Today, except for a few projects like the moribund TWA terminal at JFK, Eero Saarinen is better known for his furniture than his buildings. His "womb" chairs and pedestal tables (designed, he said, to "clear up the slum of legs" in the American home) are still big sellers for Knoll. But does anyone remember that he designed the beautifully soaring Dulles airport? Or CBS's "Black Rock" headquarters? Saarinen might find it oddly familiar that his chairs have eclipsed his architectural achievements: early in his career, he'd struggled against the long shadow cast by his father, Eliel, the revered Finnish architect who'd founded their Bloomfield Hills firm, just outside Detroit. Two years before Eliel's death in 1950, Eero had rushed to pop a champagne cork and toast his Papa after a telegram arrived congratulating Saarinen on his winning design for a memorial to commemorate the Louisiana Purchase in St. Louis. But the cable was a mistake: Eero had submitted his own idea—he was the winner, not his father. His scheme for the epic steel arch in St. Louis was a prelude to his future designs for corporate offices, embassies, and airports, veering away from his father's sensibility and embodying instead the triumphal spirit and swaggering power of postwar America. Saarinen gets his due in a fascinating exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, "Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future," that explores his impact on the 1950s and '60s. What you don't expect is to discover the impact of a woman whom Saarinen himself has come to overshadow, though she was a cultural force in her own right. The woman was his wife.
Aline Louchheim, an art critic for The New York Times, understood how Eero had wrestled with his father's ghost. She arrived in Michigan on a wintry day in 1953 to write a story on Saarinen the son. After two days of interviews and a tour of the construction of his latest project—a massive and innovative 25-building complex for General Motors—she declared in her article that the architect, then 42, had freed himself from his father to follow his own direction. His designs, she wrote, were giving imaginative form to contemporary industrial civilization and becoming "an expression of our way of life." But there was a secret behind those glowing words, one that, surprisingly, didn't prevent her from writing them: Aline and Eero had had an instant attraction. She was an accomplished, socially connected, attractive blonde divorcée; after she'd flown back to New York, he wrote her polite letters, typed by his secretary—as well as handwritten love notes that his secretary surely never saw. The next year, after Eero divorced his wife, the couple married, and she continued to promote his work to a wide circle of media friends. At one point, she even confessed in a letter to her mentor Bernard Berenson, the art connoisseur, "Now I observe myself ardently promulgating the Eero-myth." Not that she didn't believe passionately in her husband's talent—she did. What's surprising is that she didn't sublimate her own ego or her work for her husband's career. Instead, she exemplified a select species of ambitious, intellectual American women who managed to thrive in the 1940s and '50s, while most of their sex were carpooling the kids in the new postwar suburbs. Aline not only continued to work as a journalist during her marriage to Saarinen, she also won a Guggenheim fellowship and published a book about art collectors, The Proud Possessors, that became a bestseller. After Saarinen's untimely death, she reinvented herself as a television news correspondent and became the first woman network bureau chief when NBC sent her to Paris. If his optimistic designs for GM, IBM, and TWA seemed rooted in the historical moment of Eisenhower's America, so, too, did her achievements. In the pre–Betty Friedan era, Aline succeeded by using all the tools at her disposal—including her femininity and her mystique.
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