The Power of Words: What Aline Saarinen Taught us About Design Narrative
By Kate Mazade
What really happens before the glossy images of a newly constructed building unfold on a coffee table? Not the sketch-to-last laid brick process, but the final photograph-to-industry acclaim process. How does an architect become famous?
Through directed education and public narrative.
When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect dives into the rarely seen lives of those behind the curtain of newspaper clippings and magazine articles. Part historical account, part personal memoir, Eva Hagberg's latest book unpacks the often secret and sometimes omniscient world of architectural publicity.
Published by the Princeton University Press in 2022, Hagberg's book overlays the marriage and partnership of Aline and Eero Saarinen with her own experience driving architectural discourse, showing that we see only what they show us.
New York Times art critic Aline B. Louchheim first met Finnish-American modernist Eero Saarinen while writing an article in 1953. Professional correspondence morphed into personal letters and eventually into marriage, during which Louchheim would guide her husband's architectural career with the altruistic and steadfast hand of a woman in the 1950's. In her self-appointed role as her husband's Head of Information Services, Louchheim leveraged her journalistic connections to suggest how one might see the TWA Terminal as a soaring bird and how the pen could be as mighty as the drawing pencil. Through their eight-year partnership preceding and the years following Saarinen’s death, Louchheim transformed his works from concrete enclosures into the metaphorical moments we still reference today.
At the same time, Hagberg describes her own present-day career path through design media into architectural publicity—the backdoor hospitality and handshaking, the precipice of exclusivity, the coached interviews, and the blurred boundaries of interpreting someone else's work.
"I believe that the way in which we are taught to look at something…profoundly changes our experience of the visual referent," she writes in the book's introduction. And how true that is. Would we consider this building "poetic" had not a professor instructed us? Or that building "forced" had not a writer criticized it? Or this building "successful" had not the project statement told us?
How do our design affinities develop if not through the carefully crafted statements of those who created the designs or those who witnessed them? The book divulges how crafting those statements influences others—and how it can eclipse the identity of the crafter, whose role is often more effective if no one knows it's there.
Perhaps a better title would have been Aline and Eva: Diaries of Recovering Publicists, as the book describes the process of begrudgingly extricating oneself from the position as much as it outlines how to find it in the first place. When Eero Met His Match is not so much a story about an architect and a publicist as it is a window into the propagandizing of design. It is a behind-the-scenes look at the business of giving buildings a voice—the carefully scripted “this, right here, is good and let me tell you why”—that ultimately leads to recognition for the designers
While it may sound critical, the “propagandizing of design” is not necessarily a bad thing—particularly as it is the role of this column to comment on design and direct public understanding—as long as it is recognized. The ideas put forth in architectural press or marketing statements are part of the design, but they do not preclude the viewer’s personal understand of a building or space.
To quote “The Devil Wears Prada,” the cerulean sweater—or soaring TWA Terminal or “Yale Whale” Ingalls Ice Rink—was “selected for you by the people in this room.” But you have the autonomy to purchase it, to agree with or reject the curated narrative, or to use it to write your own.
When Eero Met His Match is available through the Princeton University Press.