Untimely Saarinen

Join us at Walsh Street for Untimely Saarinen presented by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen.

The talk will address an “untimely” dimension of Saarinen’s life and work, namely that neither aligned fully with historical time. He grew up in three medievalists settings – Hvitträsk, Cranbrook, and Yale, started his career early only to suffer an “untimely” death at age 51. Critics accused him of plagiarism and of historical pastiche and praised him for developing ground-breaking building technologies such as thin curtain walls and corten steel, as well as new building types of corporate headquarters, embassies, and airports. The talk proposes that this ability to embrace and blend various temporal registers was for him at the heart of what it meant to be “modern.”

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen is a Professor at Yale School of Architecture, where she teaches both architectural design and history-theory subjects. Her scholarly interests cover 20th Century European and American art and architecture, aesthetic theory, and history of ideas. She has authored several prize-winning books in that area, among them Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2009) and Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (Yale University Press, 2006). Her latest book Untimely Moderns: How 20th Century Architecture Reimagined the Past was published by Yale University Press in 2023.

Eeva-Liisa’s trip to Melbourne is supported by a University of Melbourne Macgeorge Fellowship, which is funded by the Macgeorge Bequest. She is being hosted by the University’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning.

This event is generously supported by Brickworks Building Products, Konpira Maru Wines.and Yumbo Soda.

This event is in celebration of the new online exhibition Robin Boyd: Nordic Connections, curated by Jonathan Russell and Kerry Landman and produced by the Robin Boyd Foundation’s Research and Collections Team.

In 1950, at 31 years old, Robin Boyd visited Europe for the first time. The trip, supported by a travelling scholarship and with introductions from Melbourne friends, gave Boyd his first close-up view of the post-war architectural scene abroad. Boyd visited Denmark and Sweden, and both places made a strong impression: as with many young architects of the era, the Nordic combination of nuanced, locally inflected modernism and progressive social policy was a lodestar for what might be possible back home.

The subsequent 20 years saw Boyd return often to writing about Nordic architects and Nordic design ideas – his admiration for Finnish-American Eero Saarinen was abiding, as was Boyd’s sympathy towards Dane Jørn Utzon in the Sydney Opera House affair. In 1964 Boyd visited Finland and found another valuable precedent, this time in the urban design of the planned city of Tapiola.

Boyd’s admiration for Nordic design was multi-faceted and deeply held – it can be seen throughout his writing, photography and correspondences. Robin Boyd: Nordic Connections is an interlinked collection of sources that together tells the story of this engagement. Combining items from the Robin Boyd Foundation’s Walsh Street Archive and new archival research, it highlights the crucial influence of Nordic ideas on Robin Boyd’s thinking.

Doors will open at 6.30 pm to allow attendees to explore the Walsh Street house – the iconic modernist residence designed by Robin Boyd in 1957 – and enjoy refreshments in the courtyard.

We offer discounted tickets to RBF Friends and Boyd Circle members – support the Foundation and join today.