American Masters

Saarinen sent people out from his office all over the country to look and see what a great hockey rink would be like and they came back and said, "they're all horrible. They're all just barns with ice in the middle." So he set out to make something that would express the excitement of a hockey game. We have the problem of a roof, and a new way of using old materials. We're spanning the space by one single concrete arch, then hanging cables from that arch, and on that we build the roof. Remember, he wanted to be a sculptor, so he had that innately in him. Where did he get the idea of extending the structure and creating that lights at the end that make it look like a Norse ship? I don't know. Saarinen made amazing shapes - Ingalls Rink was called, for a while, the Yale whale. It almost looked like a huge beached whale - this great sculptural object. You hadn't seen something like that before. It was an attitude that you could almost described as picturesque - his willingness to make architecture entertaining. He cared about what images buildings evoked - what they felt like. He wanted to create buildings that you would engage with emotionally, and that's something very different from what was really going on with modernism in the fifties.