About the Author:
Jayne Merkel is an architectural historian and critic and serves on the editorial board of Architectural Design in London. She was the editor of Oculus, the journal of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, from 1995 to 2002. A prolific writer, she is the author of five books, and over the past 25 years has written for Art in America, Progressive Architecture, and Harvard Design Magazine, amongst many other publications. She was Architecture Critic for The Cincinnati Enquirer from 1977 to 1988, and is a former Director of the Graduate Program in Criticism at the Parsons School of Design in New York.
From The New Yorker:
In 1956, when Saarinen made the cover of Time, he was America's most renowned architect. His sculptural modernism-evident in such commissions as the T.W.A. terminal at Kennedy Airport, the CBS building, and the St. Louis Arch-was in perfect accord with the country's postwar mood. He trained at the school founded by his father, the celebrated Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, and established important relationships there with his future collaborators Charles and Ray Eames. An indefatigable worker, he oversaw more than forty staff architects at the height of his practice, and created in detail hundreds of possible designs for each project. After his death, in 1961, his work fell into critical neglect. Merkel's handsome volume presents the first truly comprehensive survey, and seeks to demonstrate how Saarinen could be "mainstream and avant-garde at the same time."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
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