Thursday, September 18, 2008
Monday, September 15, 2008
The Finn who shaped modern America
MARY ABBE, Star Tribune
In the United States throughout the 1950s, it was a Finnish-born architect, Eero Saarinen, who shaped American dreams and ambitions with innovative buildings and imaginative furniture.
For 11 short years, Saarinen was a creative dynamo, spinning out designs of extraordinary originality -- the swooping, birdlike TWA terminal at New York's Kennedy Airport and St. Louis' Gateway Arch; buildings for Yale University, General Motors, Bell Labs, IBM and John Deere; homes, churches, embassies, and those icons of modernism, the pedestal chair and table.
He was a household name and magazine cover boy, his face on the front of Time in 1956 and his "womb chair" satirized by Norman Rockwell in a 1959 Saturday Evening Post cover.
And then it ended. In 1961, Saarinen died from complications after surgery for a brain tumor. He was 51. In the next four years, his firm finished nine of his major buildings, including the TWA terminal, Dulles Airport, New York's CBS building and St. Louis' arch. But in successive decades, his fame faded as architecture rejected innovative form in favor of boxy, orthodox modernism followed by postmodern pastiche and irony.
Now an exhibition at Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, running through Jan. 4, redresses that neglect. With hundreds of intimate photos, architectural drawings, huge models and samples of furniture, the show puts Saarinen's work at center stage in all its breathtaking inventiveness, elegant serenity and technological brio.
The architect's daughter, Susan Saarinen, and architectural archivist Mark Coir will discuss his family and work at 2 p.m. today at the institute.
"My father's work was not easy to categorize, and some critics said each building is so different that he doesn't have any consistent style," said Susan Saarinen recently by phone from Golden, Colo., where she is a landscape architect. "He was kind of an oddball in that respect, and he fell out of favor."
That began to change in 2002 after Saarinen's archives were given to Yale University by his successor firm, Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates. With the passage of time and the opportunity to put all of his work in perspective, scholars saw repeated design concepts that clarified his intentions.
"If you look at a Mies [van der Rohe] building, you see the same themes all the way through, but there is not a singular look to my father's work," Saarinen said. "He said each program for a building has to be different, and a New York City skyscraper shouldn't look like an airport and an airport shouldn't look like a chapel. He wanted to express whatever that building should express in its own form."
The Yale archives became the basis of the current show, which opened in Helsinki, Finland, in 2006 before embarking on a four-year tour to Oslo, Norway; Brussels, Belgium; Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. It was organized by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York; the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, and the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., with help from the Yale University School of Architecture.
American modernist
At the epicenter of what has been called the American Century, Saarinen's designs epitomized the country's brash confidence, expansive wealth and technological skills. He applied industrial know-how to corporate buildings, using automotive window seals to fix glass in the General Motors headquarters, surrounding the John Deere building with new Cor-Ten steel that looked like rusted plowshares but didn't corrode, and molding chairs from fiberglass.
Saarinen literally inherited his design prowess. His father, Eliel, was an internationally famous architect, his mother, Loja, a textile designer and sculptor, his sister Pipsan a designer and interior decorator. He was 13 when the family emigrated to the United States, soon settling in suburban Detroit, where his father began designing an educational complex that includes the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Eero worked in his father's office through high school, then studied sculpture in Paris for two years and graduated from Yale's architecture school in 1934.
The 1930s and '40s saw Eero winning competitions, doing high-profile projects at the New York World's Fair and the Museum of Modern Art, and collaborating with his father and Cranbrook grads Charles Eames and Ralph Rapson, among others. After his father's death in 1950, Eero took over the family firm and embarked on a decade of award-winning commissions.
Showboater extraordinaire
"He was arguably the most famous architect in America when he died, the architect of big business, known for his embassies and furniture design," said historian Coir, former director of the Cranbrook Academy archives. "But by the end of the 1960s and early '70s, he wasn't even taught in architecture schools. He had dropped off the face of design. He was considered theatrical, a showboater. ... It wasn't until the resurgence of midcentury modernism in furniture -- the womb chair, the pedestal chair -- that he was looked at again."
The show documents more than 50 of Saarinen's projects, including some unbuilt designs. His staff photographer, Balthazar Korab, who took many of the images, was a lens wizard who invented ways to photograph models so they looked like finished buildings -- a very persuasive sales technique in that precomputer era. The show is rich in marvelous pictures of bold structures under construction, designers debating the merits of huge walk-in models and dramatically lit finished projects. Prototypes show the famous chairs evolving from clunky molded plywood to sleek production numbers.
Because the show is so vast, the two museums have divided it thematically. The Walker features his designs for furniture, residences, churches and academic and corporate campuses. The institute will house his biggest models along with designs for airports, memorials, embassies and early modernist projects. Local highlights include plans for Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis (on which father and son both worked) and the IBM building in Rochester.
"He was a man of his place and time, but then he does go a step beyond in creating these dynamic forms," said Jennifer Komar Olivarez, the institute's associate curator who is overseeing the Minneapolis presentation with Andrew Blauvelt, Walker's design curator. "He learned to look at each problem individually and each building looks different because it fit the job.
"The TWA terminal was about motion and monumentality, but the Yale dormitories are a modern medieval village. ... It's all about exploring tradition and new materials in different ways."
Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431
In the United States throughout the 1950s, it was a Finnish-born architect, Eero Saarinen, who shaped American dreams and ambitions with innovative buildings and imaginative furniture.
