The TWA terminal at New York's Idlewild airport, today JFK, opened on 28 May 1962. From above it looks like a creature spreading its wings; from the ground it is a continuous interior space made of curves of reinforced concrete, luminous tubes, staircases that twist into the void. Eero Saarinen (1910–1961), its designer, is not there. He died of a brain tumour on 1 September 1961, at fifty-one, while the building was still under construction. Completed by his studio, the terminal became the symbol of the jet age. And it is only one of the four or five projects with which Saarinen changed, in fifteen years, the way America imagines its public buildings.
The son of Eliel Saarinen, the Finnish architect who directed the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, Eero grew up in a house of designers. He studied sculpture in Paris and architecture at Yale, worked with his father until 1950, then set up on his own. His first great success was an outsider's victory: in 1948, at thirty-seven, he won the competition for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis. The project is an arch.
The St. Louis victory is linked to a famous anecdote. His father Eliel had also entered the competition, and the telegram announcing the winner was addressed simply to "E. Saarinen". For a few hours the family celebrated the father's success, until the organisers made clear that the winning design was the son's. Eliel is said to have greeted the news with pride, opening a second bottle. Anecdote aside, the episode marks a generational shift: the father's measured language, still tied to tradition, gave way to the son's more experimental one.
Even before the arch, Saarinen had shown an interest in industrial design that would never leave him. In 1940, with his friend Charles Eames, whom he had met at Cranbrook, he won the Museum of Modern Art's "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition with a series of moulded plywood seats: an experience that would later lead the Eameses to their celebrated chairs and Saarinen to the Tulip. It is in this interweaving of architecture, furniture and industry that his first major project should be understood: the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan (1949–1956), a research campus for the car industry, with long, low buildings arranged around an artificial lake.
At the GM Technical Center Saarinen brought into building techniques born in the car industry. The façade glazing is held by neoprene gaskets, similar to those used for windscreens, which hold the glass elastically and watertight without putty: it is one of the first uses of this system in architecture, now ubiquitous. The end walls of the buildings are clad in glazed bricks in bright colours, blue, red, orange, contrasting with the grid of glass and steel. The press hailed the whole as a kind of industrial Versailles, and it showed that modernism could be precise and festive at the same time.
The Arch: a catenary of stainless steel
The Gateway Arch, completed in 1965, is 192 metres tall and wide, the tallest monument in the United States. Its form is a flattened catenary: the curve taken by a chain hung from its two ends, inverted, so that forces travel along its section in pure compression. Saarinen altered its proportions relative to the pure curve, making it more slender. The sections are triangular, in stainless steel, with a double wall: at the bottom the interior space is filled with concrete, at the top there is only the steel, with a system of cabins that rises within the arch. No decoration, no sculpture: a single gesture, perfectly calculated.
Building the arch, between 1963 and 1965, was a feat of precision. There was no scaffolding: the two legs were raised simultaneously by stacking the prefabricated triangular sections, lifted by cranes that climbed the arch itself as it grew. The two legs had to meet at the top within tolerances of a few centimetres, and to insert the last section, in October 1965, engineers spread the two halves slightly apart with a jack. Temperature also had to be taken into account: steel exposed to the sun expands, and the closing work was scheduled with regard to how the structure changed over the course of the day; to reduce the expansion of the leg most exposed to the sun, firefighters cooled it with jets of water. Inside each leg a small train of five-seat capsules still carries visitors to the observation deck at the top, from which you look out over the Mississippi on one side and the city on the other.
Every problem, a form
If you look at Saarinen's projects together, the first impression is of inconsistency. The Kresge Auditorium at MIT (1955) is a concrete shell resting on only three points. The Tulip chair (1956) is a plate on a single stem, designed to eliminate the “slum of legs” beneath tables. Dulles Airport (1962) is a suspended catenary roof hung from inclined piers. None resembles the others. For critics, who in the postwar period looked for recognisable authors (Mies with his steel, Wright with his organicism, Le Corbusier with his concrete), Saarinen was a problem: he had no signature.
