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Two Photographs: ``It resembles a huge, continuous hammock suspended between concrete trees,'' Eero Saarinen wrote [RECORD, July 1963, page 109].''It is made of light suspension bridge cables between which the concrete roof deck panels fit. The concrete piers slope outward to counteract the pull of the cables. We exaggerated this outward slope as well as the compressive flange at the rear of the columns in order to give the colonnade a dynamic and soaring look--in addition to its dignity.''
PHOTOGRAPHY: Copyright R. LATOFF
I think this airport is the best thing I have done,'' Eero Saarinen said more than once during the spring and summer of 1961, referring to Dulles International Airport, which opened the following year in Chantilly, Va. But Saarinen never saw the completed building; an unpredicted brain tumor took his life in September of that year at age 51. The 600-ft-long terminal, a ``continuous hammock suspended between concrete trees,'' was almost instantly regarded as a Modern masterpiece, and its status has not diminished over the years. During America's bicentennial year, a poll of prominent architects and critics named Dulles America's most admired recent building. Only a year later, however, preservationists were defending it against unsympathetic tamperings.
Dulles, Washington, D.C.'s second airport and the first anywhere to be designed for jetliner service, like other terminals of its era fell victim to technological change, enormous air-travel growth, and heightened security. The airport has expanded and Saarinen's terminal has been altered, each time igniting preservationists' concerns. Today the New York City office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is building a multiphase expansion, one that has doubled the length of the previously little-touched catenary terminal.
What was at stake
The SOM team acquired a heightened appreciation for their predecessor's work while analyzing Dulles's design and construction. SOM project manager Tony Vacchione praises the careful sequencing of passenger arrival, orchestrated by Saarinen and landscape architect Dan Kiley along the Dulles approach road, ultimately revealing the terminal as a ``giant lantern on the landscape.'' And SOM design partner Marilyn Taylor values the relationship between the low terminal and the airport's tall control tower rising on the field side. ``I never realized how complex it was to pull off a simple result,'' she says.
Taylor, a former...