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.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Beer flows at the Blue Nile
TOM HORGEN, Star Tribune
As the beer gods would have it, the Twin Cities are now home to quite a few boutique beer bars -- places where a good brew is as coveted as a fine wine. While these spots stand out among metro bars, one destination sticks out even more.
It's not everywhere you can order a premium Belgian beer with a plate of Ethiopian food, but the Blue Nile isn't your average bar. After more than a decade on East Franklin Avenue, it still looks like an Ethiopian restaurant hiding behind a Mexican facade, and it still offers great live music, from African and Caribbean to hip-hop and spoken word.
But how did an Ethiopian restaurant end up with one of the best beer selections in town? Owner Fahmi Katabay points to one man: His bartender, Al.
Al McCarty came looking for a job in the late '90s, intrigued by the restaurant's East African cuisine and worldly music. When Katabay put him in charge of the restaurant's bar, McCarty felt like a kid in a candy shop -- or in this case, a beer lover in charge of drinks.
The craft-beer revolution was just catching steam here. There was no Bulldog, Happy Gnome or Muddy Pig yet. McCarty points to only the Bryant-Lake Bowl and a couple of other bars as craft-beer havens. Regardless, he started asking the local beer distributors for the good stuff: Belgians and boutique American brands.
He only had 10 taps and a couple of big coolers under the bar, but McCarty worked with what he had. Today, he changes the tap selection regularly and has about 50 bottled beers, many of them imports. He does carry Miller and other mass-market beers -- club nights demand it -- but he stacks those bottles on their sides, packing them in to save room for the good stuff. He dreams of installing another 20 or so taps to compete with other beer bars, many of which have 25-plus.
One of his proudest moments was in 2002, when he took a perennial mainstream beer off the tap line: "I dropped Budweiser and replaced it with Maredsous, a Belgian Abbey beer. We got rid of the most ubiquitous beer in the world for a family-owned brewery."
Katabay said McCarty is like family and he supports his bartender's ambition. Plus, the range of beers matches nicely with the restaurant's mix of spicy meat dishes.
However, Katabay joked, "I did not think he would take it to this extent." McCarty will even age certain bottles, allowing the beer to develop more flavor (this works best with darker beers, he said).
He's had release parties for local breweries such as Surly. Lately, he's been trying to introduce a Sri Lankan beer called Lion Stout to the large African-Caribbean crowd that comes in on Thursdays for reggae night. They drink primarily Guinness Extra Stout, which is similar.
McCarty also pushes the importance of serving beers in their proper glassware to amplify the taste and aroma. Of course, some people would rather chug straight from the bottle. But sometimes, he'll get a novice beer drinker who wants to experiment with taste and presentation. And that makes this beer crusader feel good, as if world peace were next on his checklist.
"Every once in a while, you make a little difference," he said.
thorgen@startribune.com • 612-673-7909
As the beer gods would have it, the Twin Cities are now home to quite a few boutique beer bars -- places where a good brew is as coveted as a fine wine. While these spots stand out among metro bars, one destination sticks out even more.
It's not everywhere you can order a premium Belgian beer with a plate of Ethiopian food, but the Blue Nile isn't your average bar. After more than a decade on East Franklin Avenue, it still looks like an Ethiopian restaurant hiding behind a Mexican facade, and it still offers great live music, from African and Caribbean to hip-hop and spoken word.
But how did an Ethiopian restaurant end up with one of the best beer selections in town? Owner Fahmi Katabay points to one man: His bartender, Al.
Al McCarty came looking for a job in the late '90s, intrigued by the restaurant's East African cuisine and worldly music. When Katabay put him in charge of the restaurant's bar, McCarty felt like a kid in a candy shop -- or in this case, a beer lover in charge of drinks.
The craft-beer revolution was just catching steam here. There was no Bulldog, Happy Gnome or Muddy Pig yet. McCarty points to only the Bryant-Lake Bowl and a couple of other bars as craft-beer havens. Regardless, he started asking the local beer distributors for the good stuff: Belgians and boutique American brands.
He only had 10 taps and a couple of big coolers under the bar, but McCarty worked with what he had. Today, he changes the tap selection regularly and has about 50 bottled beers, many of them imports. He does carry Miller and other mass-market beers -- club nights demand it -- but he stacks those bottles on their sides, packing them in to save room for the good stuff. He dreams of installing another 20 or so taps to compete with other beer bars, many of which have 25-plus.
