He had no signature style, which might be the reason historians have not treated his work with much interest-they tend to favor trademarked brands, as they are easier to package and sell. The Bell Labs building was the very opposite, an immense glass box, relentlessly organized on a Cartesian grid.Īs an architect, Eero Saarinen was a shameless experimenter. Saarinen’s great fame was founded on exciting curvilinear buildings like the Yale Hockey Rink and the TWA Terminal at New York’s Idewild (now J. Lacy and John Dinkeloo, and his design protégé Kevin Roche. By then, Saarinen was dead of a brain tumor at age fifty-one, and his practice was in the hands of his partners, Joseph N.

Rather, it was that the Bell Labs building was designed by Eero Saarinen, whose firm I worked for, beginning two years after the completion of this building in 1962. The Bell Laboratories, initially located in Holmdel, New Jersey, by the monopolistic American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), was the epicenter of this story.īut this wasn’t the sting in the slap. It recounts the all-too-familiar story of how a giant American corporation sponsored some of the most important research in science and technology in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, establishing the United States as the world leader in innovation, at least in that era. The slap in this instance came in the form of an article on innovation that appeared in the New York Times recently. Occasionally, history comes back and gives me a slap in the face.

Architect who worked with saarinen nyt