Art: The Maturing Modern

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Well-building hath three conditions:

Commodity, Firmness and Delight.

—Vitruvius

Ever since man settled down under roof, he has been at the mercy of his buildings. What he sees, how he lives, looks, thinks—even how he dies—are overwhelmingly affected by the structures he designs and builds. Through the generations, good builders have tried to measure up to the formula of Roman Architect Vitruvius Pollio, contemporary of Julius Caesar, but they have often thought more of the structure than of its inhabitants, and have at times produced more monstrosity than delight, more discomfort than commodity. But in mid-20th century the art of well-building has reached a high state, and is moving toward greater achievements.

The greatest progress has come in a land not otherwise noted for its leadership in the world of art: the U.S. From Beacon Hill to Nob Hill, modern architecture has squalled and tottered through its awkward, unruly, early years, but it has begun—if only begun—to mature. In Paris, architectural students eagerly follow the new work of younger U.S. architects with all the fervor that Left Bank jazz addicts reserve for Dizzy Gillespie and Satchmo Armstrong. Said a young French architect: “When we have a chance to see what your architects are doing, we have a picture of what the future can become. We have something to believe in.”

Monopoly on Masters. In a major sense, U.S. pre-eminence in modern architecture is an expression of the country’s fabulous industrial expansion. It is also a tribute to the triumphant breakthroughs by U.S. industrialists and engineers whose work (ranging from the pioneering Brooklyn Bridge to the machine precision of General Motors’ new Technical Center outside Detroit) has made U.S. resources, machine craftsmanship and technical brilliance the envy of the world. Because there have been and are great opportunities in the U.S., the country now has a virtual monopoly on the best creative architectural talent of this century (see box).

Surest sign of the healthy state of U.S. architecture is the large number of promising younger talents. And of the whole U.S. cast of modern architects, none has a better proportioned combination of imagination, versatility and good sense than Eero Saarinen, 45, son of late great Finnish-born Architect Eliel Saarinen.

Outwardly, Eero (pronounced arrow) Saarinen (rhymes with far-‘n-then) looks like a country family doctor, dresses with the casualness of a young college prof, prefers to live clear of the cities, in the rolling countryside of Bloomfield Hills, Mich. (pop. 2,100), 18 miles from downtown Detroit. His headquarters is a simply constructed, often cluttered office shed he designed for himself, just two minutes’ drive from his home over winding country roads. Even with an office staff of 43, Saarinen’s is a small operation by comparison with the major U.S. architectural organizations, e.g., Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s 700 employees. Says Saarinen, who likes to see his plans through from drafting table to finished building: “I feel strongly that architecture has to be a personal service.”

As Saarinen’s contemporaries long ago discovered, there is a dynamo of relentless energy behind his easygoing façade. A round-the-clock worker, he sets such high standards of perfection that on occasion he holds his draftsmen and designers at their drafting tables straight through the night, is so prodigal with money for research that he recently spent $12,000 to win a competition that guaranteed only $4,000 in expenses. But judged by the results, Saarinen’s total approach pays off. His work has won the applause of the glass and steel purists, yet pleased clients who include small-town bankers, a Midwest Lutheran synod, university presidents, and the giants among U.S. corporations—General Motors, T.W.A., International Business Machines et al.

In a highly competitive profession, where awards mean prestige, Eero Saarinen & Associates is a consistent winner. This spring the firm added another rich harvest of first-place laurels, including 1) the Grand Architectural Award from the Boston Arts Festival, for Saarinen’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology cylindrical brick chapel (selected earlier this year by the National Council of Churches as one of the best churches built in the last 25 years); 2) first place in the top-drawer competition for the new U.S. London embassy (TIME, March 19).

Grapefruit & Grace. Architect Saarinen sleeps, eats and dreams architecture, reduces just about every experience in life to architectural terms, reaches for the nearest napkin or note pad to graph everything from adolescent rates of learning to the qualities that make up a beautiful woman. Last week, as his wife watched with fascination, he casually turned over his breakfast grapefruit, began carving out elliptical parabolic arches which he then carried off to the office to see if they might do as an idea for the office model of T.W.A.’s new terminal at Idlewild.

Such complete absorption gives Saarinen the bemused air of the absent-minded professor. Flying out last April to see the site of the new Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs (on which he is an architectural consultant), he suddenly turned to his companions, asked: “Just who is Grace Kelly?” Next day he told his wife earnestly: “I really didn’t know Kay Francis was marrying that Prince.”

