All language subtitles for Eero Saarinen - Architect Who Saw The Future (2016).EN

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[music]

Our architecture is too humble.

It but should be prouder,
more aggressive, much richer,

and larger than we see today.

I would like to do my part
in expanding that richness.

[music]

One finds that many different shapes
are equally logical, some exciting,

some earthbound, some soaring. The
choices really become a sculptor's choices.

[music]

[sil.]

My grandfather was Eliel Saarinen.

My father was Eero Saarinen.
And my name's Eric Saarinen.

And they were architects, they
were both world-famous architects.

When he was starting out, my
father worked under his father.

He worked within the
structure of his father's work.

He would do what he was asked to do,
and he would be assigned to do details,

and he did them well,
but he was always working

within a confines the box.

The first chance he had to make an impact with the design
of the zone and show that he was going to be more than

just the son of a famous architect was the design
competition for the St. Louis Jefferson Memorial in 1948.

There were quite a few
competitions in those days

many more than they are today, but this is the one that everybody
wanted to win. Eliel's whole career had been launched for competitions,

and he had brought arrow
up to enter competitions.

And of course, Eliel also entered.

Both teams were in the same building on other
sides of a wall, working on this competition.

And after the first stage, they
sent a telegram to Mr. E Saarinen.

I had heard the story many times.

Telegram came under the
door. It said Saarinen won.

So they rejoiced for three
days that Eliel had won,

but it was Eero Saarinen who won
the competition, not Eliel Saarinen.

So they celebrated again and the
nice sweet way to put it is, to say that

Eliel had good reason to
celebrate because his son had won.

But in actual fact, I think it was a
big blow to Eliel. He had to admit

that his son had beaten him,
beaten up badly by a better design.

[music]

[music]

The major concern here

was to create a monument which
would have lasting significance,

a landmark of our time.
An absolutely simple shape

such as the Egyptian Pyramids seemed
to be the basis of the great memorials.

The St. Louis Arch
could be a triumphal arch

for our ages as the triumphal
arches of classical antiquity

where for (inaudible).

[music]

The St. Louis Arch is one of those rare
moments where an architectural competition

yielded something truly,
daring, and bold, and important.

Saarinen's work seemed
very refreshing to our people,

very exciting, very engaging at a time

when modern architecture,
it was a pretty rigid thing.

I think Saarinen's Arch
expresses American optimism

and American openness. To me, it says,

you know, here's an architect
who sees this country as the symbol

of all that's new of every opportunity,
of everything that 20th century

hopes to represent and
accomplish. And he sums it up

in this breathtakingly
beautiful leap into the sky.

[sil.]

I was only 19 when my father died.

I never really came to terms with
who he was or what his work meant.

Now it's a great joy to come back

and understand what he did and how he did it.
It's kind of a Magical Mystery Tour for me.

[sil.]

Coming out of school, I stumbled across film-making and
started doing documentaries and that led to features.

Yeah, there you go. And drop,

drop, drop, drop. Well,
I've had a long career,

been around the world many times. This is
probably the most important thing I've ever done

because I never had closure with my father

and it's a very cathartic
procedure to go back

and film at my father's work and being able
to communicate his work to other people.

Welcome to the top.

[music]

The arch was a combination of a lot
of work my father did with his father,

but it was also the
beginning of his own work.

It gave them strength to
follow his own convictions.

[music]

He made it to last for 1000 years,
and I hope it does. I do hope it does.

[music]

My grandfather Eliel designed and built
this house in the middle of the forest

in the middle of nowhere.
We're surrounded by woods,

surrounded by nature all the way around.
My father was born here and raised here.

Eero was brought up in this environment of

artists and musicians and creative people.

Other artists would come along including people
like Maxim Gorky who was wanted being hunted down

by the Russian police. He
was hiding here for a while

and they sent him out in a boat for the day
and the police came. They couldn't find him.

And then Gustav Mahler, the great musician,

and Sibelius would play the piano. They were all friends
of Eliel's and they all had tremendous influence on Eero.

