Image © SOM
In the 1960s, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill unleashed its wild side when designing the famed Cadet Chapel for the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The expressive, metal-clad building features 15 pointy spires that resemble fighter jets ready to shoot into the sky—a thrilling contrast to the boxy Miesian towers the firm was building at the time.
Now, five decades later, SOM is working on a new project for the academy: the Center for Character Leadership Development (CCLD), a rectangular structure that will knit together the campus’s main plaza, designed by SOM in 1954. Scheduled to open in the summer of 2014, CCLD will be the place where officers-to-be receive the moral portion of their training. The academy’s aspirations for its students’ development are hammered home in every elegant inch of a 105-foot-tall glass-and-steel skylight that will be trained, telescope-like, on the North Star.
Cadets sitting in the Honor Board Room will be able to look through an opening in the ceiling to the skylight’s oculus, which will frame the North Star all day, every day, year round. Conscience never sleeps! SOM collaborated with the astronomer Dr. Devin Della-Rose to guarantee that Polaris will always be due north of the building’s position just shy of the 39th parallel.