While you won’t necessarily see me posting a lot of selfies, I LOVE sharing what makes me tick creatively and beyond. So, whether you are new to joining me here or you have been around for a few months, WELCOME!
I sometimes think of my own personal style aesthetic as ‘Future Past,’ which I know is an oxymoron, but references a design concept that was created at some point in history, but which is still futuristic by today’s standard. There are many great examples of this aesthetic out there including Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 epic science fiction film ‘2001 A Space Odyssey,‘ which is considered a classic and yet while we are now 20 years past the timeframe it was set to depict, we still don’t yet live in the world that it illustrates. How about car design from the 1950s -1980’s? Totally Future Past.
One of my most favored in-the-flesh examples of Future Past is the former TWA Flight Center at JFK in New York. Commissioned by the Howard Hughes owned Trans World Airlines (TWA) and designed by Eero Saarinen, the prolific Finnish-American architect who designed the famed Womb Chair as well as the St. Louis Gateway Arch, it is a masterpiece of all things Future Past. When it first opened to the public in 1962 the ‘Jet Age’ of larger, more powerful aircraft was just coming over the horizon, but by the 1990s commercial passenger aircraft had grown to such a magnitude that the TWA Flight Center was no longer suited to serving them and it was closed. Fortunately, however, even though it was inconveniently located in the heart of the growing JFK airport, the City of New York recognized the valuable architectural significance of the building that had once been noted as “the perfect symbol of post-war optimism, the magic of flight, and the elegance of mid-century modern architecture” and in 1994 made it a New York City landmark. In 2019, after many years vacant, the Flight Center reopened after an extensive overhaul and remodel as the TWA Hotel, where visitors can again take in the Future Past spender of this architectural masterpiece. There is really no place like it and I would highly recommend a stay or even a visit if you have a layover at JFK.
File this under #dreamshootlocations . Let me see a show of hands on who’s in?
