ROGUE ARCHITECT

The American Masters documentary Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future is really two different films spliced together. It’s a hagiography of the modern architect, with photographs and footage of his best-know works. And it’s a conflicted My Architect-type portrait of the man by his eldest son, Eric Saarinen, who narrates the film. Like Louis Kahn, the subject of My Architect, Eero Saarinen left his eldest son and first wife for another woman and started another family. And, like Kahn, he’s ulitmately pardoned by his abandoned son because he’s a genius.

The accomplished cinematorgraphy, that includes dazzling aerial sequences, takes us through the General Motors and John Deere campuses, the Miller House, Ingalls Rink, Kresge Auditorium, Dulles Airport, and the TWA Terminal. These lyrical passages go beyond the iconic, expressionistic, black-and-white Ezra Stoller photographs of the same projects. In addition to seductive views, they give a sense of the buildings’ rich physicality, spatial complexity, and peculiar asymmetries.

Eric Saarinen’s personal account of his father is touching, but holds the film back from exploring more deeply the development and detail of the buildings. Instead of landmark modern structures, each one is framed as an artifact from the architect’s biography. We learn in considerable detail how the architect falls in love, gets married, has children, meets another woman, leaves his first family, marries again, has another child, and dies at the age of 51. An off-screen narrator even reads to us, pointlessly, from the love letters he wrote to his mistress. In between, we learn about his buildings.

It’s confusing but not terribly surprising that accomplished men behave less-than-heroically in their domestic lives. Eero Saarinen’s personal life was eventful but had no impact on his work. (The only major architect I can think of whose personal life is inseparable from his work is Frank Lloyd Wright.) My favorite image from the film is a black and white photo of the architect lying flat on his stomach inside an enlarged cardboard study model of the TWA Terminal, his legs hanging off the edge of the table. It illustrates clearly his passion for architecture, one that’s both ennobling and humanizing.

January 16, 2017 by Nalina Moses

Seeing a photograph of a building is, really, seeing a fantasy. This hit home last week when I heard Charles Kramer, an architect at Beyer Blinder Belle, speak about the rehabilitation of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at JFK Airport in New York City. Kramer explained that the interior of the building has been refurbished with the original white penny tile. The only surfaces inside the central space that aren’t finished in tile are the counter and flight board at the information station, shown above. I had always thought the interior was white-tinted concrete. The notion of penny tile – just that word penny – takes some wind out of the storied, soaring structure.

It’s the famous photos of the Terminal by Ezra Stoller that, to a large part, shape that fantasy. They’re richly textured, and brilliantly composed to dramatize the building’s gentle asymmetries. Here the sweeping forms look like they’re made of some magical, immaculate material, not like they’re covered in cheap tile. Kramer explained that three sizes of penny tile were used, each smaller than a penny. The largest tiles were laid out over the surfaces in sheets and then loose, smaller tiles were set in between to accommodate the complex, curving geometries. I haven’t been inside the building yet, but imagine that a great deal of the fantasy survives.