News and analysis from Newsweek's global network of correspondents and columnists
Updated: 1 hour 14 min ago
Aline Saarinen: '50s Wonder Woman
Today, except for a few projects like the moribund TWA terminal at JFK, Eero Saarinen is better known for his furniture than his buildings. His "womb" chairs and pedestal tables (designed, he said, to "clear up the slum of legs" in the American home) are still big sellers for Knoll. But does anyone remember that he designed the beautifully soaring Dulles airport? Or CBS's "Black Rock" headquarters? Saarinen might find it oddly familiar that his chairs have eclipsed his architectural achievements: early in his career, he'd struggled against the long shadow cast by his father, Eliel, the revered Finnish architect who'd founded their Bloomfield Hills firm, just outside Detroit. Two years before Eliel's death in 1950, Eero had rushed to pop a champagne cork and toast his Papa after a telegram arrived congratulating Saarinen on his winning design for a memorial to commemorate the Louisiana Purchase in St. Louis. But the cable was a mistake: Eero had submitted his own idea—he was the winner, not his father. His scheme for the epic steel arch in St. Louis was a prelude to his future designs for corporate offices, embassies, and airports, veering away from his father's sensibility and embodying instead the triumphal spirit and swaggering power of postwar America. Saarinen gets his due in a fascinating exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, "Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future," that explores his impact on the 1950s and '60s. What you don't expect is to discover the impact of a woman whom Saarinen himself has come to overshadow, though she was a cultural force in her own right. The woman was his wife.
