Books on architecture's colourful characters

These newly published architecture books show a quirkier side of the profession, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor

Even if Eero Saarinen did nothing else other than to browbeat his fellow jurors at the Sydney Opera House competition in 1957 by plucking Jorn Utzon's entry from the reject pile, saying, "Gentlemen, this is the first prize," he would be entitled to go down in the history of 20th century architecture.

But Saarinen did much more than that. His two best-known and most iconic projects were the soaring stainless steel Gateway Arch in St Louis, Missouri (officially the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial) and the swooping, bird-like TWA terminal at John F Kennedy Airport in New York.

A new book on his life and work - Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, edited by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht (Yale University Press, €59 in RIAI bookshop, 8 Merrion Square, Dublin) - says that Saarinen's terminal "thrilled travellers with the glamour of international flight" when it opened in 1962 - a year after his untimely death from a brain tumour, aged 51. Though Finnish, he "captured the aspirations and values of mid-20th century America".

The Gateway Arch, standing 630ft (191m) high, was designed to commemorate the westward expansion of the US at a time when it was emerging as the world's leading economic and political power. A competition winner in 1948, though it wasn't finished until 1965, it launched Saarinen's career.

What he did, as the book notes, was to take modern architecture "in new and surprising directions by adding vivid hues and exuberant details" in his search for richer, more varied expression or, as Saarinen himself said, to "expand our vocabulary beyond the measly ABC" (of Mies and others).

This did not endear him to the architectural establishment. Critic Bruno Zevi denounced his work as mannerist, saying he had broken the "form follows function" rule, while architectural historian Vincent Scully said it was characterised by "exhibitionism [ and] structural pretension".

With a "twinge of guilt", Scully recants his earlier view in a lengthy essay, explaining that "most of us were evangelical modernists [ at the time] and tended to be more categoric and exclusive in our judgments". Now, he says much of Saarinen's work had a "brand new, knock-your-eye out" quality.

TWA was designed to "make those of us who are about to fly move calmly and intelligently from the tin-can containers of our automobiles to those other tin cans out on the field, in order to be shut up in them and projected into empty space". Everything about it said, "you can do it - it's going to be wonderful up there".

Saarinen's use of "new and spectacular structural device and functional innovation" was also evident in the Dulles International Airport serving Washington DC; not only did it have a sweeping suspended roof, but also "mobile lounges" to transport passengers to and from the planes.

Though Saarinen made the cover of Time magazine in 1956, he "may be the least-known famous architect of the 20th century", as the introduction notes. But his buildings "lent themselves to literal and metaphoric readings and were more accessible to the layman than most modern architecture".

After 40 years of "near complete neglect", Saarinen is the subject of renewed interest from scholars, the public and a younger generation of architects, who have been "liberated by the computer" and find his work compelling, particularly its use of new technologies to create innovative forms.

It was Kevin Roche's donation of Saarinen's office archives to Yale University library that made the book possible. Back in the early 1950s, Roche became Saarinen's "right-hand man" - even though he admits to having fallen asleep when he was first interviewed in 1949, after being out "on the tear" all night.

Roche and the late John Dinkeloo subsequently inherited Saarinen's practice, completing the nine major projects that were on the stocks when he died - before forging a formidable reputation for themselves with the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York and numerous other great buildings.

In a panel discussion last year at Yale School of Architecture with former colleagues Cesar Pelli, Harold Roth and Robert Venturi, Roche described Saarinen's methodical process of designing a building by interviewing everyone who would use it before he ever began to consider its form, how it would look.

This was "very encouraging for a young architect because you felt there was a process that you could follow and at the end of the process the form would emerge", he recalled. It was quite "unlike the experience with Mies van der Rohe, where there was a religion and a way you had to do it - a black and white ..."

The son of an architect (Eliel Saarinen), he also had the "wonderful characteristic of being completely human", as Roche said.

"The cultural and historic heritage he had from his family and from his background and from his country [ were] all very significant elements in what made Eero's architecture".

Though with considerably less justification in terms of the work he has produced, Peter Eisenman has influenced more architects than Saarinen ever did and "opened the way for the current digital avant garde", according to a new book on his "contextually disconnected", even nihilistic architecture, called Tracing Eisenman, edited by Cynthia Davidson (Thames and Hudson, €59.75 at RIAI bookshop and €59.65 at National Gallery of Ireland bookshop in Dublin).

The preoccupations of Eisenman - a cult figure for decades - are summed up (in his own words) by his 1978 competition entry for the Cannaregio area of Venice where its grid is marked by "a series of voids, which act as metaphors for man's displacement from his position as the central instrument of measure".

For his much-heralded 1981 social housing scheme at Kochstrasse, beside Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, Eisenman explained its curious angles by saying he had superimposed the Mercator grid "as a second set of walls [ that] begin to erase the physical presence of the historical walls". Imagine that!

The book spans Eisenman's career, from his first house in New Jersey (1967) to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, which opened in 2005 to widespread acclaim - by contrast with the car-crash character of much of his work.

According to Guido Zuliani, who teaches at New York's Cooper Union school of architecture, "The memorial has the courage simply to be, in a state of pure presentness, and to be the petrification of that state, of a moment, a most primordial one, which is the real kingdom of the artist, absolute and mute".

Eisenman crops up again in Neil Spiller's new book, Visionary Architecture by Neil Spiller (Thames and Hudson, from Nastional Gallery of Ireland bookshop, €52.25), which is intended as an antidote to what its author calls the "hi-tech Lords" - Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. It features the work (mostly unbuilt or unbuildable) of cutting-edge architects such as Peter Cook's Archigram.

More fascinating, because it's grounded in the real world, is another book on what lies beneath the surface of some of the world's major cities, called Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Life of Cities, by Alex Marshall (Robinson, $19.77 amazon.com). Itincludes New York's chaotic subway system, the catacombs of ancient Rome and Mao Tse-Tung's secret tunnels under Beijing.