The room with a fireplace,

you know, during the winter,
it's cold, and we're in Finland,

so everybody was drawn to the fireplace,
and there was a lot of discussion there.

As a child, I would always draw

and happen to be good at it. I got more
attention from drawing than anything else.

One of the draftsman here was Otto.

Eero was like four years old, and
he'd come up to Otto, and he'd say,

"Could you draw me a horse?" And so Otto would
draw him a horse, and everyday this happening.

Now many years later when my
father was interviewing an architect,

he would ask him to draw a
horse. And his reason was that

you can tell within two or three strokes if
the guy knows anything about drawing at all.

My father had his architectural
studio right into house.

I practically grew up under his drafting
table. He'd be on the floor drawing,

an Eliel would be at the table drawing.
And Eliel would look down once in a while,

and I'm sure Eero came up on his lap and
watched him draw for awhile and all that.

So it was just, it was a perfect match.

Except for a rather brief
excursion into sculpture,

it never occurred to me to do anything but follow
in my father's footsteps and become an architect.

[music]

Eliel's attitude on work
rubbed off on an Eero.

Work was everything. Work
was the most important thing.

And Eero was on the boat going
to the US. He was not just a child.

He had a tremendous intellectual back down,

but also he had that great training.

[music]

This 300-acre campus was designed

by my grandfather Eliel.

He brought his family to
America in 1922. My father was 13.

Eero lived with his
parents here at Cranbrook

until the age of 20.

The first time I came
here, I was about two,

and my sister was here, and I looked
at her and she looked like an angel

because she was bathed in this golden light
because of the way Eliel designed this light.

[music]

When he was growing up, my dad
was surrounded by beauty everywhere.

In Cranbrook, he started
out designing details

when he was a kid.
Little finished (inaudible).

They're playful and comic.

There's a gate on that side with a
deer, and there's a gate on this side

with a dragon, it looks like.

We're thinking maybe he was
17 years old when he did these.

[music]

Canes wood was one of the last
things that was designed in Cranbrook.

Eero's assignment was to do the
chairs and he designed pink chairs

because it was a girls' school.

My him father designed this, you know,
bow and arrow that's pointing straight up.

[music]

It was the symbol for
the students to aim high.

That's something that Eliel always
talked about. And in Cranbrook,

my father learned
those kinds of principles.

[music]

After Cranbrook, the first thing he did
was go off to Paris to study sculpture

as his mother had when she was a young woman. But he
only stayed for a year. And maybe he already sense

that he was going to be an architect.

Cranbrook was an amazing
place. Eero lived there,

Eero ad a studio, 24-hour
day, open classroom.

It was really a hotbed of creativity.

Very creative people came.

Frank Lloyd Wright came here.
He bounced me on his knee.

My mother came to study
sculpture at Cranbrook

and that's where she met my father.

She had just competed on the first US Women's
Olympic Ski team. And she was a lot of fun.

They fell in love and
they were married in 1939.

They were very influenced by each other.

She was quite talented as an artist.

She was working with clay and her farms
from nature influenced my father's work.

[music]

[non-English narration]

Saarinen's father dies in 1950 and that's
when Saarinen got to fulfill his ideas.

He was one of those people who's
struggling to give new form to architecture

to break out of the modernist box. He gets
that beginning with great corporate work

like General Motors. GM was a car company.

The car companies were among the
most important companies in the country.

They were outside Detroit. Detroit was a booming city.
It was the fourth biggest city in the United States.

[music]

The parade of new cars start the
process stage on advancing motor S.

It's funny how ancient my
own car sees as I look at…

In Detroit in 1950, really
the center of the design world,

you are styling your car and it's
more than just that the car can move.

It's how do people respond to it? How
does it grab your eye when it's going past?

So every year, there was a whole brand new set of
designs (inaudible). And everybody talked about them.

Oh, this is beautiful. A four-door hot top.

Oh, that's a car to fall in love with.

Now the impact of that on architecture
was that you had to be able to do something

that would interest people, there
had to be new ideas, new expressions.

