Having noticed a few threads touching on Saarinen's designs notably the TWA terminal & I think the Irwin Miller house I thought I would create a thread to chat about his architecture.
I recently bought the Taschen book, it has some fantastic images. Obviously the TWA terminal was/is fantastic (anyone know/have new images as it has been bought buy a new company and updated hasn't it?) but I am truly facinated by the Dulles international airport at Chantilly. Has anyone ever visited? It looks superb!
Dulles
I've been to Dulles a bunch of times and always the trip was fraught with the usual travel woes---heavy traffic getting there, no cash for the toll one time, worry about being on time or finding my pick-up, heavy rain and scorching heat, driving around and around the parking lot trying to find a spot...ETC!
But the most recent time I went there was just to drop one of my kids off on a balmy spring evening. Everything went smoothly and as we were saying our good-byes, I turned and looked at the airport with the lights just coming on and the pinky-dusk sky behind and I said, "Oh. OH. Oh, my. Why did I never see this before?!"
It was one of those singular moments when you realize just what everyone has been talking about. It was so beautiful. I still get goosebumps when I think about it.
the St. Louis arch is ...
the St. Louis arch is really something also. It took almost 15 years from the competition till it was finished. Saarinen the architect was dead before it was ever finished.
He truly was great from his furniture to his architecture, He truly benefited from his friend ship with the Eames and Florance Knoll who was like a member of the family.
He died to young!
Your nephew has a good imagin...
Your nephew has a good imagination. I was more of a street skater, tended towards things like the image below. Turn it upside down for additional possibilties.
Spanky, while I have yet to view first hand, your imagery translates very well for me. Hypnotic....
Another good book to consider, is one put out by Phaidon. Haven't compared to the Taschen, but my hunch tells me the Taschen is more photo intensive, Phaidon more historical. Only read 1/3 of the Phaidon book and it's quite detailed...delving back into his great grandfathers and fathers background. I would also consider it an architects book, as it discussed many technical aspects of Saarinens designs.
Yes, as an architect Saarinen...
Yes, as an architect Saarinen was unpredictable, and unfortunately he died far too young. Critics - one of them the tremendously influential Vincent Scully - often cited him as unprincipled, eclectic, structurally pretentious, with no definitive style. His work was held up as evidence, if I remember correctly, of the decline of modernism. I think you started a thread recently on Frank Gehry, whitespike, someone who I think probably owes to Saarinen a fair debt at least of inspiration for some of his own architectural accomplishments. Saarinen was pushing the envelope long after everyone thought the letter was sent.
I would agree that Gehry...
I would agree that Gehry could have been heavily influenced by Saarinen. I think they both contributed in a similar manner for their respective times. I think Saarinen definitely had a style. Like most great designers, there are signature footprints in most of his work.
Saarinen was a great genius in modern architecture...
...the same way that Beethoven was a great genius in the orchestral music of his time.
The intense purity of modern form language in his buildings and the virtuosic, dynamical sculpting of space with forms lifts his buildings into seeming to have literally been deposited almost from another dimension.
His buildings all stand out from their backgrounds almost like hallucinogenic superimpositions of foregrounds on vague backgrounds, as in a Hitchcock film. Corbusier was able to do this about as regularly as Saarinen, but Saarinen's buildings are just more stunning. With Corbu, the marvel I feel for his buildings is always more the marvel I feel for the emergence of an infant. With Saarinen's buildings, the marvel I feel is analogous to what I feel for the occassional magnificience of a fully formed adult.
I can't agree that Gehry owes him much, but maybe Gehry does if he says he does. Gehry at his best, say at Bilbao, has the ability combine dynamism and equilibration, but his buildings are altogether more "beautiful" and "delicate" than Saarinen's. Gehry's buildings always feel very organic to the forces of this world, however unconventional his buildings may seem.
Saarinen's buildings are almost metaphysical in their concreteness, if you get my intentional juxtaposition of these opposed terms. Look at Saarinen's buildings and you see extremes of brutalism and fragility bound together. Lightness and heaviness. Darkness and lightness. Dynamism and equilibrium. The man's architecture was positively Manichean in its opposing extremes.
p2
Frankly, Saarinen seems to have descended fairly clearly from Corbusier and probably some others I do not recall. I've always thought Saarinen and Oscar Niemeyer had quite a bit in common. Niemeyer was routinely able to get Saarinen's hallucinogenic quality, but Niemeyer just could not come close to Saarinen's virtuosic orchestration of dynamism and equilibration at the levels of formal complexity that Saarinen seemed to do rather in a day's work. Saarinen's leading descendants today would seem to be Santiago Calatrava and Renzo Piano in terms of ability to orchestrate both complexity and simplicity. Calatrava shares Saarinen's intense formal dynamism, while Piano shares his remarkable ability to compose complex forms in equilibrium. Neither contemporary architect, however, combines these two antipodal qualities--formal dynamism and formal equilbrium--anywhere near to the extent of Saarinen. Saarinen's buildings are almost harrowing the way Beethoven's most sublime compositions remain centuries later. Wright really only achieved this effect once--in the Guggenheim. Wright, like Gehry, seem to be in a different business--the business of orchestrating organic forces from this world. Saarinen, like Corbu before him, and like Niemeyer, and I suppose Mies, seem to be saying: this building is externalized mind. The reason and emotion that animate these buildings is autonomous from and independent of the earth. Saarinen's buildings would look just as right if they were orbiting Jupiter, or foundationed on the moon. Really, the St. Louis Arch could easily have been used as the monolith floating out beyond Jupiter in Stan Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Who knows? Maybe I shouldn't have likened Saarinen's architecture to Beethoven either. Maybe I should have used Strauss and Bach. But there just is a refined maniacal agression in Beethoven that comes closer to Saarinen's work. But Bernard Herrman's movie music, itself quite modernist, would also make a point about Saarinen's work also. Regardless, forget the music and leave it said that Wright's and Gehry's buildings require the earth and their sites to have their fullest fit and realization, while Saarinen's fiercely do not.
Saarinen's buildings are all it--the highest praise I can ever give any work of art.
But evaluated purely as buildings made for use, they are not perfect at all and I suppose this is where all the criticism of him flows from.
p3
They always force one to ask: couldn't this have been done just as effectively in a similar, less smashingly gargantuan way? The answer to that question is, I believe, in most cases yes. And to this extent Saarinen was, to borrow from Koen's recent comments on other topics,well, Saarinen was often a mannerist modernist. Most of his buildings probably could have been engineered and built in other less collosal ways. In most of his buildings, he seems to have been doing it the way he did, because he could, not because the problem required him to. Yes, his solutions were fresh and innovative, but were they necessary? Um, I doubt it.
Gothic cathedrals were mannerist in a similar way, also. Yes, they forced the eyes upwards. Yes, their space program communicated one through the cruciform processional metaphorically representing an individual's life and the life of a community. But did it really have to be THAT TALL?!! Did it really have to be THAT BAROQUE?! Did it really have to be made entirely of THAT MATERIAL?! Did it really have to have that much gold on the ceilings and all that stained glass?! The only answer to these questions, for either Saarinen, or the architects of the gothic cathedrals POV, is: look, mack, this ain't a house or a 5 and dime store. We're talkin' monuments, mack. We're in the wow'em business here. And if you approach these buildings from that premise, well these buildings flowed inevitably from that premise and neither Saarinen's air terminal, nor the old architect's gothic cathedrals were anything but utterly elegant and essential to the project at hand. Mannerist, schmannerist! This is show biz, mack.
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