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Last Call: If
you have the time, a cold January weekend is the perfect time to
stroll up Museum Mile to the Museum of the City of New York and
take in
Eero
Saarinen: Shaping the Future,
a retrospective of the Finnish-American architect’s work which
runs through January 31. Unorthodox, eclectic, original,
futuristic—Saarinen, who moved to America with his family at the
age of 13, designed some of the most distinctively American
buildings and monuments and furniture of his time—the TWA
terminal, the St. Louis Arch, Dulles terminal, the Tulip Chair.
And then there were the corporate commissions: General Motors,
IBM, the CBS skyscraper on 52nd Street (Black Rock to New
Yorkers!). Nicolai Ouroussoff writing in the New York Times
says: “…Saarinen came to prominence just as the United States
was emerging as a superpower and searching for ways to express its
newfound economic prosperity."
The TWA
Terminal at JFK Airport—one of the most beautiful buildings in New
York—and once, an exhilarating entry point into America (now a
historical landmark, it is under renovation, and parts of the
building are used by Jet Blue). Sinuously lovely concrete
curves that embody movement and transition manage to capture the
exhilaration of flight itself. The sculptural form still
expressing the anticipation and excitement that air travel
represented when it was built in 1956. With a roof that is
all beautiful flex of wings, the design is futuristic, all drama
(form here following not function, but the impulse to flight) yet technologically
advanced – Saarinen was a pioneer in the use of thin concrete and
steel shell technology. The monumental vaulted central
structure, the hieratic sense of inner space created by its
multilevel spaces, curved staircases, and bridges—some beautiful
bird about to lift off into the blue skies…. The St. Louis Gateway
Arch, which is so much a part of the national vocabulary of
monuments that one never stops to think about it, celebrates the American pioneer spirit and Westward expansion.
Stainless steel with reinforced concrete, equilateral triangles in
cross section that tapers upwards in an inverted catenary curve,
and here as well, the sense of movement, upward, forward,
westward.
The chairs
and tables that defined the look of an era -- the
Tulip Chair
(part of the Pedestal series that came from his desire to clean up
the forest of legs!) that he designed for Knoll) and made famous
by its use on Star Trek.
Saarinen‘s
bold designs were welcomed during his lifetime by both the public
and corporate America, perhaps because they saw in his work a
sense of the mobility that expressed their lives at that
time—within the architectural community he was often out of favor
for his eclecticism. As it turns out, some 40 years after
his passing, the future does indeed look surprisingly like Eero
Saarinen imagined it….and the TWA terminal is still the most
beautiful thing at JFK—somehow managing to be both nostalgic and
futuristic at the same time!
See:
Eero
Saarinen: Shaping the Future, Museum of the City of New York
Buy:
Tulip Chair
Tags:
new york buildings
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