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

It’s easy to forget that we have our own piece of Le Corbusier right here in New York. That would be the United Nations buildings, which he designed in collaboration with Oscar Niemeyer and Wallace K. Harrison. Maybe the buildings are so easy to forget because they’re so hard to see. These are monumentally-scaled buildings squeezed into four narrow riverside blocks east of First Avenue in midtown. There’s no spot from where a pedestrian can take in the General Assembly’s swooping roof, the platonic slab of the Secretariat, and the yawning grace of the library. Corb was an expert at plastic compositions, so it’s particularly frustrating not to get a comprehensive view of the buildings. To see them their best, they’d need more air around them, like Corb’s government buildings at Chandigarh.

Approaching the UN on foot is dispiriting. Because of increased security and a two-billion-dollar renovation that’s underway, the driveway, garden and waterside park have all been closed off, with the same type of metal barricades the NYPD uses at parades, only painted UN blue. To get inside you pass through an unhappy maze of plywood ramps and white tents that have been set up in the middle of the public plaza. But inside the General Assembly (shown above when it first opened in 1952), you pass under floating boomerang-shaped balconies, soaked in light from the glass endwall, and get a hint of how delicious it all could be. Right now the expansive ground hall is poorly used, with exhibit spaces, a stamp counter, and a wall with framed portraits of all the UN Secretary Generals. When I visited Korean tourists were lined up to have their picture taken next to the likeness of Ban Ki-moon. The wood-lined basement, darker and quieter, could also be a great space, but it’s cluttered with tchotchke shops and a cafeteria that fills both floors with the smell of stale food. With this renovation, the UN has an opportunity to transform its icnonic mid-century interior into a dazzling social space, and to make world peace seem just a little more glamorous.