An Architecture of Multiplicity
In the postwar period, when Eero Saarinen began practicing on his own, the modern movement—transformed into an aesthetic and dubbed the “International Style”—was the dominant force in mainstream American architecture. The modernist vision of European masters such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius developed into a set of formal principles employed as rules of composition. An intellectual process of abstraction based on rationalization, industrialization, and social factors had become simply an architecture of steel and glass, blank surfaces, and all-pervading regularity. Every good architect was expected to hew to this formal line. Thus, as Saarinen started turning out buildings that stylistically and structurally veered off the grid, he quickly became a controversial figure.
J. M. Richards, another influential historian, heralded him as one of the prominent members of the next generation of modernist architects—a group that included Charles Eames, Louis Kahn, Bruce Goff, Hugh Stubbins, Minoru Yamasaki, Ralph Rapson, John Johansen, I. M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, and Gordon Bunshaft.4
4
to bad taste in Gilio Dorfles, “Eero Saarinen: Recent Work,” Zodiac 8: 85–89. 2. Aline Saarinen. general correspondence, AESP. 3. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 591.
An Architecture
For other architectural observers, however, Saarinen’s architecture evoked admiration. While today we tend to see the postwar period as being dominated by mainstream modernism, many second-generation modernists, including Saarinen, were in fact interested in advancing architecture beyond the homogeneity born of high modernism’s tenets. They were attuned to the country’s rapidly changing conditions, to the fact that they were living in a time of technical progress 1. Vincent Scully, cited by 4. J. M. Richards, An when new needs and different interests Andrea 0. Dean, “Eero Introduction to Modern demanded original design. There were Saarinen in Perspective,” Architecture, 3rd ed. AJA Journal (November (Harmondsworth, also critics who applauded Saarinen’s 1981): 38–51. Scully’s critEngland: Penguin Books, willingness to experiment formally and icism in Scully, American 1962), 112. Architecture and Urbanism stylistically. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, (New York: Henry Holt the historian who helped launch the and Co., 1988), 198. Reference to shapes in Raymond International Style, identified Saarinen, Lifchez, “Eero Saarinen,” positively, as a modern mannerist.3 Zodiac 17 (1967): 120-21;
By Antonio Román
Many of Saarinen’s contemporaries reproached him for lacking a style of his own, for making “an architecture of many shapes but too few ideas.” He was accused of bad taste. The absence of a recurrent formal repertoire amounted to so much incoherence. Reviews could be extremely virulent. One of the most influential scholars, Vincent Scully, criticized buildings such as the Yale Hockey Rink and the Kennedy and Dulles airport terminals for exhibitionism, structural pretension, and self-defeating urbanistic arrogance, and derisively suggested that Saarinen was attempting to reinvent the wheel in each project.1 Even Frank Lloyd Wright, whose own body of work exhibited considerable diversity, couldn’t muster support for Saarinen’s eclectic trajectory. Writing to Saarinen’s second wife, Aline Saarinen, in 1958, Wright told her to “tell your young architect that I hope he will do something someday that I like.”2
