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Eero Saarinen
A new book on Eero Saarinen is right to applaud his newly fashionable status, writes Thomas Muirhead
Eero Saarinen is noted for his curvaceous, 1962 TWA terminal at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport. Typically of all Saarinen's work, the NYC terminal is designed not to appeal to architects or critics, but to the people who actually use the building.
At a time when air travel was still a luxury, he offered travellers a sinuous, multi-level interior in which one area flowed into another. Essential items, like the information board above the check-in, become witty design features. Alas, Saarinen, the subject of a new monograph by Jayne Merkel, didn't live to see his terminal being used.
His death in 1961, when he was only 51, meant he missed the whole sixties experience, but the building's groovy "conversation pit" and swirling lines (beautifully reproduced here in period photographs) perfectly epitomised the psychedelic age, while Saarinen's manipulation of space put people in just the right mood for takeoff.
It's lucky this now-redundant terminal survived attempts to demolish it, because after years of critical disinterest, Saarinen has now become fashionable again in the United States, perhaps because the TWA building looks like a progenitor of some of today's expressionistic architecture,...