Philip Johnson, letter of condolence to Aline Saarinen, n.d. (receipt by A.S., 8 September 1961), series IV, box 7, folder

After Eliel’s death, Eero Saarinen finally started to work alone. Thanks in part to his father’s legacy, the younger Saarinen already had an established name and thriving practice. Although he had previously entered some competitions independently, such as that for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri, he began working on his first solo commissions in the early 1950s. He quickly made his mark on the profession. By 1956, when the office reached its peak of productivity, there were eighteen projects in various stages of development, including: the General Motors Technical Center, Detroit, Ml; Kresge Auditorium and Chapel at MIT, Cambridge, MA; the Milwaukee County War Memorial, Milwaukee, WI; the Noyes Dormitory at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; the Unites States Chancellery in London, England; the Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale University, New Haven, CT; and the TWA Terminal at ldlewild (now JFK) Airport. Saarinen’s designs for these buildings demonstrate a striking range of formal approaches. As Philip Johnson later said, nobody would believe that many of Saarinen’s buildings could be by the same architect “because they represent such violently different attitudes.” 17

Saarinen never hesitated to cite personal experience as a source of inspiration in his work. To design the nondenominational Chapel at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1953–56), for example, he deliberately drew on a spiritual experience he had while traveling through Greece. Circular in plan, the chapel has a large skylight and additional perimeter lighting. “I have always remembered one night on my travels as a student when I sat in a mountain village in Sparta. There was bright moonlight over head and there was a soft, hushed secondary light around the horizon. That sort of bilateral lighting seemed best to achieve this oth- er-worldly sense. Thus, the central light would come from above the altar—dramatized by the shimmering golden screen by Harry Bertoia—and the secondary light would be reflected up from the surrounding moat through the arches.” 18

“Style for the job,” a phrase used derisively among architects during the 1950s and 1960s, describes Saarinen’s design philosophy. 19 In associating “style” and “job,” it limits the meaning of style by circumscribing it to a particular work. It also invokes the criterion of difference, in applying to each work a particular “style.” Unlike the incoherent fragmentation suggested by “adhocism,” 20 another term that cropped up around the same time, “style for the job” conveyed the proud resolve of pragmatism. Each specific case is processed in a specific manner. appropriate for the corporate headquarters of John Deere. The

17. Paul Heyer, Architects on Architecture: New

Directions in America (New York: Walker, What is appropriate for a hockey rink at Yale is not necessarily

1978), 286. 18. Statement written in

Saarinen, Eero Saarinen, 36 (January 1959). 19. Reyner Banham was the first to formally link

Saarinen with the phrase in his essay “The Fear of Eero’s Mana,” Arts

Magazine (February 1962): 73. The phrase has also been associated with the term “functional eclecticism” proposed by

Philip Johnson, “Informal

Talk, Architectural

Association, 1960,” in Johnson, Writings, 104–16. 20. Charles Jencks refers to the adhocist designer, stating that “What he proposes is a lively and fumigated eclecticism.”

For Jencks, adhocism is the result of a fragmented totality.

Jencks, ‘’Adhocism,”

Architectural Review (July 1968): 27–30. soaring sight lines designed to evoke fantasies of flight would have been ill-suited to the well tempered needs of a broadcasting company’s offices.

While this pragmatic approach made sense on a case-by-case basis, the cumulative effect was stylistic eclecticism, which, to most people, had a decidedly pejorative connotation, as it still does today. Yet Saarinen, like many of his contemporaries, viewed eclecticism as a necessary and noble response to the conditions of the period. This recalled traditional eclecticism, which was regarded as the culmination of academic achievement. In 1965, Peter Collins made this point as the guideline for his critique of architecture when he quoted Denis Diderot on the subject:

An eclectic is a philosopher who tramples underfoot prejudice, tradition, seniority, universal consent, authority, and everything which subjugates mass opinion; who dares to think for himself, go back to the clearest general principles, examine them, discuss them, and accept nothing except on the evidence of his own experience and reason; and who, from all the philosophies which he has analyzed without respect to persons, and without partiality, makes a philosophy of his own, peculiar to himself. 21

Saarinen’s pragmatism parallels this formulation of eclecticism. Indeed, the diversity of his work, far from being seen in stylistic terms, should be understood as the product of a powerful creative force— the architect himself. As Saarinen wrote:

It is on the individual, his sensitivities and understanding, that our whole success or failure rests. He must recognize that this is a new kind of civilization in which the artist will be used in a new and different way. The neat categories of bygone days do not hold true any longer. His job requires a curious combination of intuition and “crust.” He must be sensitive and adaptable to trends and needs; he must be part of and understand our civilization. At the same time, he is not just a mirror; he is also a co-creator and must have the strength and urge to produce form, not compromise. 22 Seen from this perspective, the diversity of Saarinen’s work acquires a new dimension as a multiplicity. In contrast to other archi- tects at the time, so intent on developing one single aspect of design, Eero Saarinen “wanted to embrace the entire body” when designing, something that in turn might lead to inquiry and indecision—witness for instance painstakingly compiled charts of facts and figures he created for so many of the projects undertaken. 23 With his con- stant experimenting and self-evaluation, Saarinen clearly fits the aforementioned definition of an eclectic. As he said in an interview published in 1953 in the New York Times, anticipating present-day con- cerns in architecture, “In the end, you can only create and make decisions according to your own integrity.” 24

21. Diderot, quoted in

Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750–1950 (Montreal:

McGill University

Press, 1967), 17. Collins pursues “an architectural philosophy evolved in the spirit of true eclecticism,” which he elaborates from

Diderot. 22. Quoted in Saarinen, Eero

Saarinen, 9 (1953). 23. When interviewed, Roche said that “Mies wanted to pull back all the layers and get to the heart. Eero wanted to embrace the entire body.” Francesco

Dal Co, Kevin Roche (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 22. 24. Quoted in Saarinen, Eero

Saarinen, 14 (29 January 1953).