Flights of Fancy
“TWA IS BEGINNING TO LOOK marvelous,” Eero Saarinen said, standing before the swooping concrete curves of his Trans World Airlines Terminal, then under construction at New York City’s Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport. “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.”
The date was April 17, 1961. Five months later, Saarinen, the architect responsible for numerous mid-century landmarks—the St. Louis Gateway Arch, Bell Labs in New Jersey, the Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale, the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, and Dulles Airport, outside Washington, D.C.—was dead, at age 51, of complications from surgery to remove a brain tumor. TWA, as parting shots go, was a masterstroke, an idea as impractical in theory as it proved astonishing in execution. Saarinen had become convinced that architecture, with its prevailing adherence to the International Style of modernism (picture the sleek glass boxes of Mies van der Rohe), had barreled headlong into a dead end. TWA—organic, sculptural, evocative—represented an invigorating way forward. With its thin-shell roof and birdlike shape, the terminal captured
