Eero Saarinen’s Turn
The rediscovery of a great modernist architect
On July 2, 1956, the 45-year-old architect Eero Saarinen ’34BFA was awarded the American Century’s closest thing to a knighthood: the cover of Time Magazine.
The United States, the magazine said, “now has a virtual monopoly on
the best creative architectural talent … and of the whole U.S. cast of
modern architects, none has a better proportioned combination of
imagination, versatility, and good sense than Eero Saarinen.”
Saarinen was at the top of his form, working on
high-profile projects such as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Dulles
International Airport near Washington, D.C., and the U.S. chancellery in
London. Five years later, he died suddenly of a brain tumor. His
critical reputation collapsed almost as suddenly: by the mid-1960s, his
work was virtually ignored by the architectural establishment.
Now, once again, it is Saarinen’s turn. Scholars are
reconsidering his work, which was once considered too populist and
shallow to merit study. The last two years have seen a surge of new
books, articles, and symposia about Saarinen, and in October, a major
exhibition organized in part by the Yale School of Architecture will
open in Helsinki, accompanied by a hefty volume published by Yale
University Press. The exhibition, “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future,”
draws on materials in Saarinen’s archives at Yale. (After traveling in
Europe and the United States, the exhibition will come to the Yale Art
Gallery in 2010.)
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Born in Finland in 1910, Saarinen was the son of another
famous architect. His father, Eliel Saarinen, made a name for himself
in Finland before coming to America in 1923. The younger Saarinen more
or less grew up in his father’s studio in Michigan, then went to Yale
for an accelerated degree in architecture.
Saarinen and his father won acclaim for their work
together in the 1930s and '40s, but Eero’s big break came in 1948, when
he won a competition to design the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial
in St. Louis. His design, a breathtaking 630-foot-high catenary arch,
was chosen over 171 other entries, including his father's. After Eliel
Saarinen died in 1950, his son went on to become one of the best-known
architects of his day, called on by corporate and institutional clients
to produce highly visible buildings that helped to define their images.
Saarinen is often associated with the curvilinear
geometries of his airline terminals, the Gateway Arch, and Ingalls Rink
at Yale. But unlike others of his time and today, he did not have a
signature style that he applied to every building. “He believed that
each project had its own artistic expression that grew out of the
program and the client,” says School of Architecture dean Robert A. M.
Stern '65MArch. “You talked to the client and found out what their sense
of themselves was, and how they saw what we could now call their
brand.”
To that end, Saarinen cheerfully explored one idiom after another in his buildings.
His TWA terminal was a curvaceous, biomorphic concrete structure that
seemed to suggest birds and flight. A research center for Bell Labs in
Holmdel, New Jersey, was a simple six-story box clad in reflective
glass—the first use of a material that would in a few years become a
modernist cliché.
And his two projects for his alma mater could scarcely
be more different. Ingalls Rink is all curves, a strategy determined in
part by the superior sight lines of an oval plan and also by his desire
to make a building that would be, he said, “graceful” and “dynamic.” But
for Ezra Stiles and Morse colleges, he created a polygonal, abstract
version of Yale’s Gothic colleges, using poured concrete in an attempt
to create what he called “masonry without masons.”
Critics distrusted Saarinen’s work while he was alive
and tended to dismiss it after his death. The influential Yale art
history professor Vincent Scully '40, '49PhD, said at last year’s
symposium that he had once seen Saarinen’s work as a “stylish packaging
of forms” as opposed to the “newly integral kind of design” that Louis
Kahn was pursuing at the same time. (Scully, whose views on architecture
changed dramatically in the 1960s, has since said he “respects and
admires” Saarinen’s buildings; he pays tribute to the TWA terminal on
page 48.)
Scully’s criticism reflects the state of architectural
thinking at the time. There was a stern air of moral seriousness among
architects in the postwar period, and such once-essential attributes as
ornament and allusions to past architecture were considered not just
ill-advised but wrong. Architects were expected to conform to a
specific kind of modernism called the “International Style” (flat-roofed
glass boxes and the like) or, at the very least, to have unshakable
convictions that were expressed in consistent forms.
Saarinen failed on both counts,
which is one reason he was so little studied for so long after his
death. (Until recently, only two monographs on his work had been
published, in 1962 and 1972.) But it was not just Saarinen’s
indifference to the orthodoxies of modernism that kept scholars away: a
more practical problem was that the architect’s drawings and papers were
largely unavailable to scholars for 40 years. Saarinen’s widow Aline
gave some of his papers to Yale in 1971, but the bulk of his drawings,
photographs, and project files were in the hands of his successor firm
in Connecticut, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, where they had
been only partially catalogued. Four years ago, the firm donated the
papers to Yale as part of a campaign by Stern to acquire the archives of
important architects. Staff of Sterling Library and the School of
Architecture have been busily organizing them since then.
It couldn’t have happened at a better time, says Stern.
“Saarinen’s dramatic shapes and technical innovations, and his sense
that each project was its own unique thing, were highly criticized in
his lifetime,” he says. “But that idea has come back into favor and is
at the basis of what many young architects have done recently.”
The upcoming Saarinen exhibition and book, edited by
architecture professor Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen '98MED and Donald Albrecht,
are the first major projects drawing on the Yale archive, which includes
some 500 rolls of drawings and more than 100 boxes of other materials.
