A bit late

In Metropolis: Going Back Outside (Again)

Courtesy Herman Miller

Sometimes it takes a midcentury modern dream team to create a chair: Alexander Girard, visiting Charles Eames, talks about the J. Irwin Miller House he has just completed with Eero Saarinen. But he has a complaint: while there are Saarinen chairs for the dining table, and he has devised a conversation pit to replace the pedestrian sofa, he can’t find outdoor furniture for the patio. “As we were trying to analyze the reasons why there was nothing on the market to suit him, why we were of course starting to write a program for designing the object to fill this void,” Eames told Interiors magazine in 1958. The object that resulted is the Eames Aluminum Group, a set of furniture in continuous production since that date—albeit primarily for indoor use.

Read the rest in Metropolis’s June issue, or here.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Eameses?

I don’t know what to do with this book. The Story of Eames Furniture, by Marilyn Neuhart with John Neuhart (Gestalten, 2010), is a labor of love, a two-part, richly-illustrated history of some of the most famous modern chairs in the world. To reject it seems harsh. It contains fascinating tales of false starts and under-known design careers, what could be a separate book of clever mid-century magazine covers, furniture catalogs, and abstract photographic odes to mass-production. And yet I was unable to enjoy it. It is the kind of book that the design blogs love, picking out 10 fabulous images, glorying in its heft entirely in the abstract. Another chance to cite the Eameses! But as a real thing and as a work of history, it is less than the sum of its pages.

Read the rest at Design Observer.

Arts & Architecture, 1946: Eames plywood furniture.

The Still-Expanding Airport

Drawing from the MoMA Collection, gift of Aline Saarinen.

In 1958, after some failed attempts by the Saarinen office to make a stop-motion film of their model for Dulles Airport, Eero Saarinen called upon his old friend Charles Eames to help him out. The office had spent months researching the new jet airport, and had come to a number of conclusions about how best to connect people and planes. Among their researches was accounting for the steps taken from car to terminal, terminal to gate. In Eames’s resulting film, The Expanding Airport, the distressed passenger’s apparently endless path is animated, shown as a long dashed line, with some nice slapstick involving luggage and children. (I would link to a clip or a still, but the Eames Office, for better and worse, is copyright mad. You can watch the film on this disc, or read a play-by-play in this book.)

Saarinen’s solution to the forced march was simple. Shrink the airport, motorize the path. Dulles, like the TWA Terminal, would have a small footprint, just big enough for the necessary gates and shops. But where TWA passengers traveled a long hall to get to their spiny gate hubs, Dulles passengers would hop on a Mobile Lounge assigned to a specific flight, sit there until it was time to take off, and then be transported directly to their plane, sitting in a satellite location on the tarmac.

I recently flew through Dulles for the first time, and was delighted to see most of its charms intact. On the upper level of the terminal, the gates and signs and stanchions—the branded and security clutter—are still mostly below the line Saarinen drew in the concrete. That means his parabolic roof, lifting up to create a view of the sky to which passengers will soon repair, still floats free. And passengers still have to pass through his flight hall, despite the presence of two new bar-like terminals behind it. Both have been made deliberately blank on the outside so that they are no competition. It made me sad for TWA all over again, empty of bustle, with the new Terminal 5 biting at its heels. I think of Saarinen every time I walk down the long, hot, white hall from the AirTrain to the JetBlue gates. It takes 10 minutes, it is totally unpleasant, and whoever designed it should be fired.

I got to ride in a Mobile Lounge (soon to be replaced by a quick and well-designed underground train, the signage alone puts the AirTrain to shame) and thought two things. One, Dulles is not using the lounges right. They take a motley crew of passengers to the new terminals, where we have to walk to a variety of gates. And two, the problem of the expanding airport is as pressing now as it was in 1958. I stopped to get a sandwich in the newest terminal, B, and was forced into a long march to the center of the bar. There was sunlight, and a few banners, but the design was undistinguished and the train could only take me to one end. There was still an imaginary dashed line behind me and my suitcase, adding steps to my trip in the terminal, at the Dulles entrance, at the rental car pickup. Saarinen thought he solved the problem, but someone needs to solve it all over again.

See the USA

In 2003, which now feels like a lifetime ago, my now-husband and I embarked upon a three-week modern architecture tour of the Midwest. Most of the sites on our list were topics for my dissertation, but the others were not incidental: to truly understand the history of modernism in the United States, you have to get off the coasts. Our roughly circular trip took us from New York to Pittsburgh (Wright, Harrison), Detroit [Saarinen, Saarinen, Mies (image from Dwell above)], Zeeland (Nelson, Eames, Girard), Chicago (Mies), Racine (Wright), Spring Green (Wright), Moline (Saarinen), St. Louis (Saarinen, Sullivan), Bartlesville (Wright), Columbus, IN (Saarinen, Saarinen, Noyes, Weese), and some other places I am sure we have forgotten. At the General Motors Technical Center we were the only foreign car in the lot; in Zeeland, a dry town, the only restaurant seemed to be Boston Market and the Herman Miller archivist couldn’t believe we lived blocks from the location of his favorite film, Moonstruck; when we got out of the movies in Tulsa at 9 p.m. the vast mall parking lot was empty but for our car. It was a strange trip, mostly strange because, except at the Wright sites, we seemed to be the only people interested in the buildings. I have written about the private proximities of major postwar designers like Noyes and Knoll and Saarinen, and about the corporate proximities of the same, but I never thought to rearrange the names and careers geographically.

