In this aerogram, Boyd provides a detailed account of his meeting with Saarinen in his offices in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It is full of fascinating details about Saarinen, the man. It also includes a sketch of the Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale University and describes its structural concept in some detail, with particular note of its wire tension cables.

Boyd writes:

I’m probably repeating myself: I can’t remember what I have told you. Did I tell you about Saarinen’s office? From the Time cover illustration some months back I expected him to be a lean, vital six-footer. As you probably know he is a portly, quiet, short fellow with a penetrating eye, diffident manner and a slight accent. He met me in shirtsleeves and braces and took me around his office of some fifty-sixty assistants. Models everywhere. About three study and presentation models were made (are still being made) for the London Embassy. One in course of construction for a Yale athletics building. It has a central concrete beam with wire tension cables strained to a circular base wall for the main roof, and concrete shaped roofs at the ends where the tension wouldn’t work. Dangerously close to a stunt shape. Clever idea for the model: only half of it is built, at about ¼” scale, and a big mirror backing it completes the illusion of a full building. His office is a two-story Miesian building built by themselves in a snobby part of the vast industrial slum which is Detroit (Bloomfield Hills, near Cranbrook Academy).

The office works much the same as any other except for an abnormally heavy accent on design, design, design. It’s not all left to Saarinen. A pressure is felt throughout: they must be way out in front, but in genuine, creative terms. No shoddy. I imagine the work comes largely on strength of design. Certainly I met no Bill Hartmann (SO&M’s contact man) here. Saarinen is not the ambitious ogre I was led to believe. I found him more like Fritz Janeba than Bernard Evans. He got a G-M man to show me over the G-M Tech Centre, which is nearish-by his office back towards Detroit. I found it better than the pictures, a twentieth century Versailles on the outside, a Madison Avenue* stylist’s dream inside the lobbies, a routine Stephenson and Turner in the offices.

*This of course is a term I have picked up, but it’s good. So much of Americana is nothing but the wrapping paper, superbly done. The slick-most advertisers of Madison Av. sum (?) up for all the thinking people here the best & the worst of this situation. (pdf)