I was two months shy of my seventh birthday when my family moved to Chantilly, Va., about four miles (as the 747s fly) from the main terminal of Dulles Airport. I used to be able to talk my Dad into making the short drive over to Dulles so I could watch the planes take off and land pretty frequently. Aircraft are fascinating to a boy; to my adult self, the shoes-off-please, quart-bag-of-toiletries, threat-level-orange parade of indignities that air travel has become has robbed the planes themselves of none of their mystery.
But I was equally drawn to the terminal itself, an elegant, swoop-roofed structure that would probably register as iconic even to someone who’d never seen it or heard of it before. Its design was the work of Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen, whose remarkable career was cut short when he died of a brain tumor at the age of 51, while Dulles was still under construction. Saarinen’s body of work is the subject of “Shaping the Future,” a fascinating exhibit at the National Building Museum that I’ve overlooked until now, but which is well worth a visit while it remains on view through this Saturday.
Saarinen’s design was strikingly different from that of the TWA Flight Center at New York City’s Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy International) Airport, which Saarinen also conceived, and which, like Dulles, opened in 1962, the year after his death. While the New York building’s sharp cutenary curves and recurring ovals now make it look like the set of a dated sci-fi film — “the future” as imagined back when we believed things would only get better — Dulles’ timeless majesty remains undiminished. (You could argue that it’s even more impressive now than when it opened, thanks to the expansion, completed in 1996, that more than doubled the terminal’s length. Because Saarinen had planned for this, the terminal was elongated without compromise to its aesthetic integrity.)
St. Louis’ 630-foot high Gateway Arch is the other indeligble U.S. landmark that sprang from Saarinen’s imagination.
Even if you knew that, you might not know that Saarinen’s command of line, arc, and symmetry is as evident in his small-scale work as in his monuments. Though Saarinen began his architectural career collaborating with his father on projects like the General Motors’ Technical Center — a 320-acre “constellation of buildings,” in the younger Saarien’s words, that Life magazine later hailed as “a Versailles of industry” — he first won solo acclaim as a designer of furniture; particularly, chairs. The “tulip chair” was only the most popular of several of his mass-produced creations dating from the mid-40s to the mid-50s; it, too, is as iconic as something intended to be sat on can be.
“Shaping the Future” provides a generous insight into Saarinen’s creative method for more than 50 projects, large and small; realized-and-un. Many of the the drawings, architectual models, photos, and even personal correspondence here comes courtesy of Yale University, where Saarinen studied in the early 1930s. In 2002, Kevin Roche, who was one of Saarinen’s business partners at the time of his death, and who helped complete 10 of Saarinen’s projects posthumously, donated this material to Yale’s archives. To Roche, we owe gratitude; to Saarinen, awe and veneration.
IF YOU GO:
“Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future”
Through Aug. 23
National Building Museum
401 F St. NW
Admission: Free; donations accepted.
More information: www.nbm.org
