This is one of Robin Boyd’s most important accounts of global architectural trends in the late 1950s. Published in the influential British journal The Architectural Review, Boyd provides a survey of ‘shape’ architecture, the new architectural forms enabled by thin-shell concrete and tensile cable structures: domes, vaults and hyperbolic paraboloids. Included among examples from Mexico City to Berlin, from architects and engineers like Felix Candela, Hugh Stubbins and Eduardo Catalano, was the recent competition-winning design for the Sydney Opera House by Danish architect Jørn Utzon. Central to Boyd’s account and his argument for problematising the appearance of ‘shape architecture’ was his description of three buildings by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, who Boyd regarded as ‘the man who makes the moves first for his generation’: the Kresge Auditorium at MIT (1955); Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale University (1953-8); and the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport, New York, then about to commence construction. Boyd’s article encourages architects to consider the appropriateness of ‘shape architecture’, at once praising its structural dexterity but questioning its everyday application and architects’ tendency to search for visual invention at any cost. (pdf)