General Motors had come to the Saarinen office
because of the beauty of the Cranbrook Campus.

They wanted a similar kind
of campus for themselves,

but a corporate campus. The original
design under the auspices of Eliel Saarinen

is streamlined with kind of
curving aerodynamic shapes

almost like the wings of
an airplane. When Eliel died,

there was a little battle of who was going to
do the job and who's gonna do the Tech Center.

The risk was that my father was
untested and really had proved himself.

Harley Earl, the head of
design at General Motors,

he had come from Hollywood. He (inaudible) and
Eero's Saarinen were alike, they were very bold.

They were stylists. He promoted
Eero Saarinen to get the job

and Eero Saarinen and becomes his
own architect with the GM Tech Centre.

[music]

[music]

We barely had here an opportunity

to create a total (inaudible)

with of all the buildings,
whole the landscaping.

Here was the technical setup for a
great metal producing corporation.

Somehow the character of that
should get into the architecture.

They have to remember that
architecture is not just here

to give space and shelter, but
architecture also has the purpose

of marking and enhancing
man's time on earth.

[music]

There was a need in him

to create a campus better
than Eliel would have created.

He's got the torch now.

[music]

A friend who knew both Saarinens said,

"Eliel brought Eero up to believe
one got one's rewards and maturity."

Eero waited a long time and
just now is beginning to get his.

Aline Louchheim was an art
critic at The New York Times,

and she had written an
article about Eliel Saarinen.

And she suggested her editor that
they do a story on Eero Saarinen.

She took the train to Detroit to meet and
interview Eero Saarinen. And of course,

it was a very, turned out to
be a very significant meeting.

I remember And the first
time we were alone together.

Then sneaking into Cranbrook and the dark
room and the black coat at the threshold

and making love for the first time,
hurriedly but so that we both knew

this was only the first time.

Then the drive to the airport. And I
looked at you very intently and thought,

"How much I did want to see you again."

It is difficult for me to express how terribly pleased
I am that you seem to like me more than you anticipated

because I really seemed to like you.

I know it seems astonishing that we should
this quickly have reached this degree of love.

I remember how sweetly you said to me, "It's so
quick that it wouldn't make any sense to anyone else.

But it makes sense to me."

It makes sense to me too, darling.

First, I recognized that you're a very clever,
that you were prescriptive, that you are generous,

that you are beautiful, that you
have a marvelous sense of humor,

that you have a very, very beautiful body,
that you are unbelievably generous to me,

that the more one digs the
foundations the more and more

one finds the solidest of granite for
you and I to build a life together upon.

She was married

and by then divorced. She had two
teenage sons. For whatever reason

they seem to have a very
instant chemistry, they were also

very interested in each other
intellectually. And Aline could discuss

whatever he was working on at the office.

This is the old Saarinen office, the birthplace
of the major architecture my father did.

I remember he would turn all these problems

over and over and over again,
and he'd try in 100 different ways

of solving each problem
before he arrived at a solution.

What I love about the way Saarinen
worked was he made big models,

huge models that he could put his head into and really
look around at architectural space and surfaces.

That's an invention in and of itself.

I mean, his model shop was, to me, I mean,
you know, and that I become an architect,

because I saw that office.
There was this rigorous sense of

how you actually build this stuff.

I always started wanting to put
the model together piece by piece

in flexible ways so he could change shapes

and detail as the model was being made.

Lots of computers today and I think
there's nothing that compares to this,

simply because it's the closest
you have to space-making.

[music]

At TWA, we tried to design a building in which
the architecture itself would express the drama

and excitement of travel.

[music]

In a way, this is man's
desire to conquer gravity.

[music]

Well, it's hard to take a bad picture.
I mean everywhere I look, there,

it's like beautiful there, beautiful
there. Everything is so organic.

[music]

And the old days are nobody was
making curved concrete buildings.

[music]

It was so sophisticated they couldn't
draw it. They had to build the model first

and then they had to draw
what the model told them.

