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S30 Ep9: Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future | Clip

How Eero Saarinen Imagined the Ingalls Rink at Yale

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In a time of modernist architecture, Eero Saarinen broke the mold by creating emotionally compelling buildings. When designing the Ingalls Rink for Yale’s hockey team, Saarinen used suspended cables to create a fluid-looking roof and a truly unique space.

Major funding for American Masters — Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future is provided by the A. Alfred Taubman Foundation. Additional funding is provided in part by American Institute of Architects, National Endowment for the Arts, The Durst Family, Vital Projects Fund, Eric and Katherine Larson Family Fund, MCR Development LLC, Gerald D. Hines, Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, KieranTimberlake, KPF Foundation, and Daryl and Steven Roth Foundation.

Major support for American Masters is provided by AARP. Additional funding is provided by Rosalind P. Walter, The Philip and Janice Levin Foundation, Judith and Burton Resnick, Ellen and James S. Marcus, Lillian Goldman Programming Endowment, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Vital Projects Fund, Cheryl and Philip Milstein Family, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, Lenore Hecht Foundation, Michael & Helen Schaffer Foundation, and public television viewers.

Features

Clip | Eero Saarinen and Aline Louchheim’s Shared Ambition
Clip | Aline Louchheim and Eero Saarinen
Clip | Eero Saarinen’s Design of the CBS Building in New York City
Clip | Conquering gravity with Saarinen at the TWA Flight Center
Clip | Eero Saarinen’s Revolutionary Design of the Dulles Airport
Clip | Eliel and Eero Saarinen’s Work on First Christian Church
Clip | Eero Saarinen’s Design of the MIT Chapel
Clip | Reconstructing Eero Saarinen’s MIT Chapel
Clip | Marking Man’s Time on Earth at General Motors
Eero Saarinen’s Search for Architecture
Clip | Eero and Eliel Saarinen Compete for St. Louis
Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future - Trailer
About the Film
TRANSCRIPT

Saarinen sent people out from his office all over the country to look and see what a great hockey rink would be like and they came back and said, 'they're all horrible. They're all just barns with ice in the middle.' So he set out to make something that would express the excitement of a hockey game. We have the problem of a roof, and a new way of using old materials.

We're spanning the space by one single concrete arch, then hanging cables from that arch, and on that we build the roof.

Remember, he wanted to be a sculptor, so he had that innately in him.

Where did he get the idea of extending the structure and creating that lights at the end that make it look like a Norse ship?

I don't know.

Saarinen made amazing shapes - Ingalls Rink was called, for a while, the Yale whale.

It almost looked like a huge beached whale - this great sculptural object. You hadn't seen something like that before.

It was an attitude that you could almost described as picturesque - his willingness to make architecture entertaining. He cared about what images buildings evoked - what they felt like. He wanted to create buildings that you would engage with emotionally, and that's something very different from what was really going on with modernism in the fifties.

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