David Magie Childs joined SOM in 1971, four years after graduating from Yale University with a master's degree in architecture, and he stayed there until his retirement in 2022, moving from the Washington, DC, office to the New York City headquarters in between. Working so long at one firm not bearing his name is evidence of a different era of architectural practice—a particular, corporate type of practice born in the mid-20th century—as well as a modesty of character. The latter trait finds expression in the buildings designed by Childs, which ranged from postmodernism in masonry in the 1980s to all-glass skyscrapers this century. “I’m more like Eero Saarinen, whom I revere,” he's quoted as saying in a New York Times obituary, because “his buildings all look different.”

That obituary, by David Dunlap, asserts that “Mr. Childs was the antithesis of a ‘starchitect,’ whose celebrity derives from unmistakable flourishes.” Nevertheless, few architects can boast to having one of their creations documented in a television mini series and companion book, as was the case with Childs's Worldwide Plaza, a mixed-use complex built in the late 1980s on a full city block in Hell's Kitchen on Manhattan's West Side. Draped in brick and capped by pyramidal roofs, the trio of Worldwide Plaza buildings that Childs designed for developer William Zeckendorf, Jr. are part of SOM's postmodernist phase that would extend at least until the end of the millennium.

As partner at the New York office of SOM from his arrival there in 1984 until his retirement, Childs was responsible for the design of numerous buildings, but his work this century centers on a trio of projects in Manhattan: one at Columbus Circle and two at the World Trade Center. 

What would become Time Warner Center, and is now known as Deutsche Bank Center, began as a replacement for the Coliseum, an architecturally bland convention center on the western edge of Columbus Circle slated for demolition after the construction of the larger Javits Center in 1986. Working for developer Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Childs's early schemes for the site were postmodern, depicting a cluster of masonry buildings ascending to two skyscrapers joined by a sky bridge. Following delays and changes in architects and developers, the complex Childs designed for Related Companies and that was ultimately built retained the pair of towers but sheathed their parallelogram shapes in mirrored glass and joined them via a curving mall at street level. Completed in 2003, Time Warner Center was notably the first major development built in New York City following the September 11 attacks.

Even before the events of 9/11, Larry Silverstein had hired Childs to renovate the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center, whose lease the developer had happened to acquire in July 2001. If Silverstein's immediate impulse were carried through, though, Childs would have been responsible for designing the all of the office space replacing the Twin Towers, but, as explained in Dunlap's obituary, “Mr. Childs declined the commission to design all the new towers, saying architectural diversity was vital to the site.” Still, he was ultimately responsible for two of the half-dozen numbered towers at the WTC site, beginning with 7 World Trade Center in 2006—which Dunlap calls “arguably Mr. Childs’s finest skyscraper”—and culminating with the 104-story One World Trade Center in 2014.

At the time of the very public unfolding of the design One World Trade Center, and depending on what your sources for news were, Childs was portrayed as something of an antagonist to Daniel Libeskind, the unlikely winner of the WTC master plan competition. Libeskind was inspired by the Statue of Liberty in designing what he called Freedom Tower, the tallest of the replacement buildings, reaching a symbolically charged height of 1776 feet. Childs was the corporate architect with strong ties to developers, while Libeskind was the avant-garde architect whose built resume consisted of just one building at the time. The combination of Freedom Tower's asymmetrical design and Libeskind's lack of practical experience made Childs and SOM ideal for the commission, one that would retain its height but be renamed One World Trade Center. The tallest building at the World Trade Center, in all of New York City, and in the Western Hemisphere, Childs's One World Trade Center was also, like Worldwide Plaza, fittingly the subject of a documentary and a book-length monograph soon after it opened in 2014.