I was reminded of this trip by the discovery of the website Michigan Modern (which subsequently posted a link to my Design Observer piece on Aline and Eero Saarinen, Love & Architecture), the online front for a just-launched project by the State Historic Preservation Office intended to highlight the many modern architects and buildings in Michigan. Examples are thick on the ground, with loci of invention in Detroit (and suburbs like Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe) and Zeeland (home of Herman Miller, and close to furniture town Grand Rapids). Cranbrook, the Bauhaus-like academy of art and design founded by auto entrepreneur George Booth and run by Eliel Saarinen, was a node in what became an international design network of teachers, students, and alumni. At one point, of a cold Michigan evening, you could find yourself at a party with Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Alexander Girard and Minoru Yamasaki, men who defined postwar architecture and design from what was then a booming city. Everyone seemed to have a bentwood chair in his backseat, or a skyscraper based on a new structural system on the drawing board. And Girard’s pioneering 1949 exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, “For Modern Living” brought all of these people and more together for the first time.

Everyone knows that Los Angeles—to which Charles and Ray Eames soon decamped—and New York—where the Museum of Modern Art created its own design society, were style centers, but other cities and other states certainly had their moments (Kansas City, where the Halls of Hallmark decided to remake the downtown in the 1960s, certainly comes to mind), much as other cities and other states are now at the forefront of thinking about green living, sustainability, affordability. I hope Michigan Modern inspires other states to get excited about their more recent heritage as a matter of American history and preservation. It is all very well for the media, and out-of-state historians, to try to tell a city what they are trying to tear down, but it is much better to have locals retrace the intertwined histories of industry, innovation and (oftentimes) suburbanization for themselves. The results will be less formal, and closer to the scrappy, personal culture that spawned the icons.

This Is Just To Say

Design Observer posted a link to a wonderful gallery of artists’ Christmas cards at the Smithsonian. Click on the big image, then make sure you click through to Dan Flavin’s minimal masterpiece. I am surprised they didn’t include this, from the Florence Knoll Bassett papers, inspired by the Erwin Hauer concrete screens installed at new husband Harry Hood Bassett’s First National Bank & Trust Company (designed by Chuck Bassett, no relation, of SOM).

It wasn’t for Christmas, but rather congratulations on their marriage, but the gallery also made me think of this lovely note from Charles and Ray Eames to Bassetts, on the occasion of their marriage, also at the Smithsonian. Ephemera like this makes me wish I could have been friends with the mid-century designers about which I often write. Though my friends are pretty crafty: they installed plastic swans and ivy on our car in lieu of a Just Married sign, in keeping with my wedding palette of white and green.

Taste Test

Last night I discovered something very exciting: the IFC on Demand section on Time Warner Cable Channel 1000. It lists independent films that are still in theaters, including Summer Hours, a recent French film I had put in our Netflix queue after reading the reviews. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas, the film is about three siblings deciding what to do with their mother’s summer house, and their mother’s beloved things, after her death. It is a simple plot, one rendered realistically and without melodrama. All of the details were incredibly right, and so telling, from the terrible, practical presents the grown-up children give their mother for her 75th birthday, to the subtle career put-downs of mother to son, sister to brother. As one  sibling says to another, “We don’t really talk about things in this family,” but in fact they do in that underground way most of us instantly recognize. The relaxed nature of the setting, of the actors, and the slow unfurling of plot draw you in so that you are right there with Frederic, Adrienne and Jeremie dividing the estate. I couldn’t help but put myself in their place: what would I choose of all the beautiful and/or valuable things accumulated in that house over a lifetime?

For along with being about family relations, and about the slippage of France from its former central place in the world (one sibling lives in New York, the other in China), Summer Hours is also about changing taste. What do different generations value, and why? Is value in francs or in sentiment? The film is sophisticated enough to show us real things of value (or at least good copies of them) by real modern artists, so that we can decide for ourselves. There’s the Georg Jensen tea service Adrienne (Juliette Binoche, wearing a series of high-tech hoodies), an accessories designer for Takashimaya, wraps up and takes away. There are the small, tan Corots Frederic (Charles Berling) seems to value more for their name than for any aesthetic pleasure (he’s an economist). There is the Majorelle desk and cabinet, all crazy swoops and inlaid wood, that even the curators at the Musee d’Orsay question whether are ready for their revival.

The tastes that have changed are global, national and personal. For designers the movie serves as an entertaining illustration of the fact that things are more than just products. For collectors it gives notice that your children may think your prizes are disposable…or museums will one day prize the vase you always kept under the sink. It’s ironic that I just praised my own Jens Risom chair, for I grew up with an original Eames LCW chair that I always thought was ugly until one day, it wasn’t. My mother just gave me a gift of that chair for my finished house, where it is a lesson in patience (on her part) and the growth of good taste (on mine). My son likes to climb on it, but hasn’t vouchsafed an opinion yet. He may come to prefer our equally curvy George III chairs and try to get the MoMA to take the Eames and Risom for an estate tax deduction. Once you start thinking of your things in the future, and in the market, it all becomes a little emotional.