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EERO SAARINEN AND ASSOCIATES
ARCHITECTS • BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICHIGAN

THIS IS NOT GOOD BUT
I WAS IN A HURRY.

May 4, 1953


Mr. Huntington Hartford
The River Club
435 East 52nd Street
New York, New York

Dear Mr. Hartford:

First I would like to give you the background of my thinking on this particular problem, and then state why I think certain architects are the right ones for the job, But, I am terribly pressed for time right now, and therefore I may be a little bit wordy and a little bit blunt in my opinions, and hope you will forgive me for both.

As I understand it, you have a very beautiful site with a deep ravine in it and you wish to preserve the wilderness and the beauty of this ravine. At the same time you have a preconceived idea of roughly what the building will be like. You picture it as some kind of a modern version of Mediterranean architecture - something white; perhaps with arches and lots of planting up to it; perhaps not unlike the Bel- Air Hotel, if I may use a local and non-Mediterranean example. All these wishes may be perfectly justified. You are the client and you should get just what you want. At the same time, our basic problem, which is larger and more important than your personal wish is the relation of nature to architecture in this particular case. In architecture, as in all art, one relates either by blending or by opposing. If the ravine is very intimate and fairly small, then probably the best solution is by blending. In other words, the architecture should become more or less part of nature. To show you what I mean the best example of this is Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann House. In General, the building should be dark, perhaps use the native stone, perhaps be out up so that the basic shapes are not too large, etc. That, it seems to me, is an uncompromising solution to the problem.

If, onethe other hand, the ravine is sufficiently large not to be destroyed by a building which clearly states that it is a man made thing in opposition to nature, then that is also an equally good way of relating the two. Then, the architecture should cut itself clearly away from nature so that there is no mistake about where one begins and the other ends. This might be a white building - it might be what you call a "box-like" building.

It seems to me these are two approaches to your problem, and I think any good architect would choose one or the other approach and drive it to its natural conclusion. A compromise between the two is not a solution, and the result would be a mediocre building.

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