When Architectural History Meets Personal History

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

When Architectural History Meets Personal History
TWA Terminal at Idlewild Airport, now JFK Airport, New York, NY. Architect: Eero Saarinen. Image © Wayne Andrews/Esto TWA Terminal at Idlewild Airport, now JFK Airport, New York, NY. Architect: Eero Saarinen. Image © Wayne Andrews/Esto

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Writer Eva Hagberg and I have known each other for a long time. Way back, in a year I can’t remember, I assigned her one of her first magazine assignments. Literally, dozens of other assignments followed. So it was with some anticipation, and a bit of surprise, that I received her new book When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect (Princeton University Press), an intriguing hybrid text, one-part Aline and Eero biography, one part memoir of Hagberg’s experiences as a design writer and publicist. (I am briefly mentioned in the book.) The book’s main argument is that Aline Saarinen largely invented the role of the architectural publicist. Recently I traveled out to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to talk to a very pregnant Eva about the impetus for her new book, its dual structure, and the journalistic ethics of Aline Saarinen.

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