DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

Designed by Eero Saarinen and Associates, completed 1962
Chantilly, Virginia
This airport, located 28 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., was conceived as the
international gateway to the nation’s capi tal. President Eisenhower made the final site
selection in 1958, and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) commissioned Eero Saarinen
and Associates to build the first American airport designed specifically to handle jet
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airplanes. In a quirk of timing, this symbol of international welcome was named for
Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, the bellicose point man for
America’s Cold War policies before his death in 1959. The airport design was innovative
on several counts, including its automobile traffic pattern (with separate levels for
arrivals, departures, and parking) and its controversial “mobile lounges,” which detach
from the main terminal building to ferry passengers out to airplanes parked next to the
runways. In 1962 these odd-looking vehicles were considered a breakthrough in airport
efficiency and passenger comfort. The model was never copied at any other airport,
although the mobile lounges do remain in use at Dulles Airport, supplemented by a few
fixed gates added to the airport in the mid-1990s. Modifications to the airport were far
more visible in 1997, as work commenced to extend the main terminal building 300 feet
at either end, doubling its original length. Undisturbed by these alterations, the pagodainspired
air traffic control tower (initially planned to include an observation deck)
continues to oversee the airport, providing a strong vertical accent to balance the
emphatic horizontality of the site and the enlarged terminal building.
Saarinen had anticipated the need for expansion, designing the pavilion-like terminal
as a set of 15 modular bays that were easily replicated by the builders of the additions.
The bays, each 40 feet wide, are framed by rows of concrete piers standing a
monumentalizing 65 feet tall along the main facade and then dipping to 40 feet in height
on the air side of the pavilion as a sheltering gesture for passengers arriving aboard the
mobile lounges. As at the TWA Airport Terminal (1962), also designed by Eero Saarinen
and Associates and located at New York’s John F.Kennedy Airport, custom-styled
concrete supports were required to make possible the unique roof form at Dulles, justly
celebrated for its bold upward sweep from back to front. Saarinen described the roof as
“like a huge continuous hammock suspended between concrete trees [and] made of light
suspension-bridge cables between which the concrete panels of the roof deck fit.” The
piers of the opposing colonnades slant away from each other to counteract the load of the
poured-in-place slabs carried by the cables. However, as the architect acknowledged, “we
exaggerated and dramatized this outward slope [of the piers] to give the colonnade a
dynamic and soaring look as well as a stately and dignified one.” The desired effect was
to maintain some connection with Federal traditions of static, neoclassical architecture
while still pulling off the kind of grand expressive gesture that Saarinen saw as essential,
given the use of the building.
Saarinen did not live to see the airport completed, as he died during
surgery for a brain tumor in 1961. Two of his associates, Kevin Roche and
John Dinkeloo, inherited the firm and supervised the construction of
Dulles Airport together with the engineering firm of Ammann and
Whitney and airport consultant Charles Landrum. Roche recalls the early
stages of the work, when all discussion of the appearance and structure of
the airport were held in abeyance for 14 months after the commission was
received while the functional scheme for the passenger concourse was
worked out. Any Saarinen staffer traveling by plane was under strict
orders to note the time taken to check-in, to walk to the departure gate, and to receive baggage at every airport they visited. According to
Roche, Saarinen always traveled with a stopwatch, methodically recording such details
and, invariably, reaching his gate at the last possible moment, “just to drive me crazy.”
Having boiled down the passenger data to produce an ideal plan, comprising the
concourse and mobile lounges, Saarinen brought in friends Charles and Ray Eames to
produce a documentary that was intended to help sell the airlines on the scheme. Airline
officials were not fully convinced by the ten-minute cartoon short, “The Expanding
Airport.” However, the CAA came down firmly on Saarinen’s side, alerted by the film to
the fact that the proposed 1000-foot-long pavilion concourse would have to stretch to
8000 feet if they opted for a conventional “finger-terminal” airport of equal capacity.
