Earlier this month, the TWA Terminal at New York’s Kennedy Airport, dormant for nearly two decades, reopened as the lobby of the TWA Hotel. TIME has called it“the coolest hotel in New York City.” In 1962, it was widely regarded as the ultimate icon of midcentury modern design.
The Princeton Architectural Press book, The TWA Terminal, published in 1999 when the TWA was no more and the Port Authority has no plan as to what to do with the landmark, shows off that design through the photographs of Ezra Stoller. In his introduction, Mark Lamster looks back on how Eero Saarinen’s monumental work came to be and how it changed architectural history.
Since the moment Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal opened in late May 1962, the world has been guessing at its inspiration. Bird and plane are the most common conjectures; people generally don’t think grapefruit. But legend has it that the architect arrived at the building’s evocative form one morning during breakfast, after flipping over a hollowed-out grapefruit rind and pressing down in the middle. “There is a certain amount of truth in that story, and a certain amount of fiction,” says Kevin Roche, Saarinen’s principal associate at the time and the man charged with carrying out the commission after the architect’s untimely death nine months before the first passengers strolled through. For his part, Saarinen dismissed the notion that the building was a literal representation of anything — though he was happy to let people think what they wished — insisting that the design was a pure abstraction simply intended to express the idea of flight.
Upon receiving the commission from Trans World Airlines president Ralph S. Damon in 1956, Saarinen outlined two primary objectives for the project: first, to create a “distinctive and memorable” signature building for TWA; and second, to “express the drama and specialness and excitement of travel.” To his credit, and to the great pleasure of the airline’s executives, Saarinen succeeded in achieving these goals. Absent from his stated objectives, however, was the desire to create a functionally practical air terminal, a fact with which both client and travelers must contend to this day. Ironically, the majority of criticism leveled at Saarinen over the project stemmed from issues of style, not practicality. Though the public and the press embraced the building, many in the architectural community questioned Saarinen’s motives in producing a design so blatantly in the service of corporate power. Vincent Scully, dean of American architectural historians, symptomatically accused Saarinen of creating architecture designed specifically for “dramatic unveiling at board meetings” and decried what he perceived as the architect’s hollow exhibitionism.
TWA had approached Saarinen following the Port of New York Authority’s 1954 decision to upgrade Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport into a modern facility capable of handling the ever-increasing traffic into and out of New York. At the behest of the airlines, Idlewild was not organized like other airports of the period, with centrally administered interconnected terminals servicing the various domestic and international carriers. Instead, the authority developed the now infamous “Terminal City” plan, whereby each of the major American airlines built and operated its own terminal with one combined building for all foreign carriers. This short-sighted scheme continues to plague the architecturally jumbled airport, making it one of the most difficult and unpleasant to navigate. At the time, the decentralized plan seemed like a major step forward from an organizational standpoint. Moreover, it appealed to competitive airlines anxious to create strong corporate identities that would help capture the massive boom in air travel: between 1955 and 1962, when the TWA Terminal opened, passenger traffic through Idlewild more than tripled, rising from 3.65 million to 11.5 million. Five years later it was at nearly 20 million.
Saarinen’s stated desire to create a showpiece for TWA made sense in the context of Idlewild’s competitive architectural environment. Like any good ad-man, he intuitively grasped the importance of the paired values of visibility and immersion. Toward these ends, he took full advantage of the terminal’s prominent and dramatic site, centering the arresting terminal on the apex of the airport’s looping access road (TWA had initially wanted a site closer to its hangars). In the interior, he enveloped travelers in a spectacular volume of limpid, free-flowing space and form, everywhere accentuated by TWA’s signature vibrant red. “As the passenger walked through the sequence of the building,” said Saarinen, “we wanted him to be in a total environment where each part was the consequence of another and all belonged to the same form-world.”
