Building Cultures by Designing Buildings: The Corporate Elite, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Eero Saarinen

Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1995

To many of the American corporate elite, victory in World War II presented a key moment of managerial opportunity. Much of what was understood about the world had changed; much of what was hoped for was suddenly within reach. One aspiration of that elite was that postwar America be considered one of history's greatest civilizations. Before this could happen, one deficiency needed attention: Americans had to become cultured, had to understand the prominent role the performing arts could play in their lives.

To reveal the utility of the architectural elite and the monumental architectural artifact to this culture-building project, this dissertation studies the actors, actions, and intentions of the American corporate elite which directed the design of America's Acropolis, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. It focuses especially on Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Repertory Theater, of which Eero Saarinen was the architect.

Research methods included archival searches, interviews with individuals who worked in Eero Saarinen's office or worked on the Lincoln Center project, site visits, the consideration of interdisciplinary texts and numerous 'popular' texts, and attendance at Lincoln Center performances.

The Lincoln Center elite gave programmatic form to 'the cultural capital of the world' by promoting the centralization of the performing arts and asserting a hierarchy that encompassed the opera and orchestra and other performing arts activities aimed at preempting potential rivals and suppressing opposition to the project. The Lincoln Center architectural elite followed suit by adopting the paradigm of an inward-turning cultural 'fortress' model buttressed against the neighborhood, designing five formidable buildings dominated by the Metropolitan Opera House, and fashioning an aesthetic and formal 'language of power' which unified the cultural campus and marked it as a key site of a great new American civilization.

The makers of the Vivian Beaumont Repertory Theater, including Saarinen, did not reach such an agreement: a main stage was designed which accommodated both proscenium and thrust productions, compromising both; and a controversial temporary theater was built in Greenwich Village. In time, these disagreements led the Lincoln Center directorate to intervene and re-organize both the repertory theater elite and the architecture.

In revealing a robust transactional setting inhabited by constellations of 'brokers,' 'key men,' and 'prime movers,' this dissertation challenges the architectural field's reliance upon exclusive characterizations of clients, patrons, and architects. Instead, it analyzes a multivalent and multi-layered corporate elite which directed the architectural design process and an architectural elite to give form to their vision of a dominant, historically significant postwar America