A bit late

TWA:Still Kicking

TWA Flight Center (1962). Nicolas Lemery Nantel | salokin.com

The line of photographers started at the parking lot, setting up tripods in the thick, green grass at the edge. More occupied the median, and still more crowded the interior, blocking the delicate, cantilevered bridge so that few could pass. And yet, it was not a disappointment. The traffic still flowed. A few cars on the underutilized roadway in front. A mass around the information desk, drawn there despite there being no need for flight information. Steady streams up the shallow steps. And then, dispersion. Up the stairs to the Lisbon Lounge and the Paris Cafe, stripped to their chrome light fixtures and glazed tiles. Down the stairs to the red ilets of seating, facing another iris of information. Behind the iris: an expanse of gray gravel, and the dull curve of the JetBlue terminal. Where once there was a view of flight, now there is just a wall, and not even one activated, as the lifted wings are here, by the movement of people. Beyond the lounge, two tubes with violent red carpet and a wash of white light. No one seemed to be able to decide on the proper pace. Kids ran. Adults strolled. More photographers blocked the opening. And again a disappointing end. An elevator. A staircase. No planes in sight.

Read the rest at Design Observer.

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.

Love & Architecture

My somewhat racy, somewhat serious take on one of the first architecture power couples, Aline and Eero Saarinen went up on Design Observer today. A taste:

When Aline met Eero in January 1953, she was the associate art editor and critic for the New York Times, recently divorced, and on a trip to Detroit to meet the young architect whose General Motors Technical Center had proved to be such a smashing success. She was to write a profile of Saarinen for the New York Times Magazine, eventually published on April 23 as “Now Saarinen the Son” with the byline Aline B. Louchheim. A little over a year later she would become Aline B. Saarinen.

Cathleen McGuigan had a different spin on the same topic in Newsweek. All because Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future opens at the Museum of the City of New York today. The doorstop of a catalog, to which I contributed essays on Saarinen’s corporate campuses and houses, is available here.

Speechless

My mother has been sorting through my grandfather’s studio (he was the assistant director of the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth, as well as the college designer). In one of many small drawers we found a trove of unsent postcards, including a howler of the pentagram-shaped hotel at the Syracuse Airport. Most of the others were dull scenic views of Vermont and New Hampshire. Then there was this. When I saw it I thought, “What a stylish prison. Could it be (Paul) Rudolph?” I didn’t think Eero Saarinen had ever designed a prison, but those slit windows look a lot like his dormitories for Penn.

I flipped it over to find that it is “the new Denver Art Museum.” You know, the building that Daniel Libeskind’s 2006 shard is but an addition to, and which lurked in the background of all the new photography. It was designed by Gio Ponti, founder of Domus and better known as a tastemaker, and opened in 1971. Other photos I have seen of it made it look good, in a western fort sort of way, a late modern attempt at regionalism, and like it had become part of the city fabric, albeit a glowering one. But this…this is what gives modernism a bad name.

Maybe the entrance is OK, with a perky gift shop brightening up the Corbusian glass entrance pavilion, and (I assume) a little sculpture behind that hemicycle wall. That looks like a museum. But the rest of it is just so speechless. So unfriendly. In the abstract it is not a bad building, and I could go on about the way the slot windows are set in the wall, the neo-castellation of the top and popped-out windows at the top. It’s very old-fashioned in architecture circles to want buildings to speak to their use, but I think this is a perfect example of why that is not such a heretical idea.