(inaudible) It was a particularly long

and difficult process. I think
Eero worked for about a year

and presented to the client
who liked it and accepted it.

But after the presentation,

Eero started having second thoughts. Eero told the
client that all those they had approved of the site,

that the site was not right. He
had to restart and redesign it again.

And he needed an extra year.

I went to the model room, and
I saw the balsa wood models

on the large table, and I looked at it,
and the shapes were very free flowing.

I kind of looked at it
and I said to myself,

"You know, if I were a veterinarian, I
wouldn't know how to treat this with animal

because it's not a horse but it's
not a camel. Do I treat like a horse?

Do I treat it like a camel?" I
would like to get philosophical

about all this and related to
love. Architecture is my great love,

and as such I proposed to practice it.

He worked all day and
not all night but basically

he get up at seven and then
he'd be back at two in the morning.

Susie, my sister was my Robin. I
was that man and she was my Robin.

We're pretty much together all the time.

I had a beagle dog, and to
be beagle's name is Susie.

It was a little confusing but my father explained
to somebody that it's really not that confusing

because they don't look alike and
also because the dog made less noise.

It was kind of melancholy
because it was semi sweet,

it wasn't all sweet and sugary.

Work was the most important
thing for him, it wasn't money.

And I think maybe, you
know, there's a little part of him

that he wanted to be
known in the future and to be

tend to survive the time.
It was a commitment,

a lifetime commitment really. He
never thought of it as work or not work.

It was this absolute commitment to realize
it, you know. I know Eero's drive in,

you know, open 24 hours. Those
sort of different times, you know.

I remember, one, it's either
Christmas Day or New Year's Day,

and I was in the office about eight o'clock
in the morning. And he came and he said,

"Where the hell is everybody?"
And I said, "It's Christmas Day."

Yeah. You know, the
family that we didn't have,

you guys were his family.

[music]

I remember I was with my mother
one night, and she was in tears,

and I was in tears, and we
were both hugging each other.

And I said, "Where's Daddy? Where's
daddy?" And she finally called him, and,

and she was in tears. So he came,
he came home and consoled us

for ten minutes and
then left for work again.

I always resented my father

for literally abandoning my mother,
my sister, and me, but I never saw it

from his point of view.
My mom was depressed

and she was kind of left alone
because he was obsessed by his work,

and the marriage went south.

Meanwhile, Aline understood
my father's work and embraced it.

[music]

If you and Lily were to separate tomorrow

and by some miracle,
everything were to go smoothly,

I would still not take it as an
indication that you would marry me.

I'd be very seriously heartbroken.

But I don't want you to
feel obligated or trapped.

You don't realize that I'm like a
turnip or a potato. One of those plans

that have stored up below ground, a tremendous
amount of lust for a full blooming life.

In my first marriage, all
those things lay dormant

hoping that someday a
situation would come where this,

my new real-life would begin.

Wouldn't it be nice when all this is settled and you
can get back to being an architect into designing,

and I can write to you about
ideas instead of legal clauses?

Aline represented the
same kind of ambition he had.

She's very much right there as his career

as a solo architect takes
off. She positions him

in the very first article
for this whole explosion

and boom in his career is going to be.

There's a lot of pain in
early on and suffering,

but this has changed my attitude
toward my dad. It's cathartic for me.

Aline used to say any, any good
story as needs the character to change.

[sil.]

Working on this film changes me
to a degree that I can forgive him.

(inaudible) about this was quite unique

at that time it was built. It
was amazing, it was probably

no other project quite like it in America. So
that immediately, very, very important clients

started coming to him.

[music]

In the 1950s, there was a
positive view of corporate America,

and Saarinen, I think, taps
into that. He was always trying

new materials, new
technologies as a way to build up

the alphabet of a richer
modern architecture.

I'd love to work at a place like this.

It's like the ancient Romans, you
know, they had these huge columns

and they'd walk around, and think, "I have to
think of something or I have to do something,

or I have to create something."

This is my favorite place right here
because this is where all the boy toys are.

