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Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future. Curated by Donald Albrecht. At Kunsthalle Helsinki, October 7-December 6, 2006. Travels to Oslo, Brussels, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, St. Louis, New York, and New Haven.
In death, as in comedy, timing is everything. When it comes to Hollywood stars and politicians, an early death can preserve a romantic image from the corrosive effects of aging and the inevitable missteps of living through changing times. But for architects, passing away prematurely is usually disastrous, since most careers really get going only after a number of years in practice. When Eero Saarinen died in 1961 at the age of 51, though, he was arguably the most important architect in the United States, having designed iconic buildings for some of the most powerful corporations and clients in the land--General Motors, IBM, CBS, Bell Laboratories, the Department of State, and Yale University, to name just a few. And he was lucky enough to have associates in his firm, particularly Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, who could see his late works--including the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and Dulles International Airport--through to completion after his death.
So you might think Saarinen would have benefited from the James Dean cut-down-at-the-peak-of-his-career halo effect. But Saarinen had the misfortune of dying right as critical opinion of his work was turning increasingly negative. In 1962, when Reyner Banham saw Morse and Stiles Colleges at Yale, which Saarinen designed in a historicizing mode, he wrote, "Yale is a very sick place!" A few years later, Vincent Scully stated that Saarinen's Yale hockey arena with its swooping roof "embodied a good deal that was wrong with American architecture in the mid-1950s: exhibitionism, structural pretension, self-defeating urbanistic arrogance." From the grave, Saarinen had no way of rebutting his critics.
Saarinen's reputation also suffered because his office's archives remained out of reach of scholars for more than 40 years. So instead of being rediscovered by new generations of architects and writers, he was relegated to a kind of architectural purgatory and barely mentioned in the standard histories of Modernism.
All that changed in 2002 when Roche...