Eero Saarinen

Went to see the Eero Saarinen exhibit at the Building Museum on Saturday. Thoroughly enjoyable. I realized, once I got there, that I have never been to a museum exhibit dedicated to an architect and his architecture before. True, Saarinen was also known as a designer of furniture, specifically of chairs. He is credited with the first truly original chair design since Le Corbusier, and according to those who experienced both, Saarinen's are much more comfortable. Several of his chairs were duly displayed, and it was neat to see them, especially out of context. They are actually familiar designs, especially his pedestal chair, but they are normally seen in striking modernist interiors which can make it difficult to focus on individual objects. At the show, you could really look at the chairs without bookshelves, tables, or even the space itself competing for your attention.

First and foremost, however, Saarinen is known as an architect, and how do you exhibit architecture without exhibiting the actual buildings? Through photos, drawings, and blueprints, with an occasional scale model mixed in. This proved to be more effective than I had expected. The photography was excellent, and architectural drawings are a weakness of mine – I often find them beautiful irrespectively of how I feel about the depicted building once it's built. The models were a little less interesting – very stylized with most of the details omitted – but useful nevertheless for getting an idea of the overall shape and proportion of Saarinen's often gargantuan buildings.

Those of us in the Washington, DC area think of the Dulles Airport when Saarinen's name is mentioned. The exhibit covered Dulles, of course, and I was dismayed to find out that in addition to the striking front terminal building, Saarinen was also responsible for the idiotic “mobile lounges” that take passengers to the “island” where most of the jetways are. In his defense, however, the original design for the lounges was infinitely better than the current fishtanks on dump-truck wheels (those who have flown in and out of Dulles know what I'm talking about) – aerodynamic and streamlined in the best 1950s General Motors style, they would have at least been attractive, if no less functionally idiotic.

For most people, however, Saarinen is known for the giant arch in Saint Louis and the original TWA Terminal at the Kennedy Airport in New York City. The show featured both prominently, of course. I didn't really care about the arch – I don't go for the functionless and site-ignorant architecture of memorials, though technologically it is, of course, very impressive – but the TWA Terminal is a gem, and the extensive display dedicated to it at the exhibit did it full justice. I was about to write that I have only seen it from the outside, but realized that this is not true – when I arrived in New York for the very first time in September of 1987, it was on a TWA flight from Rome, and a quick look at the terminal's timeline shows that I must have arrived there. This did not occur to me at the museum for some reason, but only now, as I am typing this. I remember nothing of the terminal's flowing, swooping interior, of course, from that time, so the show's photography was still useful in connecting the familiar exterior with what's inside.

The real value of the exhibit for me, however, was all the other stuff Saarinen had designed. He started in partnership with his father Eliel, and designed several impressive buildings under those auspices, including Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, NY, where J. and I had heard several concerts some years ago without being aware that the Saarinens were involved. Eero's independent career, however, was shockingly brief – only eleven years. Established independently upon his father's death in 1950, he died unexpectedly of a brain tumor in 1961. In that time, he produced an astounding number of designs, some of them on an absolutely vast scale.

Most of the criticism Saarinen received in his lifetime centered on the suggestion that he had no identifiable style and pandered to his clients a little more than a great architect should. To me, however, his fatal flaw was the very scale on which he occasionally worked. Saarinen invented, or at least codified, the idea of the corporate campus – several office and/or factory buildings built in the middle of nowhere on a central plan. The best known example is probably the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, MI – a gigantic complex of over twenty buildings in austere International style interconnected by miles of roads, walkways and tunnels. I am sure it, and others like it, seemed wonderful in safely Utopian, car-centric fifties. Today, we abhor them as sterile dinosaurs from an era when technology and uniformity was thought capable of curing all our ills.

Thankfully, Saarinen redeemed himself with plenty of smaller-scale works that the show spotlit equally well. One was his college and university architecture – he has designed many remarkable buildings on a number of campuses in the US, many of them not otherwise well-known, and they show that he could work very effectively in the context of his surroundings and on a scale appropriate for the site and the building's intended use. The other was his church designs. I find it remarkable that houses of religion, which is by definition irrational, lend themselves so spectacularly well to creativity in the most rational art form and the only one that is equal parts art and science. When the two intersected, Saarinen could be truly sublime.

The exhibit runs through August 23rd, and I highly recommend catching it.