IBM Manufacturing and Training Facility, Rochester, Minnesota, (c. 1958) © BalthazaKorab Ltd.

“Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future” is the first retrospective of the life and work of Eero Saarinen (1910–61), a genuinely dis- tinguished post–World War II American architect.[1] This scholarly and thoroughly researched exhibition, long overdue, opened in November at the Museum of the City of New York and will remain there until the end of January, when it will travel to New Haven to be divided between the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale University Art Gallery. The attention now being paid to this controversial and challenging master of the art of architecture is the direct result of a fortuitous event: the donation in 2002 of the Eero Saarinen and Associates office archives to the Yale University Library by its successor firm, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates. Aline Saarinen, Eero’s widow, had previously made significant contributions to the library.

The elegance of the work on view—Saarinen’s sketches, drawings, photographs, and models—must be contrasted with the state of many of his buildings as we have come to know them today. Such a juxtaposition is surely an inadvertent byproduct of the exhibition. The curator Donald Albrecht and the architect and exhibition designer Wendy Evans Joseph make little mention either of the longevity of Saarinen’s designs or the present disuse of many of Saarinen’s buildings. Still, anyone who has headed for Jet Blue at New York’s