And it's kind of neat that

it's a show room when you entered the
building, and you see these huge machines

that are maybe taller than you are.

[music]

We tried to express in the
architecture the special character

of the Deere & Company.
We tried to get into the building,

the character of the Deer products.

We tried to use steel to express strength.

The amount of steel that went
into this building was almost double

that of a normal office building,

and when I talk to Saarinen about it,
his response was, "Well, in this building,

I use steel the way I would have
used marble in another building."

Loot at this. Look at that. Jesus!

[music]

Having selected a site
because of the beauty of nature,

we were especially anxious to take
full advantage of views from the office.

[music]

In the 1950s, there was enormous optimism,

there was a sense that anything was
possible. Particularly, in this country,

there was this optimism we were rich, we were
leading the world, we were good at technology.

And all this technology was gonna lead in wonderful
directions. And Eero Saarinen really captured that spirit.

He captured it in the St. Louis
Arch, he captured it in his furniture.

[music]

He had a sense of the excitement of the
future. And the work embodies that excitement.

[music]

We thought we're going to go to Mars. If you're
gonna go to mars, the (inaudible) would be perfect.

[music]

Most furniture designers or stylists,
they don't approach things from comfort,

and they don't really think
about it from different size people.

[music]

The furniture is the architecture in miniature. The
curvaceousness relates to the sculptural quality

of the architecture that Saarinen
is designing at the same time.

It's a bad pun to say
(inaudible) design chairs,

but we basically did. We would make forms

and actually sit in them.

Eero's thinking about modern design changed radically
after he met Charles Eames who's studied a Cranbrook

under Eliel during the late 1930s.

Their first conversation share combined a
seat and arm-rest and a backrest into one form

by bending plywood in two directions.
The technology had not yet been invented

to achieve this goal.

In 1940, the Museum of Modern
Art organized a design competition.

Eero and Charles entered the competition
and they won. It was a fresh new idea

and absorbed by the world. When
he first brought out the side chair,

it was made of
Plasticine. I went to sit in it.

He said, "No, you can't sit in it. That's made of
clay and it'll break, and there's only one of them."

So it was hand sculpted, hand
done by him in the basement.

And then in 1953, Florence (inaudible) asked
him if he would do another furniture collection

and he smiled because
he's already thinking of one,

and it was what we now know is the Saarinen pedestal
furniture which basically allow the chair to have one leg.

[music]

[music]

I think the lighting is amazing

that there's a shaft of light, soft light
coming down almost in the middle of the house,

and then a shaft of light right next to the bookcase
which soft top lights the books is brilliant.

[music]

The Miller House is a thing unto itself
because Saarinen did almost no private houses.

He was encouraged to be as free
as he wanted and in a lot of ways.

That's what makes the Miller
House really unique and yet also

at least as rigorous as
any of his other buildings.

Perhaps the most important thing
I learned from my father was that,

in any design problem, one should seek the
solution in terms of the next largest thing.

A chair in the room, a room in a house,

a house in an environment.

Clearly his creative genius was his own.

But I do think Aline really helped him
become better known to the American public.

End of 1953,

Aline and Eero were married.
And I think what's significant is

how much part of his office
and his career she became.

She did a lot of promotion for him, she knew
a lot of people. She was involved in arranging

for the Time Magazine writer to come and it
landed Eero on the cover of Time Magazine.

It was kind of his arrival
as a cultural figure.

So she's very much part of the
creation and construction of Eero's fame.

[music]

[music]

Function is only one of
the elements of architecture.

In an auditorium, for example, function
acoustics and sidelines must be respected.

But the basic form can come from structure.

He was inspired by things
that were at hand, you know,

he was always had breakfast and he always had
half a grapefruit. So he came up with the idea

of the Kresge Auditorium
from the grapefruit.

Now here's a bowl.

It'd be half a grapefruit. And then
you take the slice, that's the quarter.

And then you take a
slice, that's an eighth.

[music]

In designing the new auditorium for MIT,

the strongest and most economical way of
covering an area with concrete is with a dome.

