NBM

Building Museum 8-9-08

There's been an exhibit at the National Building Museum for the past few months that I've been meaning to see: Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future.  I finally went yesterday, ready to take a number of pictures - Chris has said he is a fan of Saarinen's work, and urged me to go to see this.

Unfortunately, photography was not allowed.  I did take some pictures of the NBM, which is one of my favorite buildings in DC.  It was originally built as the Pension Office after the Civil War, so the stairs have long, easy grades for injured veterans.  The atrium is pretty amazing - they use if for kids paper airplane contests.

The Saarinen exhibit was extremely interesting.  They had a number of detail design drawings for some of his buildings, like the Yale Whale, Gateway Arch, and TWA Terminal.  Saarinen was also did a lot of furniture design, and they had examples of some of his more successful works.  Too bad they were displays, and you couldn't sit in them; the Womb Chair looked very comfortable.  I was intrigued by the "criticism" leveled at Saarinen by his contemporaries, that he "invented a new style for each project."  I think that is an obvious virtue - not letting any kind of dogma or standard practice inform a design, but creating the right solution for the problem.  If that's the way Saarinen worked, then I'm a fan of Saarinen.