But the lack of a signature was a method. Saarinen thought the architect must find the form starting from the program and from the character of the client: an airline wants flight to be an experience, a university wants a concert hall with optimal acoustics, a city wants a symbol. He studied each project with hundreds of models. The TWA Flight Center was born that way: the terminal must say “journey”, and the form springs from movement, not from abstraction. The result is a building in which almost no line is straight, from the check-in desks to the stairs and the gate access tubes.
Variety also shows in the materials. In the MIT Chapel (1955), next to Kresge Auditorium, a windowless brick cylinder is surrounded by a moat: light enters reflected off the water through arches at the base of the wall and falls from above, through an oculus, onto a screen of thin metal elements by the sculptor Harry Bertoia, which breaks it into glints. It is a non-denominational chapel, intended for students of every faith and of none. It is a non-denominational chapel, intended for students of every faith and of none. At the Yale ice rink (1958), nicknamed "the whale", a curved concrete spine carries a net of steel cables on which the roof rests. At the Deere & Company headquarters in Moline, Illinois (completed in 1964), Saarinen used weathering steel for the first time in architecture, left to rust in a controlled way so that the patina protects the metal: a material that has enjoyed enormous success ever since.
In the same years the office designed the Bell Labs building at Holmdel, New Jersey (1962), a huge block clad in mirrored glass, one of the first large reflective envelopes in history, and the CBS skyscraper in New York (1965), Saarinen's only tower, nicknamed "Black Rock" for the dark-granite-clad piers running its full height. From mirrored glass to rusted steel, from thin concrete to granite, each building explores a different material. It is a catalogue of solutions more than a style, and it explains why many of the architects who passed through his office later went in very different directions.
Dulles Airport, near Washington, shows the method applied to a new functional problem. In 1950s airports passengers walked along long corridors to the aircraft; Saarinen and his consultants proposed instead a compact building from which "mobile lounges" set out, large waiting rooms on wheels that carried passengers directly to aircraft parked far away. The terminal is a single large space covered by a suspended, hammock-shaped roof stretched between two rows of concrete piers leaning outwards, as if bending under the weight of the roof. Saarinen had foreseen that the building could be lengthened by repeating the bays, and in the 1990s the terminal was indeed doubled in length following his scheme.
After Saarinen: surviving the death of its author
The TWA terminal closed in 2001, after the airline's bankruptcy. For almost twenty years it stood abandoned, under threat of demolition. In 2019 it reopened as the TWA Hotel, with rooms in modern buildings at the back and the original spaces restored to host restaurants, a museum, events. It is one of the rare cases in which a twentieth-century building, born for a function that then disappeared, is brought back into use without betraying its form. The conservation required a meticulous restitution of colours, finishes, furnishings.
After Saarinen's death, the projects under way, including the TWA terminal, Dulles, the arch, Deere and CBS, were completed by his closest collaborators, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, who then founded their own practice; Roche would receive the Pritzker Prize in 1982. Cesar Pelli, who worked on the TWA terminal, had also passed through Saarinen's office, as had the young Robert Venturi, who would later build his own career by criticising precisely spectacular modernism. An important role was also played by Aline Bernstein Louchheim, art critic of the New York Times, whom Saarinen married in 1954 and who skilfully managed the communication of his work: photographs of his buildings, often by Ezra Stoller, helped turn them into icons before they were even finished.
Visitors to the TWA terminal today, converted into a hotel, can read the structure that makes that image possible. The roof is formed by four large concrete shells, which meet at the centre along thin glazed slits and rest on four Y-shaped piers. Between the shells light falls in strips, and the large glass walls sloping towards the runways once framed departing aircraft. The long red-carpeted tubes that led to the gates have been restored and can still be walked through. It is one of the few places where you can see at first hand how Saarinen turned a functional problem, moving thousands of passengers, into an experience. A split-flap departures board has returned to the hall, made by the same company from Friuli, Solari of Udine, that produced the boards of the period, and a vintage Lockheed Constellation four-engine airliner, turned into a bar, stands on the apron outside. A split-flap departures board has returned to the hall, made by the same company from Friuli, Solari of Udine, that produced the boards of the period, and a vintage Lockheed Constellation four-engine airliner, turned into a bar, stands on the apron outside.