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[Rockefeller] Center, and Arvin [?] Shaw, I think was his name; but Shaw, I think, was the guy's name. A soft modern interior guy. Not bad; not great.
I said: “If you let me do the outside, you can get anybody you want to do the inside.” And he took Shaw. Then I said to him: “If you do that, promise me that we'll have Shaw do a couple of offices as a mockup, so we can see what he would do for us. I have got my doubts, but if he's your choice, I can live with it.”
And that's the way we went ahead. And I had to then tell Saarinen, or tell Hopper: “Don't cancel Saarinen. Let's keep it on ice. But tell him that I don't want him to do the interior.”
This infuriated Saarinen, because he wanted to do the interior. He had done beautiful chairs and tables for other people, and he saw the whole building being done; and I did, too. But as I said to his partner, Dinkeloo, since died--I said to John Dinkeloo, “I told Saarinen that we weren't going to have him do the interior, and he said that would break John Dinkeloo's heart.”
So I said: “Well, get John in and I'll have dinner with him tonight and I'll carry the burden of getting out of the interior.”
I did get Dinkeloo and he was upset and I told him it was a case of doing it that way or not doing the building. And, obviously, they wanted to do the building, because it was their first major building in Manhattan. And as it turned out, the only one they did, except one of the members of the firm did the Ford building. That was done by Kevin Roche, but Kevin was the guy that carried after Eero died, as far as CBS was concerned.
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