For 11 short years, Saarinen was a creative dynamo, spinning out designs of extraordinary originality -- the swooping, birdlike TWA terminal at New York's Kennedy Airport and St. Louis' Gateway Arch; buildings for Yale University, General Motors, Bell Labs, IBM and John Deere; homes, churches, embassies, and those icons of modernism, the pedestal chair and table.
He was a household name and magazine cover boy, his face on the front of Time in 1956 and his "womb chair" satirized by Norman Rockwell in a 1959 Saturday Evening Post cover.
And then it ended. In 1961, Saarinen died from complications after surgery for a brain tumor. He was 51. In the next four years, his firm finished nine of his major buildings, including the TWA terminal, Dulles Airport, New York's CBS building and St. Louis' arch. But in successive decades, his fame faded as architecture rejected innovative form in favor of boxy, orthodox modernism followed by postmodern pastiche and irony.
Now an exhibition at Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, running through Jan. 4, redresses that neglect. With hundreds of intimate photos, architectural drawings, huge models and samples of furniture, the show puts Saarinen's work at center stage in all its breathtaking inventiveness, elegant serenity and technological brio.
The architect's daughter, Susan Saarinen, and architectural archivist Mark Coir will discuss his family and work at 2 p.m. today at the institute.
"My father's work was not easy to categorize, and some critics said each building is so different that he doesn't have any consistent style," said Susan Saarinen recently by phone from Golden, Colo., where she is a landscape architect. "He was kind of an oddball in that respect, and he fell out of favor."
That began to change in 2002 after Saarinen's archives were given to Yale University by his successor firm, Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates. With the passage of time and the opportunity to put all of his work in perspective, scholars saw repeated design concepts that clarified his intentions.
"If you look at a Mies [van der Rohe] building, you see the same themes all the way through, but there is not a singular look to my father's work," Saarinen said. "He said each program for a building has to be different, and a New York City skyscraper shouldn't look like an airport and an airport shouldn't look like a chapel. He wanted to express whatever that building should express in its own form."
The Yale archives became the basis of the current show, which opened in Helsinki, Finland, in 2006 before embarking on a four-year tour to Oslo, Norway; Brussels, Belgium; Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. It was organized by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York; the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, and the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., with help from the Yale University School of Architecture.
American modernist
At the epicenter of what has been called the American Century, Saarinen's designs epitomized the country's brash confidence, expansive wealth and technological skills. He applied industrial know-how to corporate buildings, using automotive window seals to fix glass in the General Motors headquarters, surrounding the John Deere building with new Cor-Ten steel that looked like rusted plowshares but didn't corrode, and molding chairs from fiberglass.
Saarinen literally inherited his design prowess. His father, Eliel, was an internationally famous architect, his mother, Loja, a textile designer and sculptor, his sister Pipsan a designer and interior decorator. He was 13 when the family emigrated to the United States, soon settling in suburban Detroit, where his father began designing an educational complex that includes the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Eero worked in his father's office through high school, then studied sculpture in Paris for two years and graduated from Yale's architecture school in 1934.
The 1930s and '40s saw Eero winning competitions, doing high-profile projects at the New York World's Fair and the Museum of Modern Art, and collaborating with his father and Cranbrook grads Charles Eames and Ralph Rapson, among others. After his father's death in 1950, Eero took over the family firm and embarked on a decade of award-winning commissions.
Showboater extraordinaire
"He was arguably the most famous architect in America when he died, the architect of big business, known for his embassies and furniture design," said historian Coir, former director of the Cranbrook Academy archives. "But by the end of the 1960s and early '70s, he wasn't even taught in architecture schools. He had dropped off the face of design. He was considered theatrical, a showboater. ... It wasn't until the resurgence of midcentury modernism in furniture -- the womb chair, the pedestal chair -- that he was looked at again."
The show documents more than 50 of Saarinen's projects, including some unbuilt designs. His staff photographer, Balthazar Korab, who took many of the images, was a lens wizard who invented ways to photograph models so they looked like finished buildings -- a very persuasive sales technique in that precomputer era. The show is rich in marvelous pictures of bold structures under construction, designers debating the merits of huge walk-in models and dramatically lit finished projects. Prototypes show the famous chairs evolving from clunky molded plywood to sleek production numbers.
Because the show is so vast, the two museums have divided it thematically. The Walker features his designs for furniture, residences, churches and academic and corporate campuses. The institute will house his biggest models along with designs for airports, memorials, embassies and early modernist projects. Local highlights include plans for Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis (on which father and son both worked) and the IBM building in Rochester.
"He was a man of his place and time, but then he does go a step beyond in creating these dynamic forms," said Jennifer Komar Olivarez, the institute's associate curator who is overseeing the Minneapolis presentation with Andrew Blauvelt, Walker's design curator. "He learned to look at each problem individually and each building looks different because it fit the job.
"The TWA terminal was about motion and monumentality, but the Yale dormitories are a modern medieval village. ... It's all about exploring tradition and new materials in different ways."
Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Tale of 2 cities: Minneapolis, St. Paul's club scenes are night & day
BY JO PIAZZA
Republicans in Minnesota for the party's National Convention this week are getting a pretty sweet two-for-one deal when it comes to nightlife. The two cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, each have a very distinct brand of after-dark fun.
Republicans in Minnesota for the party's National Convention this week are getting a pretty sweet two-for-one deal when it comes to nightlife. The two cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, each have a very distinct brand of after-dark fun.
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