Even before the building opened, the architectural press was celebrating it. In a January 1958 feature, Architectural Forum heralded “TWA’s Graceful New Terminal” as “an eye-stopping design, appropriate as the symbol of an airline” while assuring its readers that “the building is not a shallow stunt.” Later, Architectural Record wrote that it “surely meets any man’s criteria for distinction and drama, for excitement and dynamics,” and Progressive Architecture, in a special issue dedicated to interior design, stated that it had the “most original interior in decades.” Architectural historian John Jacobus summarized the accolades, writing that the terminal “creates a sharp, penetrating, memorable image in the fashion of the great railway concourses and sheds of the previous century, something no other airport building before has achieved.”
Meanwhile, Ezra Stoller, the preeminent architectural photographer of the day, captured the building in action. His images of natty travelers moving through the terminal’s soaring spaces — which appear slightly exaggerated in scale due to the nature of his lens — graced the pages of architectural publications, the general press, and the airline’s advertising, in the process shaping the way generations have visualized the building. Walking through the terminal even now, it is hard not to see it through his eyes.
While the architectural press applauded, the terminal became a destination point in itself. Its chic dining facilities, clubs, and lounges (the gallery level restaurant and cafeteria were actually designed by the office of industrial designer Raymond Loewy) offered locals spectacular views and the frisson of mingling with the new “jet set” in high style.
This image is somewhat deceptive. Though the terminal has been considered the very icon of a “jet port” since it opened, it was not conceived as one and has never been truly effective in that capacity. “TWA was initially designed for propeller aircraft with jets in the backs of our minds,” admits Roche, “but commercial jets simply didn’t exist when we started.” In fact, the first commercial jet aircraft (the Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC-8) were not introduced until 1958 and 1959 respectively, well after the terminal’s design was a fait accompli. These planes created a variety of problems for the $15.2 million building — they were physically larger and required better noise insulation and wider turning circles, for instance — but most importantly their increased capacities, ranges, and air-speeds spurred the growth of passenger traffic well beyond even the most optimistic projections of airline planners. Thus the TWA Terminal was overwhelmed from the start despite meticulous circulation studies and a variety of innovative features — including baggage carousels and satellite gates — aimed to make life easier for both passengers and airline.
As Architectural Forum pointed out in its preview, one of the unique aspects of the terminal was the method of its design. While most architectural projects move from sketches and conceptual drawings to models and then to blueprints, the TWA Terminal proceeded directly from grapefruit to model. Saarinen completed technical drawings only after the final form emerged following an extended modeling process. This unorthodox — and widely publicized — approach did not endear Saarinen to hard-core modernist critics, who viewed it as an unholy inversion of modernism’s “form follows function” mantra.
There is a certain validity to this line of criticism. Despite Saarinen’s proclamations regarding the primacy of “structure” in his architectural philosophy, with the TWA Terminal he forced a formal solution on Ammann & Whitney, his structural engineers — a composition of four segmental domes that sprung from a like number of streamlined Y-shaped piers. Separated by skylights, the concrete lobes lean in and meet above the terminal’s centerpoint, where their resolved forces are marked by a grilled circular pendant. From an engineer’s point of view it is not the most elegant of designs: hidden from view, a bramble of steel reinforces the curved concrete lobes, whose immense weight requires visible edge buttressing. Such concerns didn’t seem to bother Saarinen, however. After his last visit to the site, on 17 April 1961, with the superstructure already in place, the architect was effusive: “TWA is beginning to look marvelous,” he said. “If anything happened and they had to stop work right now and just leave it in this state, I think it would make a beautiful ruin, like the Baths of Caracalla.”
Saarinen, who studied sculpture in Paris before attending the Yale School of Architecture, was always predisposed to a sculpturally expressive monumental architecture. Following his 1934 graduation from Yale and an extended grand tour through Europe, he returned to America and the Cranbrook Educational Community in suburban Detroit, the celebrated arts and crafts academy run by his renowned architect father, Eliel Saarinen. There, he worked with such future luminaries as Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames, Ralph Rapson, and Harry Weese in a challenging, collaborative environment. Reunited with his family (in addition to the senior Saarinen, both mother and sister were resident craft artists at the school), he spent the war years teaching design and working in his father’s practice, where he developed a reputation for his uncanny ability to win over peers, architectural juries, and clients. A tireless worker famously willing to repeatedly reinvent a project — often to the chagrin of his design team — Eero took over the family atelier after Eliel’s death in 1950.