Saarinen is absorbed day and night in the problem of visualization, likes to start working early with models, is notoriously extravagant with paper. In a single evening he will run through 170 ft. of tracing paper; he made more than 2,000 drawings in revising his plan for the London embassy. A girl in his office, whose desk Saarinen sometimes uses late at night, inevitably knows when he has been there. Says she: “It’s like slicing down through the excavations at Troy—tracing paper, tobacco, paper, paper, matches, more paper, a cigar stub, paper, paper, paper.”

Sire & Sisu. Saarinen credits his natural competitiveness partly to his Finnish sisu* and the example of his hardworking, hard-playing father. Eliel Saarinen was Finland’s No. 1 architect (the Helsinki railroad station and National Museum) and town planner (Helsinki, and Canberra, Australia). He set up headquarters in a romantic, rustic, 38-room retreat which he and his partners built overlooking Hvitträsk (White Lake), 18 miles outside Helsinki. After he married a sister of one of his partners, Sculptress Loja Gesellius, they turned it into a center of crafts and architecture. Among the stream of visitors and guests: Russian Novelist Maxim Gorky, Critic Julius Meier-Graefe, Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil von Mannerheim, Composer Jean Sibelius.

Center of the household for Eero and his older sister, Eva-Lisa, always called Pipsan, was the 90-ft.-long, all-purpose studio and living room where the elder Saarinen worked with his draftsmen while his wife sculptured and sewed. Such a beehive of cultural activity was calculated either to smother or force the children. In the case of Eero and Pipsan, it forced.

By the time Eero was five, his talent for drawing had shown itself. Sitting under his father’s drafting tables, he busily turned out his own versions of door details and houses. Encouraged by his mother, he progressed to blood-and-thunder pictures of Indians he had read about in James Fenimore Cooper (he can still rattle off the names of 30 tribes) and knights from Ivanhoe. At twelve he was proficiently drawing nudes—a common sight in the house, since Eliel Saarinen was then busy designing Finland’s national currency, using nude models (while grandfather Juno Saarinen, a Lutheran minister, sat in the background rheumily chattering about religion and philosophy).

From his father Eero learned two lessons he never forgot. One: “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, environment in a city plan.” The second, Eero learned one day when he went to visit a girl friend, leaving half-done at home his design for a matchbox-emblem contest. When young Eero asked to stay longer, he was firmly ordered home, told: “Competitions come first, girls second.”

Two years later Eero proudly walked off with first prize in a Swedish newspaper matchstick-design contest, collected 30 Swedish kronor ($8). The same week, his father received a telegram from Chicago announcing that he was runner-up in the international Chicago Tribune Tower contest, with a design that Skyscraper Architect Louis Sullivan hailed as “a voice, resonant and rich, ringing amidst the wealth and joy of life.” Eliel Saarinen promptly dipped into the $20,000 prize to move his family to the U.S. When the family landed in Manhattan, Eero Saarinen was twelve.

“Frank Lloyd Wrong.” Two years later Eliel took on what was to become his major U.S. monument, the 40 school buildings and faculty houses for Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, a whole complex of transplanted Scandinavian modern, including sculpture by the late Carl Milles (who served there as resident sculptor for 21 years). Eliel Saarinen soon learned to exchange compliments with his contemporaries. When Frank Lloyd Wright wryly called him “the best of the eclectics,” Eliel labeled his critic “Frank Lloyd Wrong.”

With Cranbrook’s brick buildings mushrooming before their eyes, the young Saarinens were expected to play their part. For the Kingswood School for Girls, Eero, then 20, designed the furniture (still in use) and Pipsan, 25, did the auditorium and ballroom decoration. Eero spent summers in Finland with the family, and one year alone in Paris, where he studied sculpture.

In the ’30s, Undergraduate Saarinen found the Yale School of Architecture almost untouched by modern architecture. He produced models for school competitions on such set themes as “A Palace for an Exiled Monarch” and “A Monumental Clock,” won so many school prizes (including one for holding his liquor) that he got a medal for winning the most medals, graduated with honors (1934) and the top traveling fellowship to Europe. Saarinen grabbed at the chance to rubberneck his way from Naples to Stockholm, wound up the year taking on his first architectural assignment, a playhouse in Helsinki. Says Saarinen today: “It was a terrible building, but good experience in seeing all the things that could go wrong with a building. That’s where I took up the pipe—which is something you could put between you and your client.” Today, with more clients than he can handle, he smokes his pipe incessantly.

