Life magazine called the General Motors Technical Center “The Versailles of Industry”, which is a strange compliment for a campus of low, flat, rectangular buildings. Eliel and Eero Saarinen didn’t achieve that reputation with ornament. They achieved it with proportion, materials and an almost obsessive consistency, and the buildings have looked deliberate for seventy years as a result.
The method, stated plainly
Decide the proportions carefully. Use good materials. Repeat them without variation. Add nothing that isn’t doing work. Every one of those decisions is invisible individually and overwhelming in aggregate.
It is exactly how a suit works
The men who look best in clothes are almost never the ones wearing the most interesting ones. They have settled on proportions that suit them, bought decent cloth, and repeated it. Nothing about the outfit announces itself and the whole thing reads as considered.
What to do with that
Buy plain and buy well made, which on our floor means half-canvassed at $300 to $500 in a navy or a charcoal with nothing going on. Then wear it repeatedly rather than diversifying. The Saarinens would have approved of the repetition most of all.
Also for Warren: Conceived in 1944, Opened Across Two Decades. More on style consulting, or plan your visit to our Oak Park showroom.
