Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:59:35 +0000

Rudolph arranged his buildings, essentially modifications of a single design, in two facing curves loosely defining a wide lawn. A central campanile anchors the broad pedestrian space, with cars banished to a ring of peripheral parking lots behind the buildings. This expansiveness, which Rudolph likened to Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia [page 121], is countered by the interior lounges that Rudolph argued were vital to creating a sense of community in a commuter college. The lounges are some of the most satisfying vertical spaces anywhere, three stories of shifting volume defined by staircases and balconies and interspersed with padded benches (and even a few fireplaces). They lend the much more sedate corridors and classrooms that connect them a sense of anticipation.

Rudolph's expert manipulations of form prompt a desire to delve into the mind of the architect working "with a grubby pencil at a grubbier drafting board." [page 89] But Writings on Architecture is elusive here; Rudolph seems only willing to describe his design process as iconoclastic: "As an architect I am the most prejudiced person in the world; as a teacher I hope I am as open-minded as possible." [page 84] Only slightly illuminating those prejudices, he told the historian and writer Robert Bruegmann in 1986, "I'm compelled: I have no choice about certain combinations of forms, material, space, or architectural considerations. They egg me on."

Bruegmann's fascinating interview (which includes the delightfully surreal anecdote of Rudolph and Frank Lloyd Wright meeting inside Phillip Johnson's guest house), focuses largely on Rudolph's work during the 1980s in Asia. Excerpts would have made a valuable addition to Writings on Architecture, whose three included interviews from the same decade only look back to Rudolph's successes in the '50s and '60s. It is also somewhat disappointing to find just one essay documenting his post-A&A experiments with megastructures and prefab housing (another constant fascination, which he called "twentieth-century brick”), and very little material relating to Rudolph's interiors, unbuilt projects and the overseas commissions that made up the bulk of his output from the early 1970s onward.

For that, we have Roberto De Alba's 2003 monograph, Paul Rudolph: The Late Work, which opens with an insightful and comprehensive essay by Bruegmann, titled "The Architect as Urbanist." At first glance this seems like a provocation. Rudolph's buildings, the common view goes, are polemics in concrete, ponderous and introspective masses more interested in their own monumentality than in their surroundings. Aren't they?

This week, as most Yalies cram for midterms and watch the sunrise while writing fifth drafts of papers, the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale University Art Gallery offer students a novel incentive to perform well on their exams. On entering “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future,” a new retrospective on the Finnish-American architect, visitors can see one of the transcripts of Saarinen, ARC ’34, from his time as a Yale student. The thought of future generations smirking at your gentleman’s Cs (though, to be fair, Saarinen pulled some As, too) might send more than a few students scrambling back to the library.

The intrepid souls who stick around, however, will find a detailed and nuanced portrait of an eminently adaptable, sometimes enigmatic architect, whose work has undergone a recent critical renaissance. Though at first it seems strange that Saarinen’s grades are displayed so prominently, the choice begins to make sense as you move through the rest of the exhibit. That transcript, which displays both Saarinen’s Yale connection and his professors’ widely varying evaluations, embodies the two main points of the exhibit. In examining Saarinen, “Shaping the Future” focuses both on the man’s relationship with Yale and on the very different views critics had of the artist’s work.

Born in Finland to a sculptor mother and an architect father, Saarinen eventually emigrated to Michigan with his family, where Eliel Saarinen taught at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. At Cranbrook and later in Paris, the young Saarinen studied sculpture and furniture design. His close friendship with Ray and Charles Eames may have influenced his creation of several iconic pieces of modernist furniture, including the Tulip Chair, a smoothly molded space-age concoction that was popularized by its use on Star Trek.

Despite his success as a sculptor and furniture designer, Saarinen eventually decided to follow his father into architecture, and worked for Eliel Saarinen’s firm for over a decade. The two men had a close working relationship (they even shared the same birthday), and arguably similar styles: In 1948, Eero took first place in a competition for his design of the famous Gateway Arch, but the prize committee mistakenly sent the award to his father. However, Saarinen eventually carved out a place for himself in a community of architects, all immigrants or sons of immigrants, inventing a uniquely American artistic identity.

That identity, for Saarinen, had a bit of a split personality. “Shaping the Future” deals with the idiosyncrasies in Saarinen’s style by breaking the exhibit up into four sections, color-coded by theme, which not only makes the exhibit more navigable but also brightens up the gray of the rough stone walls and black-and-white photographs. Viewers can choose where to enter the exhibit: I recommend beginning with “Forging Community,” a catalogue of Saarinen’s works for universities like the University of Chicago, the Berkshire Music Center, and Drake University.

One of the most striking works in this section is the Kresge Chapel at MIT. The building is a windowless, flat-roofed cylinder with brick arches that form a water-filled moat. Light is reflected from the moat through a glazed panel in two walls, and also reaches the chapel through an oculus above the stone altar. The light produces patterns on a curved screen by Harry Bertoia, while a ceiling-spanning photograph showcases the interior of the chapel to great effect. Despite the lack of traditional ecclesiastical opulence, the chapel is staggeringly beautiful. The fluid interplay of the walls and light seem to capture motion in stationary architecture.