Womb for Comfort. Welcomed home to Cranbrook as an instructor and made a partner with his father, Eero married a Cranbrook ceramics student, Lillian Swann, a wealthy Long Islander (they have a son and a daughter). With another Cranbrook faculty member, Designer Charles Eames (today famed for his “potato chip” plywood chairs), Saarinen teamed up on designing the first molded wood chairs. Years later, the wife of a furniture designer urged Eero to design a chair that women can curl up on. His answer was his famed “womb chair,” today a bestseller. His current project: a one-legged chair on a broad base to “clear up the slum of legs in the U.S. home.”

Designer Eames, on the scene at the time, will never forget Eero Saarinen’s approach to his first major national competition, the firm’s entry for a new Smithsonian Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. Says Eames: “I remember Eero thought out the whole thing carefully, and then told us that the first thing to do would be to make 100 studies of each element that went into the building. We would then pick the best, and never let our standards fall below that. Then we would make 100 studies of the combinations of each element—the placing of the sinks in the ladies’ rooms, for instance. Then 100 studies of the combinations of the combinations. When the whole thing was finished, Eero was almost in tears, because it was so simple. And then, of course, he won the competition.”

Growing up the son of a world-famed architect was no easy problem for Eero Saarinen. He had to win through to a style of his own. First clear-cut sign that he was going to be something more than just the son of a famous father was the national competition for the St. Louis Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in 1948. The elder Saarinen submitted a formal monumental design; Eero’s entry was an audacious, 590-ft. stainless-steel arch that looked like a giant, glistening croquet wicket—which he had conceived while bending a wire and wool pipe cleaner. A telegram announced Eliel the winner. The family broke out the traditional champagne to celebrate.

Only days later was the secretary’s mistake uncovered: the $40,000 first prize was properly Eero’s. His arch, hailed by the jury as “a work of genius . . . which will rank it among the nation’s great monuments,” has not yet been built, but it is Eero Saarinen’s favorite work.

“Tivoli Gardens. Boy!” The younger Saarinen clinched his position as top U.S. architect with the $100 million, 25-building General Motors Technical Center outside Detroit, hailed by Architectural Forum as “an architectural feat which may be unique in our time.” A model of modern architecture, the G.M. center has glistening expanses of aluminum, greenish glass and grey porcelain façades, interchangeable office paneling and windows “zippered in” with neoprene gaskets.

At G.M. and in his other work, Saarinen readily acknowledges a number of his father’s influences: a sense of spaciousness and orderliness, the complementing of existing structures, the use of bodies of water to provide focal points, resistance to a set style, a fondness for expressive materials. But there is another influence at work: that of Mies van der Rohe, the glass and steel purist whose “Less is More” has become younger architects’ gospel.

Saarinen readily admits Mies’s crystallizing influence on his work. “Mies was a mature influence,” he says. “He puts clamps on the problem.” But Saarinen is no blind follower of any style. “When you do a job like this,” he says of the G.M. Center, “your mind goes back to Versailles, the Tivoli Gardens, San Marco, the way Italians used pavements. And you think, ‘Boy! Let’s do that!'” Saarinen admits he has to ask himself: “Is that creating a new architecture?” And he replies: “Isn’t it just bringing back things that have been lost to architecture? We must still create, but we would like to bring back some of the great awarenesses that existed in the past, expressed in our own forms and technology.”

While poring over the model for G.M., Saarinen developed a good many answers on how to recapture “great awarenesses of the past.” To pull the spread-out buildings together he created a 22-acre artificial lake, placed in it two fountains that pump more water than did Versailles’. To give each building its own identity, he developed glazed bricks in eleven colors ranging from deep crimson and tangerine-orange to chartreuse and royal blue. For the strong vertical accent, almost a signature of Saarinen’s work, he erected a gleaming, stainless-steel water tower rising 132 ft. from the lake, matched it with a 188-ft.-span dome of aluminum-covered steel for displaying new models under high-powered lights.

Two in a Study. As Saarinen’s G.M. began going up, his marriage was washing out. The marital problem was discussed sympathetically in a story written by the New York Times’s Associate Art Editor Aline B. Louchheim. “When he is in Bloomfield Hills,” she wrote, “Saarinen works at the office until at least midnight . . . Unlike the elder Saarinen’s studio-house, which kept the family working and playing together and was a convivial center for artists, actors and musicians, the younger Saarinens allocate social life primarily to their infrequent vacations . . . Very occasionally, in a musing, somewhat rueful tone, Eero Saarinen questions whether he has not let architecture devour too much of his life . . . But one wonders if there could have been any other way for him.”

