Word: saarinen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Before his death three years ago, Eero Saarinen traveled a long way to ward an architecture far beyond the glass-and-steel purism that seemed the ultimate in construction a decade ago. His Yale colleges are mounds of masonry; his Dulles airport terminal is canopied concrete; his CBS building a granite monument in great triangular piers. His headquarters (see opposite page) for Deere & Co., makers of farm machinery, returns to glass and steel-used in an utterly original...
Pavilion in a Ravine. At first, Saari nen had proposed a concrete building, but the coolness of Deere executives led him back to the expressionist truth of architecture: the building ought to symbolize its purpose. So Saarinen chose steel, the material of plows and tractors, to "reflect the big, forceful, func tional character of its products...
Convention Upside Down. In his return to glass and steel, Saarinen brought new technology with him. Most of the windows are made of laminated mirror glass that reflects 52.3% of sun heat and 62% of light, eliminating the need for curtains inside. The steel itself is a novel alloy called Cor-ten,* which rusts a dense protective coat onto itself -then stops, does not flake, and need never be painted. Although a half-million railroad cars have been made of it since 1933, Saarinen was the first to build with the steel that must rust...
...architect who liked to turn convention upside down, Saarinen made people go downstairs, from the fourth-floor main entrance at one end of the building, to the executive offices. Secretaries, instead of being tucked away in dark inner cubicles, were given window seats. Treetops wave just outside the horizontal steel louvers, which will eventually rust to a cinnamon dark ness. Every office has its own thermostat, and the whole building has push button telephones...
...building shows how the architect excels by pleasing the client as well as himself. Saarinen's client, Architecture Buff William Hewitt, chairman of Deere, delivered the ultimate compliment by hesitating to talk about the building - it would be "like a beautiful girl telling you how beautiful...