Revisiting Kleinhans Music Hall

摘要

I first became aware of the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo because of a chair. I was researching Eero Saarinen's furniture for my book Now I Sit Me Down (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), and I came across one of his earliest chairs, designed in the late 1930s in collaboration with Charles Eames. The two young men-Saarinen was 28, Eames was 31-were working together in the Bloomfield Hills, Mich., office of Saarinen & Saarinen, a partnership recently formed by Eliel Saarinen and his son. The chair was intended for a new concert hall that the firm was designing in Buffalo. I was recently in Buffalo and had a chance to visit the hall. Not surprisingly, the chair was no longer in use-few public seats last 75 years. Nevertheless, I found several survivors in the musicians' lounge. The striking design, which uses one piece of lightly padded molded plywood for the seat and back, was obviously influenced by Alvar Aalto's molded wood furniture of that period, yet for two novices it remains an impressive accomplishment.