Eva Hagberg - When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect

When Eero Met His Match

When Eero Met His Match

Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect

Eva Hagberg

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2022 by Eva Hagberg

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Jacket image: Aline Saarinen, after Eeros 1961 death, holding a copy of the book Eero Saarinen on His Work. Aline and Eero Saarinen Papers, 19061977, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-20667-7

ISBN (e-book) 978-0-691-20668-4

Version 1.0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022936094

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Book design by Monograph / Matt Avery

FOR PAUL

1. ix

In the summer of the year 2015, I started two projects simultaneously. One was the first chapter of what would become this book, a venture about Aline Saarinen, whom I always identified, to anyone I was speaking to, first as wife of the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen and second as the first architectural publicist. The second was an ongoing career working as a high-stakes, secret, exclusive, and reticent architectural publicist. Both of these projects happened almost by accident. The first I began when I was a masters student in architectural history at UC Berkeley, finishing a masters thesis on an Architectural Digest article about Angelo Donghia, an interior designer I had never heard of before somehow writing a ninety-page thesis about him, and I stumbled across a set of letters written from Eero to Aline, and Aline to Eero. The second I began when a friend, a photographer, recommended me to a pair of architects with an office on Lombard Street in San Francisco, who were looking for a website copywriter. We had a phone call, and I agreed to rewrite their text for one thousand dollars. This was a huge amount of money then, considering my graduate school stipend worked out to $1,400 a month, and I knew the work would be fast and easy. What I didnt know is that the one phone call, and finding those set of letters, would change my life for the next sixat leastyears.

I had a meeting with the designers, and they asked if perhaps Id be interested, given my career before grad school as an architectural critic and design writer, in taking on a position closer to marketing. They felt underappreciated and undervalued in their field, and they thought I might be useful in getting them some good publications. I did not disabuse them of this notion; rather, I started name-dropping, mentioning my friends at the New York Times, my friends at the design website Curbed, my friends at House Beautiful. They asked me to write a proposal, and I wrote one in the office, on my laptop, and then emailed it to them, sending my desires across the room and through the air. We agreed to $2,500 a month to be their editorial director. I didnt like the term PR rep, even though thats basically what I was, because of the way in which designers, editors, and writers can often still view PR reps: as flacks who dont understand anything about buildings, who send awful and boring press releases about sofas, who cant be trusted. To my somewhat surprise, they agreed, and we signed a contract a few days later. They were my first clients in what would become a three-person business that had revenues of $400,000 a year at one brief and glorious point, a business that I just shut down in order to focus on writing this book, a business that, by the end of it, I mostly couldnt stand doing. It was a business that was based on using all of my narrative and theoretical skills, all of my media contacts, and all of my scholarly acumen in helping to guide and shepherd a number of high-end residential architects careers through the media. My selling point to them? That I was deep into learning about the very first architectural publicist and was very literally the world expert on the relationship between the visual and the narrative in architectural publishing. The way that I justified it to myself? That I was doing research.

In the summer of 2015, I was also undertaking another projectone to do with my health. After getting married that spring, Id suddenly become allergic to my home: first just my bedroom, which had pockets of mold growing on almost every surface, then my entire apartment, and then, seemingly, the city of Oakland. A few months after getting married, months I spent living in my in-laws living room because I was allergic to their basement, I left Oakland for first Palm Springs and then the desert. I landed in a rental house in Sedona, where my then-husband eventually joined me, and from there I launched these two projects. I mention this dislocation because it was relevant; I felt desperate to make money however I could, desperate to pay for medical treatments that would help reduce what felt like an allergy and a sensitivity to the entire world, and so I was willing to do anything. I was also in the odd in-between of comps and dissertation draft. Id taken my qualifying exams in May 2014, a year after Id had a major brain surgery, and Id sort of been a bit of a problem student ever since. I was perennially delaying things, Id left the architecture department because of forces that felt beyond my control, and I felt intellectually adrift. My solution was to work with my advisor, Margaretta M. Lovell, on coming up with an interdisciplinary topic. So, here I was: majoring in an invented field, Visual and Narrative Culture; living in a tent; trying to figure out how to start writing about Aline Saarinen; and representing these architects interest in the media, which mostly meant sending Dropbox links to my old friends and asking if they might want to cover this. Some combination of rest, sleeping outside, medical experimentation, and time worked. After six months, I was well enough to go back to the Bay Area, where I started seriously writing, kept teaching, and kept expanding my business.

By the time I wound the business down, I had finished the dissertation, and had represented one of the top architects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (by his estimation, but also in some ways the press). I had dealt with clients who got overly close to me and then suddenly pulled back. I was fired, over email, by a client who had felt like one of my most stable connections. Id had two of my clients say, to a third friend, that they needed to take me out to dinner to talk about my attitude, until my attitude changed. I briefly had a client who liked to bully me over email and text, who demanded that I come to Napa in the middle of the 2017 fires, and who texted me thread after thread when I didnt respond within ten minutes (even though Id explained to him that I was still teaching, and busy). Id worked with a client whose wife disliked me so much that I eventually quit because I couldnt deal with her. I had hired two colleagues, both of whom Id met at Berkeley, and we had figured out, together, how to work as a team. I incorporated, and put myself and them on actual payroll. I made us SEP IRAs and insisted that they contribute and that I match 3 percent. For a few stunning months, I had enough money to put some of us on health insurance, including my colleagues dependent. When we lost two clients at once, I had to lay her off and hire her as a contractor, until I could eventually hire her back as an employee. It was an odd time. I didnt have a business degree, but I was running a state business, and I kept learning only by totally screwing up.