Their plan for the new airport approved, Saarinen and his design team embarked on
the search for a suitable form for its main pavilion. Dozens of sketches, now in the
archives at Yale University, show what a remarkable variety of shapes were considered—
rows of barrel vaults and of ziggurats as well as jagged roof forms, as if drawn by
Picasso. Ultimately, Saarinen looked back to his own work, on the cable-strung roof of
the Ingalls Hockey Rink (1959), built by the firm on the Yale campus in New Haven,
Connecticut. The hammock form that evolved for the airport pavilion has since been
celebrated to the point where the U.S. Postal Service printed a 20-cent stamp to honor the
building as part of a series in the 1980s dedicated to American architecture. Suitably, a jet
airplane is seen on the stamp, climbing into the sky (but in a direction perpendicular to
the runways, as if it somehow took off from the concourse roof).
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Heralded as “The Temple of Travel,” the central pavilion itself appears to hover above
the flat plains of the airport runways. Approached by car, Dulles Airport can be seen as a
“Jet-Age Parthenon,” resting on an “Acropolis” created by the tiers of roadways stacked
up at its front. In its thrusting expressionistic posture, the pavilion is also reminiscent of
designs by Erich Mendelsohn, particularly that portrayed by his 1914 sketch,
“Architectural Fantasy.” In turn, Saarinen’s airport buildings (if not his mobile lounges)
have inspired imitation, as in Renzo Piano’s Kansai Airport (1994) at Osaka, Japan, and
in an airport design by Santiago Calatrava for Bilbao, Spain. That Saarinen knew that he
and his firm had created something special at Dulles is evident from comments made just
two months before his death: “I think this airport is the best thing I have done…. Maybe
it will even explain what I believe about architecture.” At the very least, he matched the
feat performed by his father, architect Eliel Saarinen, at the Helsinki Train Terminal
(1914) in Finland by likewise providing his country with a transportation gateway that is
a masterpiece of its genre.

Johannes Duiker

Architect, the Netherlands
Although relatively unknown outside his native land during his brief life span, today
Johannes Duiker is recognized as among the foremost representatives of the Nieuwe Bouwen, the Dutch
version of functionalism, or neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). The buildings of his maturity,
composed of crystalline volumes of great purity, executed without superfluous details,
rationally fulfill function while expressing modernity in all its spare beauty. The exciting
possibilities of 20th-century technique are transformed into radiant forms that engage the
mind and lift the spirit.
Duiker’s work cannot be discussed without citing two other Dutchmen, Bernard
Bijvoet (1889–1980) and the civil engineer Jan Gerko Wiebenga (1886–1974), with
whom Duiker frequently collaborated, thus honoring one of the ideals of the modern
movement: its stated emphasis on architecture as a cooperative profession. Although
Duiker’s lyrical architectural vision dominates, realization of the oeuvre is a result of
teamwork.
Like so many of their peers, Duiker and Bijvoet would achieve recognition through
competitions. Already in 1913 they won first prize for a church, never built, but their
entry of 1916 for the Karenhuizen, an elders’ hostel in Alkmaar, became their first
executed work (1918). They next triumphed in the most prestigious contest of the day,
that for the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam in 1917 (Michel de Klerk, the leader of
the Amsterdam School, came in second); although their striking design, heavily
influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, would never be erected, the prize money allowed
them to establish a partnership that would continue even after Bijvoet moved to Paris in
1925 to work for Pierre Chareau.
Duiker’s production can be divided into three phases. In the first, from 1913 to 1923,
he employed the traditional Dutch vocabulary of brick with stone trim, wooden sash, and
tile roofs and followed the lead of H.P.Berlage, the doyen of Dutch architecture. The
majority of commissions from this period are domestic, whether for groups of urban
townhouses or clusters of villas at Kijkduin (1919–23), all in The Hague. The next,
transitional period is foreshadowed in the entry to the Chicago Tribune Competition
(1922), which is indebted to De Stijl, a movement that Duiker would later criticize for its
aestheticism. However, it was in 1924, when Duiker discovered skeletal structures, that
the major shift toward a personal language appeared. This occurred at Stommeerkade 64
(1924) in Aalsmeer, a country house supported by a wooden frame and based on novel
motifs: shed (monopitch) roofs, window bands that turn the corner, a projecting circular
stair, and horizontal wooden siding. The interior spaces are clearly articulated in the
exterior massing. It is but a short step to the reinforced-concrete-and-steel skeletons and
glazed curtain walls of Duiker’s mature phase, which commenced with the Laundry in
Diemen (1924; extension 1925), built for the Koperen Stelenfonds (KSF, Copper Wire
Fund) of the ANDB (Netherlands Diamond Workers Union), which raised money by
retrieving and selling copper wire used in the diamond polishing process.
