Weaving the Monumental Surface: First Christian Church, Columbus Indiana

By 1938 Eliel Saarinen, in addition to his role as director and head of the Architecture Department, had completed the first primary works at Cranbrook and was working on an increasing number of independent commissions. At the same time, his wife, Loja was the head of the Cranbrook Weaving Department and the principal textile designer of Studio Loja Saarinen. Under her supervision, the Studio Loja Saarinen had produced textiles and carpeting for many of the early Cranbrook buildings, often in direct collaboration with Eliel, in order to ensure a total architectural environment sympathetic with the arts and crafts ideals of the academy itself. But while the design relationship between weaving and architecture had been explored at Cranbrook as a unidirectional strategy—textiles reflecting the architecture—a reciprocal more symbiotic relationship remained elusive. This paper hypothesizes that it was in the analogous application of the weaving process to architecture that Saarinen discovered the solution.The First Christian Church, in Columbus, Indiana demonstrates how a new correlation between weaving and architecture was manifested in the surface articulation of architectural form. In the process of this exploration several questions will be asked. What were the antecedents of this articulation strategy in Saarinen´s architecture and textile designs? How did the discontinuous weft technique favored by Loja Saarinen provide inspiration for an architectural language of pattern, system, and flexibility inherent in weaving process? How did this application of analogous thinking enable Saarinen to obtain a sense of lightness and depth in the architectural surfaces? And finally, how was this articulation theme advanced and evolved in Saarinen´s later works, eventually leading to the dissolution of the monumental surface?

Volume Editors
Marilys R. Nepomechie & Robert Gonzalez

ISBN
0-935502-54-8