Emerging from the long shadow cast by his father, Saarinen pushed the firm to explore a variety of seemingly divergent trends in contemporary design culture: the rigid rectilinearity of glass-box corporate modernism inspired by the work of Mies van der Rohe; the plastically expressive formalism of Le Corbusier; and the structurally daring application of reinforced concrete of Pier Luigi Nervi. In the words of Peter Papademetriou, a leading scholar of Saarinen’s work, “it is as if several architects were at work within Eero Saarinen, each pushing the limits of modern architecture in a different direction.” More than any other, it was this was aspect of Saarinen’s practice that drew critical ire. Saarinen reasoned that his catholic experimentation was necessitated by the individual requirements of his varied commissions. But the fifties and sixties were dogmatic times for architecture, as they were for the rest of society, and Saarinen’s reputation inevitably suffered. Shortly after the architect’s death, the revered British critic Reyner Banham, who viewed the American scene with a certain degree of detachment, chastised Saarinen’s peers for their harsh personal attacks and for having labeled him “a shifty footloose character. . . . a rootless, reckless eclectic, a man without standards.”
It was, in fact, Saarinen’s mastery of the Miesian idiom that led to his receiving the TWA commission. The airline’s executives were sold by his 320-acre Warren, Michigan research and development compound for General Motors (1948). That $60-million agglomeration of steel-and-glass buildings, plainly influenced by Mies’s campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology, was situated around a 22-acre decorative “lagoon” punctuated with a shimmering steel water tower. But by the time TWA chose him for its signature terminal, Saarinen had come to the conclusion that the Miesian direction of the so-called International Style had reached a dead end: “I feel strongly that modern architecture is in danger of falling into a mold too quickly — too rigid a mold,” he said. “What once was a great hope for architecture has somehow become an automatic application of the same formula over and over again everywhere. . . . I align myself humbly with Le Corbusier and against Mies van der Rohe.” With the TWA Terminal Saarinen made his allegiances clear, providing a striking juxtaposition to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s neighboring International Arrivals Building (1957), a tour de force of glass-box modernism and the de facto architectural centerpiece of the airport. Saarinen promised TWA a building that would stand out from the crowd, and he delivered.
Three concrete structures built and widely publicized during the 1950s clearly influenced Saarinen in his design of the TWA Terminal: Le Corbusier’s Chapel at Ronchamp (1950.55), Minoru Yamasaki’s terminal for St. Louis Airport (1956), and Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House (1957–65). More than any other project, Le Corbusier’s chapel offered a sculptural alternative to the rigidity of the Miesian school; Yamasaki’s air terminal for St. Louis, housed under three concrete vaults divided by skylights, was an obvious design inspiration; and Utzon’s opera house — which Saarinen juried shortly before beginning work on TWA — must have struck a chord, confirming Saarinen’s affinity for the formally expressive and structurally innovative.
The German architect Erich Mendelsohn and the Russian sculptor Naum Gabo have also been cited as sources for Saarinen’s expressionism. Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (1919–22) in Potsdam and Gabo’s 1931 proposal for a Palace of the Soviets both bear some formal resemblance to the TWA Terminal. The building’s sweeping form may also owe something to the streamlining of industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, with whom Saarinen briefly worked for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and to Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiralling Guggenheim Museum (1956–59), across town on Fifth Avenue.
Saarinen’s interest in monumentality developed as his career progressed. It is apparent in his domed structures (at the GM Technical Center, for instance), in the giant, steely curve of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch (officially, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, 1948–64), and in the D. S. Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale (1953–59), where streamlined piers taper seamlessly into a 228-foot flattened concrete arch. In Saarinen’s own estimation, the Ingalls Rink was the direct precursor to the TWA Terminal. And immediately following TWA came yet another soaring air shed, Dulles International Airport (1958–62) outside of Washington, D.C., which many consider Saarinen’s greatest work. A final, less flashy air terminal, for Athens, Greece, was completed in 1964.
