Risk taker

Architectural Review, The, July, 2003 by John Winter

EERO SAARINEN: AN ARCHITECTURE OF MULTIPLICITY

By Antonio Roman. London: Laurence King. 2003. [pounds sterling]40

Eero Saarinen died, at the height of his powers, in 1961. His best buildings are now some fifty years old. This must put him near the low point in the pendulum of architectural fashion. His name, once universally respected, rarely comes into architectural debate at present.

Yet his achievements remain significant. The General Motors Technical Center, outside Detroit, is the place where the Modern Movement dream of the machine-made, machine-serviced, environment was achieved for the first time. Its inventions and achievements are many--the first neoprene gaskets, the first office grid with lighting and ventilation available in each grid square, the curtain wall with metal faced sandwich panels--all these are the stock-in-trade of a thousand office buildings built since. But, unlike succeeding buildings, the G. M. Tech Center has glamour; it has staircases and public areas that can still startle.

Saarinen rejected the notion that architecture was a 'formula to be found' and considered that each architectural project should 'have its own solution'. He was a risk taker. So, among the successes are some grim failures, and some designs that do not come off, like the US Embassy in London. Let us be generous, and judge him by the best. CBS is still the best New York office tower post-Seagram; Dulles, with its mobile lounges, really did bring new thinking to airport design; the Jefferson Arch at St Louis is one of the few great monumental structures of the twentieth century.

With the TWA Terminal at Idlewild threatened with redundancy, it may be time to reassess Saarinen. This book gives sound illustrations and a thoughtful text, but by only using black and white photographs, it tends to look dated. The 1950s cars in those photographs reinforce the feeling that this book is a survivor from an earlier era, not an attempt to see Saarinen from a contemporary viewpoint.