After he was divorced, Eero Saarinen and the author of those understanding lines (herself a divorcee) were married. He told his new wife frankly: “I think you will be able to be married to me, because you understand that my first love is architecture.” Since then, Eero has kept the romance boiling with surprise “I love you” notes Scotch-taped on the walls. They named their son, now 19 months, Eames, for Eero’s old designer buddy, Charles Eames.

Architect Saarinen and his wife and son live in a made-over, nine-room Victorian brick farmhouse of 1860 vintage, smoothed off, brightened and painted white inside, and furnished with Eero’s furniture. (His mother lives on the back lot in a sleek modern house he designed to fit her favorite, handloomed, 25-ft.-long Finnish rug.) In cutting away a section of one wall to throw light on the main stairway of his old house, Saarinen has made the exterior what he considers “better Victorian than ever.” The garage has been converted into a joint study, where Eero, working over his drafting table at night, glances up frequently to see Aline chewing up pencils over her writing.

Only real source of friction in the house : Eero’s unwillingness to play handyman. Says Aline: “It’s the shoemaker’s-children-have-no-shoes situation. The basement leaked for months without his taking any interest in it. Then, happily, one day during a strenuous spring thaw, it flooded to a depth of six inches. That was sufficient crisis to engage him. He sprang into action and within an hour a sump pump was making the house throb like an ocean liner.”

Earth & Sky. As usual, Eero Saarinen has much to keep him busy far into the night. With 39 major structures already built, he has $35 million worth of works in progress, involving 50 buildings, 21 campus residences and one $300,000 house. As usual he is never completely satisfied with his own projects nor with the general state of his profession.

“Strict functionalism was a necessary purgative,” he says, “but after all, there is nothing esthetic about an WOMB CHAIR) enema.” Agreeing that modern architecture has won the day, he says: “Now is the time to examine the presuppositions.”

Saarinen’s insistence on doing this has made him one of the most debated, and at the same time imaginative, architects today. Rejecting the cult of the cube as the answer to every problem, he made his M.I.T. auditorium a billowing, white shell of concrete, resting on three points, in which the acoustic elements could be placed. His questioning (“Need a church be rectangular?”) produced M.I.T.’s cylindrical brick hatbox chapel, lighted from a single honeycomb skylight above and light bounced up from the narrow, containing moat through low arches to give the interior a grotto-like mystery and calm.

In designing Concordia Senior College at Fort Wayne, Ind., Saarinen remembered the snug appearance of Danish villages clustered around their church, kicked the modern cliche of the flat roof skyhigh, and designed the chapel and buildings with pointed roofs. Says he: “There is a whole question of how to relate buildings to earth and sky. Is the sharp horizontal really the best answer? We must have an emotional reason as well as a logical end for everything we do.” Saarinen admits his decision spread dissension even within his office, but he let the peaked roofs stand. “The smorgasbord boys love it,” he says, “but the Mies followers are not convinced.”

“It Will Get Better.” Saarinen’s belief that “each building must have its own look,” and be a “good neighbor” as well, has brought down the wrath of modern purists, who favor glass and steel even if it clashes with every building in the area. Saarinen’s answer was to show what he meant in his plan for the new design of the U.S. embassy on London’s Grosvenor Square by keeping the structure modern but keying the floor levels and spacings of the front façade to the surrounding Georgian buildings. He also got off his mind another pet peeve: that too much modern ages poorly. He designed the embassy in Portland stone, London’s traditional building trim which ages to a contrasting rain-washed white and deep, sooty black.

Convinced that 20th century architecture is still in the foothills, Eero Saarinen thinks it will be a long time before the summit is reached. Driving home through the industrial suburbs of Detroit, he often admits to a wave of pessimism: “I think the immediate future is black. There is too much that is ugly. Architecture is not just to fulfill man’s need for shelter, but also to fulfill man’s belief in the nobility of his existence on earth. Our architecture is too humble. It should be prouder, more aggressive, much richer and larger than we see it today. I would like to do my part in expanding that richness. I believe that is where architecture is going. It will be gloomy for a long time—and then it will get better.”