experienced as more than individual projects, revealing how ideas and expertise come together behind the architecture. We executed a large-scale content migration and implemented backend integrations to support editorial and business needs. On the frontend, we engineered a performance-first experience with optimized media handling and restrained motion to maintain clarity and speed across image-dense pages.

SOM now has a flexible WordPress foundation with a clean, scalable content structure that improves publishing workflows and long-term maintainability. The new site delivers high-resolution architectural imagery with faster load times and a smoother browsing experience. Most importantly, the platform reframes how SOM’s work is understood, presenting it as a coherent expression of how the firm thinks, works and shapes the built environment.