We made dozens of models.
One of them seemed at first strange.

The three-pointed dome.

And he managed to make it
light, lightweight enough so that

it's literally perched on these
corners, just like the arch

or just like everything else
he does. It's a magic trick.

That was a typical (inaudible) that you
take something which was, by tradition,

done such and such a way and
their new interfered with the tradition

by sometimes just turning
the whole thing upside down.

[music]

A year and a half ago, the only
concrete thing was an ambition

to make a mark in architectural
history. Now my aim in life has grown

to also be with you.

About a year or so
after, they were married.

Aline and Eero had a son Eames, named
four Eero's great friend Charles Eames.

He did some remodeling.

They had desks that faced each other.
And whereas in much of his marriage to Lily

when the marriage became unhappy,

he spent long, long hours at the
office. Now he was more inclined

to come home, have dinner with Aline, and
then they would retire to the workplace.

She also traveled with him

widely to sites where he
was designing something.

She was very, very much part of his life. Partly
because he was so ambitious and consumed by it,

but I think she also loved it.
Aline came at the right time,

but my mom came at
the right time too for him.

My mom kind of got him out
of the box, I think, originally.

She worked with form. Form is a very
big word in our family and always was.

And she'd molded however
she wanted, and then she'd fire it,

and it would stay and it would last. And my
father kind of did that at a much larger scale.

[music]

I like the story of the boy
on the Yale hockey team

who said when he looked up at the concrete
arch, it made him feel, "Go, go, go!"

[sil.]

Never saw this before.

Wildly organic.

[music]

I've always liked hockey.

But it's (inaudible) that my
dad designed a hockey ring.

It's also, what, 55
years old, I think like that.

No mercy! Doesn't look old.

Saarinen sent people out from his office

all over the country to look and see what a great hockey Rink
would be like. And they came back and said, "They're all horrible.

They're all just barns with ice in the middle."
So he set out to make something that would express

the excitement of the hockey
game. We have the problem

of a roof and a new way
of using old materials.

We're spanning the space

by one single concrete arch,
then hanging cable from that arch,

and on that we build the roof.

[music]

Remember, he wanted to be a
sculptor, so he add that innately in him.

Where did he get the idea of extending the structure and creating
that lights at the end and make it look like a north ship?

I don't know.

Saarinen made amazing
shapes, Ingall's Rink is called

for awhile the Yale Whale, 'cause it
almost looks like a huge beached whale,

this great sculptural object. You
hadn't seen something like that before.

It was an attitude that you could
almost describe as picturesque,

his willingness to make
architecture entertaining.

He cared about what images
buildings evoked, what they felt like.

He wanted to create buildings that
you would engage with emotionally.

And that's something very different
from what was really going on

with modernism in the '50s.

I am very interested in campus planning.

Universities are, to our time, what the
monastery is were to the Middle Ages.

On existing campuses,
there's the challenge of

building proud buildings of
our time that are in harmony

with the existing buildings of other times.

The Gothic and Georgian style colleges were
built at Yale when Saarinen was a student.

He knew them intimately. And he knew what
a Yale residential college needed to be,

a quadrangle with varieties of
rooftop and skyline silhouette elements.

Saarinen's college is at Yale,

to respect the Yale
residential college tradition.

[music]

Of our time but also timeless,

the architecture should show that these colleges were
worlds somewhat apart, worlds with their own flavor

with emphasis on the
individual and his scholarly life.

[music]

Eero's use of sculpture
at Yale is interesting

because it's not representational.

And every once in a while you see
something implanted coming out of the wall,

it's not a gargoyle, it's
become a new modern shape.

[music]

Morse & Stiles was a complicated project.

The quirkiness was appealing up to a point

but a lot of people have
issues with those buildings.

Something in him made him
resistant to that underlying ideology

that seem to be the driving force

in so many modern architects,
this sense that there is one right path.

Saarinen saw lots of paths. He
had to be modern and innovative.

He also had to fit in with
the Gothic imagery of Yale.

