Word: saarinens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Some of the modern architect's best customers are the U.S.'s expanding schools and colleges. But one of his most difficult problems is how to blend modern architecture with the traditional style enshrined in many an ivy-covered wall. Last week Eero Saarinen, probably the most versatile of living architects, unveiled the best solution...
Commissioned last year to design two new colleges for Yale University, Saarinen (Yale '34) quickly discovered that the standard vernacular of modern architecture would not do. First, the site was odd and irregular. Furthermore, the new colleges would have to exist cheek by jowl with two of Yale's most determinedly pseudo-Gothic structures: the ten-story Payne Whitney Gymnasium and the Yale Graduate School. Talking with students, Saarinen discovered that undergraduates want their rooms to be as individual as possible, decided that the rooms should be "as random as those in an old inn rather than...
Courts and Crescents. Last week, as Yale released its plans for the two new colleges, it was clear that Saarinen had indeed turned his back on modern architecture's shibboleth of repetition, regularity and smooth surfaces. Instead, Saarinen had produced two irregular structures of crescents and courts built of earthy, monolithic masonry. For the exterior walls, he devised a method of rubblestone construction that would do away with expensive hand labor. Stones varying in size from three to eight inches are placed in wood forms; then cement mortar is pumped in through hoses. Before the cement has completely...
About 250 students will be housed in each of the two new colleges. Their rooms, hardly any two of them similar, are variations on a basic polygonal plan, look out on courts and open passageways that Saarinen feels are "not unlike a small Italian hill-town street." The interiors, done in stone, oak and plaster, will be designed to suggest the scholar's study rather than the clubman's rumpus room...
Bottles in the Buttery. For prestige, each college will have its own tower. For conviviality, each will come equipped with cellar-type butteries around whose round oak tables students and masters can gather. "It is hoped," Saarinen added, "that television will be kept out of these rooms, so that they become centers of conversation and discussion rather than areas where people sit drugged by canned entertainment." As for the name "buttery," Saarinen made clear that he was not thinking of dairy products, pointedly cited the Oxford Dictionary derivation: "Buttery, sb. ME. (app. a. OF. boterie - bouteillerie:-late L. botaria...