“Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future” at Kemper
January 30 to April 27, 2009 Eero Saarinen was one of the most prolific, unorthodox, and controversial architects of the twentieth century. By exploring Saarinen’s entire output of more than fifty built and proposed projects–including St. Louis’s iconic Gateway Arch–Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future will be the first opportunity to understand the architect’s collective work in the larger context of postwar modern architecture through full-scale mock-ups and a selection of drawings, models, photographs, films, and other ephemera. Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future features materials offering an in-depth look at Saarinen’s greatest designs, which encompassed a varied range of architectural scales–lighting, furniture, prefabricated elements, curtain wall systems, residences, religious and educational buildings, corporate headquarters, airports, campus and community designs, and urban planning. Deploying progressive construction techniques and a highly personal, exuberant, and at times metaphorical aesthetic, Saarinen’s work defied modernist orthodoxies and gave form to the postwar American ideal of an open-ended society of unbounded choice and diversityan ideal that persists to this day. The exhibition reveals facets of the architect’s diverse network of friends, family, and colleagues. Film, press clippings, documents, and photographs by Ezra Stoller and Balthazar Korab will paint a portrait of a man guided by a vision of modern life as a constant collaborative dialogue infused with clear purpose.
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In an era when designers of all stripes are mining the relationship between sophisticated technologies and architectural form, the resurgence of interest in midcentury modernist Eero Saarinen should come as no surprise. In his day Saarinen was often seen as an eclectic, and many of his iconic works, from the TWA terminal at JFK airport (1962) to the ubiquitous Womb Chair (1948), deployed cutting-edge technology to produce expressive, mathematically rigorous, curvilinear buildings and furniture that defied high-modernist orthodoxies. The Minnesota iteration of this major traveling retrospective (Saarinen’s first) will span the galleries of two institutions, offering viewers a unique opportunity to engage the complete oeuvre of this great master of both the ars and the techne of architecture. Also on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.