Last week, General Motors’ design manager, Susan Skarsgard, spoke at the Museum of the City of New York on her book Where Today Meets Tomorrow, a monumental tome devoted to Eero Saarinen’s design of the GM Technical Center, in Warren, Michigan. Before her talk, Skarsgard was kind enough to give me a close-up tour of what is literally a one-of-a-kind book: Skarsgard personally put it together for the 50th anniversary of the Technical Center, in 2006, and there is only her one original copy. Which is a shame, because after spending an hour immersed in the scores of archival photos, plans, and other documents—not to mention pop-up models of interior spaces and a sumptuous fabric lining borrowed from the interior of a 1956 Cadillac—I almost felt like I had visited the iconic campus in person.  Read more…

Calvin Tomkins’s 1995 profile of the landscape architect Dan Kiley is worth a read.

When a few of us from the magazine visited Kevin Roche one morning last September—his recollections made their way into our recent stories on Eero Saarinen and Associates and Roche’s Ford Foundation building—he regaled us with tales of “four-martini flights” with the hard-partying Saarinen crew, and other architectural shenanigans. He also told a memorable story about Dan Kiley, who did a number of landscape designs for Roche and his partner, John Dinkeloo (including the Ford Foundation plantings). For one such project, Roche had hoped to impress some clients by bringing them on a site visit with Kiley.

I did a big song and dance about Dan Kiley. So we arranged to meet him down at the site. Dan drove down from Vermont. He arrived in an old Army overcoat, with no socks. It looked like he was wearing his pajamas. And he had no shirt.

Apparently, this was hardly out of character. Read more…

By now, you’ve probably heard that, last weekend, JetBlue held a dry run of Terminal 5, its new 635,000-square-foot, $743 million facility at JFK. Around one thousand dyed-in-the-wool Jetters checked in to nonexistent flights, diligently filed through security stations, and stood in line to board phantom planes, all to help the building’s engineers, Arup, work out circulation and way-finding kinks before the opening on October 1. In return, there were free JetBlue caps. Naturally, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my Saturday. Read more…