Word: saarinen
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When Architect Eero Saarinen was invited to submit plans for Washington's new Dulles International Airport, he set out on a countrywide tour of existing air terminals. He came back with one overriding impression: his feet hurt. The average passenger, he observed, "already has a walking distance of 900 feet from the point of entering the terminal to actually boarding his plane." Saarinen's solution: replace the customary "finger-style" airport design, which rays out to distant plane positions, with a compact structure served by a system of "mobile lounges." Instead of boarding their planes directly, passengers will...
...sell his scheme, Saarinen had his longtime friend Charles Eames make a film on the trials of an air passenger, in which one background noise was the squeak of shoes. Washington officials were sold, last week displayed Saarinen's design for the building, to be completed in the spring of 1961. The field itself will occupy 9,800 acres near Chantilly, Va. (23 miles west of Washington), boast two major runways each 2¼ miles long. Saarinen admits to not having solved another major headache for air travelers: the long wait for baggage. "After a careful survey," Saarinen says...
Courts and Crescents. Last week, as Yale released its plans for the two new colleges, it was clear that Saarinen had indeed turned his back on modern architecture's shibboleth of repetition, regularity and smooth surfaces. Instead, Saarinen had produced two irregular structures of crescents and courts built of earthy, monolithic masonry. For the exterior walls, he devised a method of rubblestone construction that would do away with expensive hand labor. Stones varying in size from three to eight inches are placed in wood forms; then cement mortar is pumped in through hoses. Before the cement has completely...
About 250 students will be housed in each of the two new colleges. Their rooms, hardly any two of them similar, are variations on a basic polygonal plan, look out on courts and open passageways that Saarinen feels are "not unlike a small Italian hill-town street." The interiors, done in stone, oak and plaster, will be designed to suggest the scholar's study rather than the clubman's rumpus room...
Bottles in the Buttery. For prestige, each college will have its own tower. For conviviality, each will come equipped with cellar-type butteries around whose round oak tables students and masters can gather. "It is hoped," Saarinen added, "that television will be kept out of these rooms, so that they become centers of conversation and discussion rather than areas where people sit drugged by canned entertainment." As for the name "buttery," Saarinen made clear that he was not thinking of dairy products, pointedly cited the Oxford Dictionary derivation: "Buttery, sb. ME. (app. a. OF. boterie - bouteillerie:-late L. botaria...