Word: saarinen
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Bostonians will have to get used to some radical new architecture across the Charles River Basin on the M.I.T. cam pus. In 1950, M.I.T. commissioned Michigan Architect Eero Saarinen, whose wicketlike design for a Jefferson memorial in St. Louis caused a sensation five years ago (TIME, March 8, 1948), to submit plans for a new campus center with auditorium and chapel. Saarinen's idea: to challenge the age-old rectangle with a new pattern of spheres, cylinders and triangles...
Architect Saarinen's auditorium is as simple and modern as an airplane hangar; he sees it as a huge, concrete shell, one-eighth of a sphere, planted on the ground at three points. Advantages of the triangular dome, according to Saarinen: speaker and audience seem closer together, space and materials are saved. Inside the auditorium are two levels, a lower for a small theater, an upper for a large, 1,200-seat hall in which students will sit under a sky of white, sound-reflecting "clouds" hung from the dome. Total estimated cost...
...Saarinen's small (130 seats) chapel is just as unusual: a simple cylinder of brick or stone that belongs to no century and looks somewhat like an oil storage tank. Since there are no windows, Architect Saarinen has set it on arches in a moat to get a dappled light effect something like Capri's Blue Grotto. The altar is near the wall, dramatically spotlighted from a small bell tower in the ceiling. Outside, to tie the whole project together, Architect Saarinen has designed a majestic plaza set with a mosaic of colored stones, possibly pink, grey...
Plans for the building (above) were designed by Eero Saarinen, Detroit architect, with the cooperation of the two MIT professors of Architecture. The spherical surface will be slightly raised from the ground at its vertices, and supported by heavy abutments. Between the corners will be segmented glass window-walls...
...Saarinen is a practicing architect in the middle west. His father Eliel was the founder of the Cranbrook Art Foundation in Michigan and a noted designer in this country and in Finland. Some of Saarinen's furniture creations were recently exhibited in New York's Museum of Modern Art, and he has designed a large General Motors factory...