Saarinen’s work for other colle-ges leads neatly into the next section, “Saarinen and Yale.” Beyond receiving his architecture degree in New Haven, Saarinen did a great deal of design work for Yale. Drawing on the extensive Saarinen collection housed in the university’s archives, the exhibit offers an exhaustive account of the architect’s academic and professional relationship with the university.

The first work highlighted here is the David S. Ingalls Hockey Rink (1956-58). The genius of this work is the roof: suspended on cables from an enforced concrete arch, a concept difficult to imagine but perfectly comprehensible by examining the scaled model, which shows half of the building with the roof and half without. The design does indeed have a watery, fluid feel to it, in keeping with its affectionate nickname, “The Yale Whale.”

The rest of the section is devoted to Saarinen’s controversial design of Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges. The basic design for both is a low-rise polygonal building punctuated by two high-rise towers, with irregularly shaped rooms meant, according to Saarinen, to be “as individual as possible, as random as those in an old inn.”

The exhibit addresses the often less-than-enthusiastic reception that these buildings have received with a film featuring discussion by Saarinen’s associates, including Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art Vincent Scully, JE ’40, GRD ’49, on the subject of why Morse and Stiles do not work. This panel suggests that Saarinen’s work on the colleges falls prey to the ordinary hazards of experimental architecture: The buildings are “not gentle,” not meant to be co-ed, and definitely not designed to feel like home. The film also explained both colleges’ lack of common rooms by citing a preliminary survey done by Saarinen’s design team that revealed that students wanted single rooms. Interestingly, the film also revealed that Saarinen himself coined the term buttery, although he originally wanted to call the buttery a “ratkiller,” hearkening back to a beer-serving area of Connecticut Hall that Saarinen purportedly found in the nineteenth-century Yale archives.

The next section of the exhibit, “Creating Corporate Style,” is appropriately highlighted in green, for the millions of dollars that went into and came out of Saarinen’s buildings for some of America’s most iconic companies. Saarinen’s experience designing university buildings contributed to his pioneering idea of the corporate campus. The most famous example of Saarinen’s corporate design is his work in designing the 25-building, 100-million-dollar General Motors Technical Center. Hailed as “the Technopolis” and the “Versailles of Industry,” the GM Technical Center symbolized American power in the technological and commercial realms. While the outside of the buildings are impressive, the most beautiful architecture in the GM Center is found in the staircases—wide, white spirals suspended by steel rods fanning out from a central point. The effect is simultaneously flower-like and industrial. Pockets of sheer beauty like these help leaven the harsh criticism some of Saarinen’s more commercial work has received. While Manfredo Tafuri once called Saarinen’s work mere “corporate advertising,” his consummate commitment to functional but exquisite details help rescue Saarinen from charges of mindless commercialism.

The exhibit ends with “Shaping an American Identity,” which features airport terminals, embassies, and national memorials designed by Saarinen. Though he was originally Finnish, Saarinen’s work is often described as characterizing the optimism of mid-twentieth century America. The exhibit claims that his designs for airports “thrilled people to the glamour of international travel,” and the variety in his designs reveal Saarinen’s conception of an American ideal of unbounded choice. The three main features of this section are the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Dulles International Airport, and the TWA Terminal (now part of JFK International Airport), and the exhibit features small-scale models of all three structures.

Like the stairways of Saarinen’s GM Technical Center, all three structures require the viewer to step back to appreciate the overall magnificence of the designs before taking a closer look to appreciate their many intricacies. The most compelling design in this section is for the TWA Terminal, characterized by multilevel spaces, curving stairways, and bridges that allowed 14 jets to dock simultaneously. Complicated drawings stipulate the materials for the construction of every part of the building, but the photographs and model show it at its uplifting, elegant best. The building looks like some strange biological organism or seashell, weirdly curving and undulating; Saarinen’s style here might best be described as organic expressionism.

Each of the four sections of “Shaping the Future” show Saarinen working in a different register; the harsh blocks of Morse and Stiles seem to come from a different pen than the one that drafted the sweeping, triumphant lines of JFK. As Vincent Scully wrote last year, Saarinen’s buildings exemplified “the style for the job…each of them evoked a brand new, knock-your-eye-out form.” Still, some critics of Saarinen find fault with the diversity of his designs, noting that he never found one particular style, instead swinging from Miesian realism to abstract expressionism to a sort of classicizing eclecticism.

That flexible style, which has earned Saarinen criticism in the architecture community, can perhaps be seen as his unique interpretation of the American ethos—cheerfully mercantile, readily adaptable, and effortlessly optimistic about the future. While it’s fitting that this exhibit, having shown in museums across Europe, is ending its run in one of Saarinen’s American hometowns, it also seems ironic that a collection of work so imbued with a sense of American superiority should return to the United States at this time of profound uncertainty about the country’s status in the world.

When we look at Saarinen’s work in a modern context, the proud statement of the GM Technopolis stands in contrast to the struggles of American car companies today, while his expansive and exciting airport terminals remind viewers of a time when airplane travel was thrilling rather than exhausting and tedious. The exhibition implicitly asks us if we accept or reject Saarinen’s sunny post-war hopefulness. It also looks past his impressive work into the future, to the architecture that will help to define American art in the century to come.