TWA Hotel
by Sean Davidson

There are conflicting stories about how Finnish architect Eero Saarinen came up with his indelible design for the Trans World Airlines terminal at Idlewild Airport, New York, United States. It has been said that Saarinen derived its dual-winged shape from Da Vinci’s flying ornithopter. It has also been said that his early studies in fine art and sculpture inspired him to turn the terminal into an abstract representation of flight, less of a building and more of a sculpted idea. It has also been said that the terminal’s characteristic forms—its cavernous spaces, sloping ridges, and liquid boundaries—came to him while he was digging to the rind of his breakfast grapefruit.

In 1955, Saarinen had been approached by the artistic director of the public relations department at Trans World Airlines, then under the sway of majority shareholder and film-impresario-turned-avation-mogul Howard Hughes. Earlier that year, Idlewild Airport had instructed its largest tenant airlines to build their own terminals in accordance with the new ‘Terminal City’ development plan, giving each airline free reign to develop their allotted blocks however gaudily, austerely, artistically or plainly they desired. Hughes, who produced the original Scarface film in 1932, was a spectaculist at heart, never shy of public theatrics. He was also looking to leave his competitors—and his fellow tenants at Idlewild—in a dust of new-age technological advancement, forging TWA’s name at the vanguard of the burgeoning aviation industry. The green-lighting of Saarinen’s plan was Hughes’ statement of intent: TWA was to fashion itself an airline of pure class and clout, the future brought into the present.
Those of us who have perused the extraordinary architectural drawings of Saarinen’s winged design might imagine, with some glee, the scene in TWA’s boardroom in 1956—Saarinen’s sketches splayed across the table. Not to mention the planning authorities presiding over the ‘Terminal City’ project, who, besides the obvious questions about how it would fit in amongst its neighbouring buildings, could only have been perplexed as to how on earth this great, undulating concrete hawk was going to remain upright. The task of turning blueprint into building underscored their suspicions. There were inefficiencies everywhere; so structurally dubious was the thin shell of the roof that a number of supplemental steel beams had to be hidden in the pillars and supports. But the results spoke for themselves. Hughes had produced another hit; the Finn had landed the eagle.
While all of these backstories—the ornithopter, the sculpture, the grapefruit—seem plausible, it is the Da Vinci story that gets closest to the heart of the building, which, although resplendent with ingenuity and vision, was doomed by the exigencies of the real world. Completed in 1962, a year after Saarinen’s premature death and only a few short years before the small jets it was designed to exclusively accommodate gave way to airliners with much larger capacity (including the Boeing 747), the TWA Flight Centre became a relic, a grounded raptor with wings tied, almost as soon as it opened.

As is the way for so many aesthetically powerful but practically anachronistic buildings, the TWA Flight Centre was too inefficient to use yet too beloved to demolish. So Saarinen’s raptor sat more or less completely idle from 2001 until 2016, when years of speculation about the terminal’s future resulted in a new contract, enjoined by architecture and design firms Beyer Blinder Belle, Lubrano Ciavarra, Stonehill Taylor and INC, to turn this dormant bird into a hotel worthy of its inheritance. Their commitment to stay true to Saarinen’s original conception was, to say the least, exacting. BBB had to source 20 million ceramic tiles from China (yes, you read that right) to match those with which Saarinen had insisted on cladding the floors and walls of the building. But then, when the original budget of $9 million set aside by TWA in 1955 had been blown out to $15 million, they didn’t fire Saarinen, didn’t even bat an eyelid; the work continued, they believed in the power of his vision. The building’s restorers and renovators, it appears, were inheritors of this vision also.
In May 2019, the new TWA Hotel opened its 512 rooms, with Saarinen’s terminal as the principal lobby anchoring its two newly-built wings and connected to the head house by long carpeted tunnels known, in appropriately retro-futurist pastiche, as the ‘flight tubes’. Wary historians, concerned about whether the application of nostalgic touches would render the hotel too deferential (or not deferential enough), ought to have had their fears allayed when their eyes caught the Sunken Lounge, where Saarinen’s bespoke Chili Pepper Red hue—which he concocted specifically for the project—shines with all the power that fifty-seven years can muster. If it’s trite to say that everything old is new again, the TWA Hotel suggests a kind of inverse; everything new becoming old again. There is, as it turns out, a rich conviviality to be found in pairing Knoll chairs, rotary phones, and an original Solari split-flap flight board with contemporary methods of soundproofing. While the hotel is, in some senses, a flashy trip back to 1962, it is only 21st-century ingenuity that has saved it from the fate of all obsolete pieces of architectural gold.
Mounted in the hallway of Saarinen’s creation, inquisitive guests of the new TWA Hotel may spot a photo of the stately Finnish architect suited and quite literally submerged in a large-scale model of the building; only his feet can be seen sticking out.

Only once he’d satisfactorily worked out the harmony, the texture, and the feel of the space, would he begin using the model as a basis for his blueprint sketches. Those of us unfamiliar with the arcane procedures of architecture won’t realise how unintuitive, how reverse-engineered, how unusual this approach was for a mid-century modernist architect.
But Saarinen wasn’t just your everyday doctrinaire modernist; he was also a sensualist. Sure, well-rationalised buildings are all well and good, but the TWA Hotel’s insistence on curved lines, swooping planes of concrete, off-kilter symmetry, and eccentric detail stands as irreproachable testimony to the pleasures of well-felt architecture. Indeed, Saarinen’s design is rooted in an attitude towards travel that at once exalted, glamourised, and revered the airborne voyages we now can’t help but take for granted. The TWA Hotel, custodian of Saarinen’s spirit, wants to be fun in the way we all imagine air travel used to be. There is even a refurbished Lockheed Constellation plane parked behind its main lobby, purchased as not much more than a piece of scrap aluminium and carbon fibre and now fully renovated into a cocktail bar, its plush red upholstery and Knoll Tulip Tables oozing the Swinging Sixties. Who said travel isn’t cool anymore?
Restorations hardly ever come this assiduous, this generous, this fun. Maybe one day the ‘new-old’ TWA Hotel will become its own kind of neglected artwork. But until then, there is a standing invitation for all of us to climb into this ‘full-scale model', peruse it for our own pleasure, and see how everything new can once more be made old again.