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The encounter with this new client might have occurred as early as 1919 and was
brought about through Berlage’s recommendation. It equals in importance Duiker’s
introduction to skeletal construction, for several major projects were commissioned by
this socially conscious body dedicated to the well-being of employees of one of the main
industries in Amsterdam, namely, the preparation of diamonds for the international
market. The most extensive was for the sanatorium Zonnestraal (Sunshine) in Hilversum,
which received its definitive formulation in 1925 and was completed in 1928 to great
acclaim. The program was perfectly suited to Duiker’s growing concern with health, and
he utilized his new mastery of concrete construction to fashion a luminous series of
buildings intended to speed recovery from tuberculosis, an occupational hazard of the
diamond workers.
Duiker’s concurrent preoccupation with mass production and the tall building resulted
in a book, Hoogbouw (1930), and a block of flats in The Hague, Nirwana (1927–30), both done in
collaboration with Wiebenga. American skyscrapers had captured the European
imagination and led to many fantastic projects, above all in Germany and the
Netherlands, but the modestly scaled Nirwana, comprising six stories of apartments set
between a ground story and a penthouse, seemed eminently feasible. It was intended as a
prototype, but despite structural innovations, the envisaged economies did not come
about, and the handsome building with its ingeniously designed corner windows remains
a unique example.
In 1928, Duiker joined the polemical Amsterdam group De 8, founded in 1927, and
was elected president in 1932. That same year he became the first editor of De 8 en Opbouw, the
periodical published jointly with the similarly functionalist Opbow (Construct), established in
1920 in Rotterdam. From 1932 to 1935, Duiker filled its pages with thoughtful
commentary on the nature of the new architecture and, by extension, the new society,
shaped by scientific progress and mechanization, that it was to serve. When the Nieuwe Bouwen was
criticized for its utilitarianism, Duiker responded that it was spiritual rather than
monetary economy he sought, utilizing new materials to dematerialize architecture and
embody the quickened tempo of modern life.
The four-story Fresh [Open-Air] School for the Healthy Child, (Amsterdam, 1929–30)
complements Duiker’s interest in hygiene, manifested at Zonnestraal, and maintains the
vocab ulary of exposed reinforced-concrete frame and window walls. Set behind an entry
building that dramatically spans the existing dwellings on the Cliostraat in Amsterdam,
the school demonstrates how Duiker achieved magic with the simplest and most direct
means.
One year before his death, Duiker received commissions for three significant
buildings, including the newsreel cinema Cineac (Amsterdam, 1934), ingeniously fitted
onto a miniscule plot and identified by a striking neon sign set high above the street, and
the department store Winter (Amsterdam, 1934), its transparent curtain wall stretching
the length of the facade to facilitate tempting views of the merchandise. He also began
work on the Grand Hotel and Theater Gooiland (1934–36) in Hilversum; after his death,
Bijvoet came from Paris to see to its execution, apparently adding a few touches of his
own.
Although Duiker rarely left the Netherlands, he was conversant with international
architectural events. With Wiebenga he submitted an entry to the League of Nations
competition, and although he was not present at the founding meeting of the Congrès
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Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1928, he participated in its third
conference on Rationelle Bebauungsweisen (1930) by sending a project for exhibition.
Throughout his professional career, Duiker followed advances in the natural sciences and
mathematics, believing that they pointed the way to an architecture that would free rather
than constrain its occupants and encourage them to pursue a wholesome lifestyle
invigorated by physical health and spiritual enlightenment.