It wasn't impossible to ask
really, but it did get a lot of criticism.

And of course, when you change and
you do something new, people resist that.

They have a problem with it for a while. Now
the critics were not very kind to Saarinen.

He seemed, as one critic
said, to be kind of an ad man

who gave the client whatever they
wanted and who did the style for the job.

Critics had some problems
with Saarinen all along

because he was seen as not
intellectually rigorous enough.

I guess he must have worried about critics

but he'd never showed it. He kept
on doing whatever he felt he had to do.

I feel strongly that modern architecture

is in danger of falling into a
mold too quickly, too rigid a mold.

Each building must have its own
look. I have brought down the wrath

of the modern purists who favored glass and steel
even if it clashes with every building in the area.

[music]

[music]

Sometimes the problem
and the times are right

for an entirely new functional approach
to a problem. No one asked us to grapple

with the problem of the JET H terminal
beyond the question of pure architecture,

but I believe the architect has to
assume that kind of responsibility.

The central element of Eero's

approach to architecture
was the desire to understand

what is the problem
you are trying to solve.

Now many architects will push
that off and have a creative room

to make a scribble and say, "Do
that." He wasn't that way at all.

To every single job that he
did, there are a lot of problems

and lot of solutions. In the case
of Dallas, his first thought wasn't

what is it going to look like or what is it going
to be. His first thought was how do we solve

the passengers walking for miles.

The jets are getting bigger, passengers are
going longer and longer distances to the plane.

So how do you solve that?

When we were flying around a lot and he had
a stopwatch out and he would wait to see

how long it took to people to load the plane, how
long it took the plane to taxi or to the runway,

how long it took the plane to take off.

[music]

We became convinced that some new method
of passenger handling had to be found.

The soundest system seemed to be one
which brought the passenger to the plane

rather than the plane to the passenger. We
arrived at the concept of the mobile lounge.

[music]

The acceptance of the mobile lounge
concept allowed us to make the terminal

a single compact building. We
started with abstract ideal shapes.

Gradually, we arrived at
the idea of a curved roof.

It occurred to us that this
could be a suspended roof.

The Ingall's Rink gave us courage
to go to the hanging roof here.

When he did the Yale
hockey rink, he had a spine

and then he draped the cables
and put wood on top of that.

Here he's draping cables and he's
putting concrete roof on the cables.

You know, you scratch
your head a little bit.

So it sticks with you. It's
like, "Oh, yeah. Cool idea,

but how does the roof stay up?"

The roof is supported by a row of columns,
40 feet apart on each side of the concourse,

65 feet high on the approach
side, 40 feet high on the field side.

[music]

It is like a huge hammock
suspended between concrete trees.

[music]

And he talked about the fact that architecture
was really a fight against gravity,

and he said that if we don't watch out, if we
don't work very hard at it, everything we do

becomes too heavy and too downwind pressing.
Also the business of soaring to Eero

was the way he thought of making this
idea of the dignity of man come through of,

of making you feel as if we
wanted to take a deep breath,

those standing tall of being a human being.

I think starting was visionary.

I mean, some of his buildings like TWA
and the Hockey Rink and Dallas Airport

seem openly futuristic. And
he believed in experimentation.

He believed in re-inventing
things each time around.

[music]

[sil.]

Every new building or structure that I come
upon is so different from the next step.

It's almost like it's been
made by a different architect.

Because he was trying to get at

what really is this structure is for. And in
this case, it's religious, somehow spiritual.

[music]

I think architecture is much
more than its utilitarian meaning,

to provide shelter for
man's activities on earth.

It is certainly that, but I believe it has a
much more fundamental role to play for a man,

almost a religious one, to fulfill his
belief in the nobility of his existence.

[music]

He said he had three commitments,

one was to is profession to do
the very best work that he could do,

one was his own personal integrity, and then
he said, "When I reach the (inaudible) gates,

I want to be able to tell St. Peter that

some of my best work was that
little church at Columbus." And, yeah.

[music]

And now to bed and to prayer,

perhaps to dreams, I hope of you.

