Review of reviews: Art

Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future

National Building Museum

Washington, D.C.

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Through Aug. 23

Creating buildings that capture the public imagination is difficult, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post, but “nobody did it with more flair” than Eero Saarinen. The Finnish-born architect—who devised such iconic symbols of “mod-Americana” as TWA’s futuristic terminal at JFK airport and the St. Louis Memorial Arch—helped soften the hard-edged modernist forms that dominated architecture in the 1950s. But a new exhibition at the National Building Museum suggests that Saarinen’s biggest influence on architecture may not have been his curved, sculptural forms; rather, it was the way he turned himself into a sort of brand. The “breadth of his practice, his fondness for ‘iconic’ forms, his forays into furniture and design”—but primarily his sophisticated self-promotion—made him one of the first celebrity architects.

This is “the museum’s best exhibit in years,” said Deborah K. Dietsch in The Washington Times. It shows how deeply Saarinen was influenced by “the form-follows-function philosophy” of such architects as Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. At the same time, it underscores how he “expanded their vocabulary by embracing the latest materials of his day—Cor-Ten steel, neoprene gaskets, mirrored glass—to create buildings in sync” with the jet age. Unlike most modernist architects, Saarinen wasn’t afraid to imitate earlier architecture, such as the Pantheon in Rome or the Great Mosque in Cordoba, Spain. Yet somehow this Finnish immigrant united all these disparate influences “to capture a quintessentially American, optimistic spirit in confident, futuristic structures.”