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Metropolitan opera architect saarinen9/13/2023 She sees Aline as a trailblazer in her field, who-first through her influence as associate art editor at the New York Times, and later as Head of Information Services at Saarinen and Associates-understood the importance of crafting the brand for a building. Through careful research and cross-referencing, Hagberg has given us a reconstruction of the life and career of Aline Loucheim, with particular attention spent on the time between 1953 when she first interviewed Saarinen for the New York Times, up to and after his sudden death in 1961.Īs well as an homage to Aline, Hagberg also has provided us a glimpse into the world of being an architectural publicist, having represented several architects and written for various magazines since graduating from Princeton architecture in 2008. Despite this, Hagberg says the book is not meant as an architecture history lesson, preferring to highlight the more emotional impact of his work through his correspondence with Loucheim.įor while the title might suggest otherwise, this is Aline’s book, perhaps best demonstrated in the opening pages where Hagberg provides a brief history of each of the book’s protagonists-Eero gets two pages and Aline sixty, though really the whole of the book is hers. Reading the book, one almost forgets that the great canon of modern architects-Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies-were his contemporaries, and his work along with theirs in the mid-century is an inflection in architectural history, such that even his more minor buildings, like the beautiful chapel he did at MIT (also where his memorial took place), are even more important to re-examine. Louis Gateway Arch in Missouri, and for this reason, he is thought of as one of the last great monument architects. ![]() Perhaps less known by most is that he designed the St. Perhaps best known for his TWA terminal at JFK airport (recently converted into a 512-room hotel), Eero Saarinen is the architect who, it is said, took Jorn Utzon’s design for the Sydney Opera House off the scrap heap when he and the jury were selecting the winning commission, and one look at his soaring ‘bird’ in New York and one understands why. However not until now, in Eva Hagberg’s When Eero Met His Match, has the subject matter been given such a personal interpretation. As such, these letters have been in the public realm and studied by architectural historians over the years. And even more recently in the world of film, in 2020 the ADFF featured Aalto, an intimate portrayal of Alvar Aalto and his first wife Aino, with whom he had both a personal and professional relationship.īut perhaps one of the most famous-if also mostly unknown-romantic correspondences is that between Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen and his second wife Aline Loucheim, written while they were courting in 1953, and now a part of the Smithsonian since 1981. In recent years, there have been a number of publications on architects and their life partners, with Loving Frank (2008) telling the story of Mameh Cheney and her relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1907, along with The Women (2009) which includes the perspective as well of his three wives. ![]() But I have also tried to write a book that reminds us that so much of what we take as history has happened because of two people, who loved each other. Perhaps there is something to be said for the way in which we keep repeating professional and personal behaviors just as Aline and Eero fell in love, so do we… and so I have tried, here, to write a book that works as a piece of history. I see traces of her work everywhere, in the way in which I email with my colleagues, in the way in which my colleagues email with me. Today, I think about Aline’s contributions to the field, and to the practice and publicity of architecture. Author: Eva Hagberg (Princeton University Press, 2022)
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