After Saarinen’s death in 1961 at the age of fifty-one, architects and historians began wrestling with his legacy. In a monograph published in 1962, Saarinen acolyte Allen Temko wrote, without irony, that “the loss of this fearless architect. . . appears in its full tragedy as one of the cultural disasters of modern times.” That same year, the American Institute of Architects posthumously awarded him its highest honor, the Gold Medal for Architecture, and there was a general rush for the Saarinen bandwagon. But there were those who stood aside. Banham, who had mixed feelings about the architect, viewed the encomium heaped on Saarinen as a whitewash — in his words, a “red-faced orgy of track covering” — given the often vindictive treatment he had received from peers and critics.
With commissions from such corporate giants as GM, CBS, IBM, Bell Labs, and TWA, from the federal government, and from various academic institutions, Saarinen was inextricably associated with big business and institutional power — unseemly bedfellows to many sixties-era critics. Moving from style to style, he earned a reputation as the “patron saint of the ‘style-for-the-job’ faction” within the profession, and his buildings — the TWA Terminal in particular — were derided as not only mannerist but lacking finish and élan. When Henry-Russell Hitchcock averred, in his authoritative compendium Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, that Saarinen had made a few valuable contributions to modern building in a promising career, but that his “oeuvre included many works which in their willfulness and even, one may say, their frivolity, were well below the standards of achievement in [the 1960s],” he both spoke for and shaped the conventional wisdom.
Through the seventies and eighties former Saarinen protégés such as Cesar Pelli, Ulrich Franzen, and Kevin Roche achieved professional prominence. Meanwhile, their former master continued to fall from favor. Tom Wolfe, in his screed against modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, relates the scathing reaction of an unnamed critic to his suggestion that Saarinen was worthy of study: “I wish there was some way I could convey the look on his face….The look that says the subject is so outré, so infra dig, so de la boue, one can’t even spend time analyzing it without having some of the rubbish rub off.” The anecdote, even if invented to corroborate the author’s own position, reveals the degree of ideological contentiousness surrounding Saarinen’s reputation even two decades after his death.
Architecture’s ideological battles have shifted to the extent that today Saarinen’s name can no longer be used as a weapon. In fact, his commitment to place advanced building technology at the service of architectural expression and programmatic requirement resonates in the work of many of contemporary architecture’s foremost practitioners. Nevertheless, Saarinen has been banished to history as a Minor Master — despite his own best efforts to secure himself a central place in the canon — and has gradually slipped off the architectural radar screen.
And so we are left with his buildings. Landmarked in 1994, the TWA Terminal stands awkwardly in JFK’s rapidly transforming landscape, a majestic yet antiquated icon of flight’s romantic past. TWA is now defunct, and the building itself is disheveled from years of misuse. An empty symbol, it is also functionally obsolete — hopelessly so, according to the planners of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the terminal’s foster parent.
The authority, in an attempt to upgrade JFK, has proposed a massive new crescent-shaped terminal with the decommissioned TWA building at its focal point. Just what is to become of Saarinen’s masterpiece in this scheme is unclear. Will it be a restaurant? A museum? A conference center? All of these? The question awaits a satisfactory resolution.
Whatever the terminal’s future, Ezra Stoller’s photographs safeguard its past. Here we can experience it, however vicariously, in its pristine state, as Saarinen imagined it, forever frozen as one of our great public spaces, a monument to a time lost but not forgotten.
The TWA Terminal is available exclusively from:
Ezra Stoller (1915–2004) began photographing buildings as an architectural student in the 1930s, and quickly developed a reputation as one of the preeminent architectural photographers in the world. His exacting attention to detail and unparalleled ability to translate an architect’s vision into two dimensions made his images prized by architects, editors, and collectors. The photographic agency he founded in 1939, Esto, continues in operation today.
