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 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.
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.
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.