Last week, in a cold rain, I traveled up to the Museum of the City of New York to see the Eero Saarinen show. I expected to feel glad there, and moved by Saarinen’s work. I began my undergraduate studies at a university where I had, as a nine-year-old, visited a Saarinen dorm. It had seemed like a great basin of light and I wanted to live in such a place. While I am glad for my time there, I never did find a good way to fit myself into the culture of that university. Similarly, I felt myself strongly affected by, but not enjoying, the Saarinen show. As I considered the succession of corporate campus projects – so many windowless offices (described, not shown) set down in vast clearings – my heart contracted, perhaps because I enjoy and rely upon contact with the world around me, in all its random and changeable aspects. Saarinen said of his pedestal furniture, designed for Knoll: “The underside of typical chairs and tables makes a confusing, unrestful world…I wanted to clear up the slum of legs.” The slum of legs has, of course, long been a favorite place for children who find within it the enclosing, inviting space that intensifies the pleasure of play. It is the slum that shelters children from the unrestful world of not-play and not-imagining (for any child, at some point the classroom sometimes represents just such a difficult place, and the escape route is located right under a table.)
My favorite image from the Saarinen exhibition shows a child in the just-opened TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. A boy, perhaps six years old, in a suit with short pants, is climbing up the low escarpment of a curving (snow-cave/middle ear) wall. His back is to us; two adults in the foreground ignore him. The picture reminds me of a thought I have had from time to time (when passing a huge snow bank, a heap of wood chips, a small stone outcrop): it takes a great deal of acculturation to suppress one’s inclination to climb up a nice ramp or fit oneself into a likely niche. At least when young, we like to get higher, we like to tunnel under, we like to establish our redoubt. How we define the “confusing, unrestful world” from which we seek relief, that is what we are so unlikely to agree upon. In the classroom I am the voice of acculturation, the denier of the urge to be under tables or on top of shelves. I try to help my students fit themselves together in a community, and fit themselves into the world through language and representation. All the while I often refuse them opportunities for another sort of representation and communication as they seek to fit their bodies into the world, physically, in novel (disruptive, potentially dangerous) ways. Sometimes I become, my body becomes, a space for them to use in play. They climb under and over me, seek out or escape the embrace of my arms. I am part of our classroom, part of the physical structure of the school. I hope I may seem, in later years, in my students' wordless, distant, impression of our time together, like a space that opened onto, out into the world. More often than not.
Image: orphanage from a community laid out on the classroom rug, after hours, by Hanauta.
