Word: saarinens
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...Drama of Powerful Forms Saarinen was a Modernist by birthright. His father Eliel was a Finnish architect whose radically clean-lined entry in the 1922 competition to design the Chicago Tribune Tower took second place in the contest but first place in history. For a rising generation of architects, that unbuilt proposal was an arrow pointing straight to the future and a strong influence on the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. The fame it brought the elder Saarinen in the U.S. persuaded him to emigrate the following year from Finland to Chicago. A few months later, his wife...
...most important project of Eliel Saarinen's American career was Cranbrook Academy, a school of the arts situated on the estate of a wealthy patron in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where the Saarinens soon relocated. In his teens, Eero worked occasionally on projects in his father's studio. From early in his career, the younger Saarinen's buildings grew out of the Modernist principles of simplified form and clearly expressed structure. But soon he was looking for ways to move beyond the arctic purities of Modernism's first generation. Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier had done what they could...
...Saarinen they found a man who operated in their sweet spot. His work had the richness and lyricism that so many Modernist buildings lacked. At the same time, he had taste and intelligence. He wasn't about to give them the kind of thing suited to Vegas casinos and Miami Beach hotels. For the most part, the wow factor in his buildings was a matter of structure, not sparkle. Saarinen was enchanted by the drama of powerful forms. His mother was a sculptor, and he had studied sculpture before switching to architecture. The massive curve of the Gateway Arch...
...things that pure Modernism excluded from architecture, including symbolism and psychology, Saarinen brought to his TWA terminal. With the wide concrete wingspread of its flaring roof, it resembles a bird in flight. But more than that, it has an almost maternal quality, one that's re-emphasized by the Fallopian coils of the stairways inside. And the long enclosed tunnel that passengers had to walk from the main terminal to the gates - isn't that like a birth canal leading you to the moment you are launched into the sky? This is, after all, the man who invented the Womb...
...Greeks called architecture the mother of all arts. Maybe it took Saarinen to show how true that...