One of his proudest moments was in 2002, when he took a perennial mainstream beer off the tap line: "I dropped Budweiser and replaced it with Maredsous, a Belgian Abbey beer. We got rid of the most ubiquitous beer in the world for a family-owned brewery."
Katabay said McCarty is like family and he supports his bartender's ambition. Plus, the range of beers matches nicely with the restaurant's mix of spicy meat dishes.
However, Katabay joked, "I did not think he would take it to this extent." McCarty will even age certain bottles, allowing the beer to develop more flavor (this works best with darker beers, he said).
He's had release parties for local breweries such as Surly. Lately, he's been trying to introduce a Sri Lankan beer called Lion Stout to the large African-Caribbean crowd that comes in on Thursdays for reggae night. They drink primarily Guinness Extra Stout, which is similar.
McCarty also pushes the importance of serving beers in their proper glassware to amplify the taste and aroma. Of course, some people would rather chug straight from the bottle. But sometimes, he'll get a novice beer drinker who wants to experiment with taste and presentation. And that makes this beer crusader feel good, as if world peace were next on his checklist.
"Every once in a while, you make a little difference," he said.
thorgen@startribune.com • 612-673-7909
What to do in Minneapolis/Twin Cities while you’re waiting for the Republican National Convention
Los Angeles Times staff writer Christopher Reynolds gives an entertaining and informative guide to the Twin Cities for John McCain. For those who struggle to tear themselves away from political news updates on TV, here are some simple suggestions for what to do and where to eat and drink in the Twin Cities while you wait for the GOP convention to begin.
Five Popular attractions in Minneapolis-St. Paul:
1. Walker Art Center
2. Frank Gehry’s Weisman Museum
3. Midtown Global Market
4. Cathedral of Saint Paul
5. Mall of America
Music during the Republican National Convention:
The Twin Cities Daily Planet has the lowdown on all the music events going on in the area during the convention. Read: Music to ripple through Twin Cities during RNC
Where to eat and drink: Gayot’s Hot 10 Restaurants in Minneapolis list includes Alma, Chambers Kitchen, Good Day Café, Heidi’s, Meritage, Modern Café, 112 Eatery, Red Stag Supperclub, Saffron Restaurant & Lounge and Town Talk Diner. Meanwhile the Mpls. St. Paul Magazine has an extensive dining guide and bars + nightclubs guide to get the locals’ dish on where to go.
Five Popular attractions in Minneapolis-St. Paul:
1. Walker Art Center
2. Frank Gehry’s Weisman Museum
3. Midtown Global Market
4. Cathedral of Saint Paul
5. Mall of America
Music during the Republican National Convention:
The Twin Cities Daily Planet has the lowdown on all the music events going on in the area during the convention. Read: Music to ripple through Twin Cities during RNC
Where to eat and drink: Gayot’s Hot 10 Restaurants in Minneapolis list includes Alma, Chambers Kitchen, Good Day Café, Heidi’s, Meritage, Modern Café, 112 Eatery, Red Stag Supperclub, Saffron Restaurant & Lounge and Town Talk Diner. Meanwhile the Mpls. St. Paul Magazine has an extensive dining guide and bars + nightclubs guide to get the locals’ dish on where to go.
Skyway art celebrates new immigrants
MINNEAPOLIS - A busy downtown Minneapolis skyway has been transformed into a celebration of Minnesota's newest immigrants.
The "Speaking of Home" public art project features 23 family photographs of immigrants and other new Minnesotans. The photos are printed on 10-by-13-foot sheets of white transparent fabric and installed consecutively in the skyway window frames.
Artist Nancy Ann Coyne collaborated with the latest Twin Cities residents to create the project. It's one of the official events celebrating Minnesota's 150th birthday.
The project is installed inside the 150-foot skyway connecting the IDS Center and Macy's department store. It's visible to pedestrians passing below on Nicollet Mall.
The display runs through October 31st.
The "Speaking of Home" public art project features 23 family photographs of immigrants and other new Minnesotans. The photos are printed on 10-by-13-foot sheets of white transparent fabric and installed consecutively in the skyway window frames.
Artist Nancy Ann Coyne collaborated with the latest Twin Cities residents to create the project. It's one of the official events celebrating Minnesota's 150th birthday.
The project is installed inside the 150-foot skyway connecting the IDS Center and Macy's department store. It's visible to pedestrians passing below on Nicollet Mall.
The display runs through October 31st.
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