God bless you, darling. Thank
you, God, for letting me meet Eero.

Help us to reach the rich,
true, and lasting marriage

in which we both believe.

I was in Cape Cod, and I got a phone call,

and Aline just burst into tears and said,

"He's died. There was one in 10,000 chance.

He had an operation that they found

a tumor in his head. It was in
the creative center of his brain.

He decided to go ahead
and, and have an operation

that there was a one in 10,000
chance that he would survive."

So… And he didn't make it.

[music]

Closure was something
I didn't have with my dad.

But I forgive him for his genius. You
know, how could you not forgive somebody

for being a genius.

But it just happened virtually overnight.
The day before, he was working away.

The next day, he died.

So it was a tremendous loss. But he
did an amazing amount of really good stuff

during that one productive decade.

Architect's careers usually mature
very late, have a very, very long arc.

But Saarinen's career
had a very short arch.

Who knows what would have
happened if he had lived longer.

Even though the tragedy was
enormous, there is, without hesitation,

the commitment to complete
and to fulfill his legacy.

Eero and Aline Saarinen were
only married for eight years.

And after Eero died in 1961,

the key aspect of her
contribution to Eero's legacy

was her role in making sure that
his unfinished projects were finished

and finish the way he would have liked
them. TWA was still under construction.

Dallas Airport was under construction. The Arch in
St. Louis was not completed at the time of his death.

The CBS building had not
even really begun construction,

and that was one project where
William Paley was considering

going with another architect,
and she persuaded Paley

that in fact Kevin Roche could
complete the CBS building.

[music]

If your buildings remained alive,
your memories remains alive.

[music]

He figured out a way to
(inaudible) important across time.

So even though he died
young, he is still alive.

[music]

In the case of Dulles Airport, it's
not really that he didn't get to see it

because he already saw it in a model stage
when it was like a giant looking down.

Eero Saarinen loved air travel,
his wife often flew with him.

She also traveled with him on the
road that led from an idea in a man's mind

to a building of concrete and steel and stone.
We're glad she's here to tell us about that.

The Eero is very anxious to create something
that would make you feel when you came in,

not as somebody said that you should have
the Dramamine before you got out of the cab,

that you would feel some of the wonder and the excitement of really
this miraculous thing of getting from one place to another through air.

[music]

America actually took
over TWA's routes in 2001,

so the terminal sat dormant
for a number of years.

The one of the best parts is at
the end of these open house events.

Everybody vying to be the last
person to take the photograph

with the place empty.

[music]

When I was 14 or 15, he
yanked me out of prep school

and brought me to New York, and he
wants me to see this for some reason.

I didn't really understand
it. I saw it bare-bones

pretty much the time when everybody had their
fingers crossed that it would not fall down.

He had told the engineer that it was finally
done and they were standing in the middle

and he said, "You know, if this
thing falls down on my head right now,

I will have lived a happy life."

[music]

[music]

When I first got the
call that my father died,

it was from Aline. Days
later, I got instructions

to be at the chapel at a certain
time for memorial service.

[music]

I did my duty, I came,

I listen to the words, but
they didn't mean anything.

I wasn't concentrating on the details, the
way the light splashed around the sides.

None of that meant anything.
You know, if you look at this place,

it's kind of impersonal. It makes
you feel small. And I felt very small.

As the ceremony was tapering off,

I heard the clicking of high-heeled shoes.

Someone was leaving,
going out the door behind me,

and I know it was Aline. I
realized that she had been in there,

had been really quiet, never
said hello, never said goodbye.

But now I can say that

I'm finally rewarded by
saying my father's work.

Understanding it, embracing
it, and being able to pass it on.

[music]

I hope that some of my
buildings will have lasting truths.

I admit frankly, I would like a
place in architectural history.

[music]

(inaudible) architecture is
both universal and individual.

The individuality comes through
as a result of a special quality.

[music]

Experimentation can present great
dangers. But there would be greater danger

if we didn't try to explore at all.

[music]