(Most of the images in this article are from the archive.) The
collection offers a detailed look into Saarinen’s creative process—early
sketches in which the fundamentals of a design like the Gateway Arch
are being worked out or communicated to colleagues, photographs of
mockups, and construction drawings showing just how he proposed to build
his designs.
Through correspondence and project files, the archive
also documents one of the secrets of Saarinen’s success: his ability to
work so well with large, conservative corporations—including General
Motors, Bell Telephone, IBM, and TWA—and persuade them to try novel
forms and technologies.
“Many people today say, ‘There are the commercial
architects over there and there are the artistic architects over there,
and the twain never meet,’” says journalist Jayne Merkel, whose
biography of Saarinen was published last year. “But Saarinen never saw a
conflict between architecture as an art and as a profession.”
Architect of Optimism
“In order to see why there’s been a resurgence of
interest in Saarinen, you have to ask why he went out of style in the
first place. Why was he forgotten so completely?
“One of Saarinen’s great talents was that he had a sense
of the spirit of the times. And the work embodied the values of the
times. There’s his tremendous interest in technology. The GM tech
center, the Yale Whale, the TWA terminal—each time a new technology, as
if he were saying, 'Let’s make a challenge for ourselves.' This was that
postwar period of optimism when everybody thought technology was going
to make the world wonderful.
“And then of course, since Saarinen’s work was so right
for that time, it had the wrong aesthetic when the times changed in the
Sixties. Nobody believed in optimism and technology when they saw what
it wrought in Vietnam and when they saw that it didn’t really create
equality in our cities. It took another optimistic time with a
resurgence of faith in technology—beginning in the 1990s—for Saarinen’s
upbeat, buoyant buildings to seem meaningful again.”
Preparing for Takeoff
“What Eero did understand—had always understood—was
American space, America’s vacant space, and he understood the airport,
which best serves it. Two of Eero’s greatest designs [the TWA Terminal
and Dulles International Airport] clearly come out of that understanding
of America’s continental scale. I criticized TWA at the time, reacting
to the concrete structure choked with steel and questioning the bird
imagery when it was the planes that flew. But what Eero was trying to do
with those forced forms is much more important from a human point of
view. It is to make those of us who are about to fly move calmly and
intelligently from the tin-can containers of our automobiles to those
other tin cans out there on the field, in order to be shut up in them
and projected into empty space. What an irrational series of actions.
Anything could happen at any time, and yet we do it all the time,
habituated to it though never entirely free of anxieties. (I suspect the
bravest hero of the Middle Ages could not have been induced to climb
into one of those things.) But everything about Eero’s TWA terminal
says, You can do it; it is going to be wonderful up there. The beautiful
volutes of the plan sweep us up and forward and into space. … It takes
this secular act of faith that so many Americans make so often in their
lives, this commitment to flight, and transforms it into a sacrament.
The first time I flew out of TWA, which I am sorry to say was long after
Eero’s death, I thanked his shade, and asked his pardon for my
blindness.”
Bend it Like Eero
“There was a whole thread of modern architects who used
curves and expressive geometries, like Alvar Aalto, Jorn Utzon, Erich
Mendelsohn, and Saarinen. That thread was ignored for a long time by
architects, in favor of mid-century high modernists like Richard Neutra.
Now, people like Martha Stewart and Calvin Klein have picked up on the
high modernist approach, so people in the profession are moving in other
directions because that work has already been assimilated. So they’re
paying attention to Saarinen and those geometries again.
“With all the digital tools that are available now,
architects are looking at what was being done with those kinds of
geometries in other kinds of architecture historically. Saarinen was
much more hooked up with American corporate culture than Aalto or Utzon,
so his architecture has a scale and a monumentality and an
institutional presence that those architects didn’t have. So he’s one of
the few architects to look to for precedent.
“If you could have given Saarinen a digital modeling
tool, he would have loved it. Because I think in his work there was a
real struggle, an attempt to figure out how to rationalize these things
and get them built with existing technology. Now it’s much easier, and
you don’t need a project on the scale of an airline terminal to do that
kind of stuff. It’s more feasible and reasonable on a budget.”
The Undergraduate Heart
“From the beginning, I think his plans for Morse and
Stiles were questionable. I think it was a very important quest that
Eero engaged in, but only partially successful. Perhaps he was trying to
do too much; he was trying to invent a whole new idiom for these
colleges, and he didn’t ever get complete control over that idiom.
“Eero wanted the rooms to be irregular—I never discussed
with him why he wanted that. The competition for him was the Harkness
Quadrangle, which had simply-organized, standardized rooms. But he
really wanted to do something that would capture the heart of an
undergraduate at that moment when people are still dreaming about life
and living in a slightly unreal world. All of the old colleges do so
very well.
“The urban design aspects of the project are absolutely
fantastic. The space in front of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium is
magnificent—the gymnasium never looked as good before as it did after
the colleges were built. And the passageway between the two colleges
over the common kitchen was brilliant. He was very successful at
connecting these cheap buildings with the rest of Yale so they would
look as interesting and as rich as the older buildings on the campus. On
the whole, though, it was probably too great a task that he set for
himself within the time and the budget that were available.
“When he died, the colleges were just starting
construction. He was ready to move to Connecticut, and we were just on
the cusp of that huge change. I wish he had had at least a year here.
Most of his buildings were finished after he died. I still have a hard
time accepting that he had to die at that moment. It just seemed so
unfair.”
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