Eero Saarinen
Eero Saarinen
Born	August 20, 1910 Kirkkonummi, Finland
Died	September 1, 1961(1961-09-01) (aged 51) Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.
Nationality	Finnish American
Awards	AIA Gold Medal (1962)
Buildings	See list of works
Design	Gateway Arch Dulles International Airport TWA Flight Center Tulip chair

Eero Saarinen (Finnish pronunciation: [ˈeːro ˈsɑːrinen]) (August 20, 1910 – September 1, 1961) was a Finnish American architect and industrial designer of the 20th century famous for varying his style according to the demands of the project: simple, sweeping, arching structural curves or machine-like rationalism.^[1]

Biography [edit]

Eero Saarinen shared the same birthday as his father, Eliel Saarinen.^[2] They emigrated to the United States of America in 1923, when Eero was thirteen.^[3] He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where his father was a teacher at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and he took courses in sculpture and furniture design there. He had a close relationship with fellow students Charles and Ray Eames, and became good friends with Florence Knoll (née Schust).

Beginning in September 1929, he studied sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, France.^[1] He then went on to study at the Yale School of Architecture, completing his studies in 1934. Subsequently, he toured Europe and North Africa for a year and returned for a year to his native Finland, after which he returned to Cranbrook to work for his father and teach at the academy. He became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1940. Saarinen was recruited by Donal McLaughlin, an architectural school friend from his Yale days, to join the military service in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Saarinen was assigned to draw illustrations for bomb disassembly manuals and to provide designs for the Situation Room in the White House.^[4] Saarinen worked full-time for the OSS until 1944.^[1] After his father's death in 1950, Saarinen founded his own architect's office, "Eero Saarinen and Associates". Eero Saarinen died of a brain tumor in 1961 at the age of 51.

Personal life [edit]

He had two children from his first marriage, Eric and Susan. Following his divorce from the sculptor Lilian Swann Saarinen, his first wife, in 1954, Saarinen married Aline Bernstein Louchheim (March 25, 1914 – July 13, 1972), an art critic at The New York Times. They had a son, Eames, named after his collaborator Charles Eames.

Work [edit]

Furniture [edit]

Saarinen first received critical recognition, while still working for his father, for a chair designed together with Charles Eames for the "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition in 1940, for which they received first prize. The "Tulip Chair", like all other Saarinen chairs, was taken into production by the Knoll furniture company, founded by Hans Knoll, who married Saarinen family friend Florence (Schust) Knoll. Further attention came also while Saarinen was still working for his father, when he took first prize in the 1948 competition for the design of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St. Louis, not completed until the 1960s. The competition award was mistakenly sent to his father. He designed furniture with organic architecture.

During his long association with Knoll he designed many important pieces of furniture including the "Grasshopper" lounge chair and ottoman (1946), the "Womb" chair and ottoman (1948), the "Womb" settee (1950), side and arm chairs (1948–1950), and his most famous "Tulip" or "Pedestal" group (1956), which featured side and arm chairs, dining, coffee and side tables, as well as a stool. All of these designs were highly successful except for the "Grasshopper" lounge chair, which, although in production through 1965, was not a big success. This long discontinued Grashopper chair and ottoman are currently available from Modernica (www.modernica.net).

Buildings [edit]

Saarinen's Gateway Arch in St. Louis

One of Saarinen's earliest works to receive international acclaim is the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois (1940). The first major work by Saarinen, in collaboration with his father, was the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. It follows the rationalist design Miesian style: incorporating steel and glass, but with the added accent of panels in two shades of blue. The GM technical center was constructed in 1956, with Saarinen using models. These models allowed him to share his ideas with others, and gather input from other professionals. With the success of the scheme, Saarinen was then invited by other major American corporations to design their new headquarters: these included John Deere, IBM, and CBS. Despite their rationality, however, the interiors usually contained more dramatic sweeping staircases, as well as furniture designed by Saarinen, such as the Pedestal Series. In the 1950s he began to receive more commissions from American universities for campus designs and individual buildings; these include the Noyes dormitory at Vassar, as well as an ice rink, Ingalls Rink, and Ezra Stiles & Morse Colleges at Yale University.

He served on the jury for the Sydney Opera House commission and was crucial in the selection of the now internationally known design by Jørn Utzon. A jury which did not include Saarinen had discarded Utzon's design in the first round. Saarinen reviewed the discarded designs, recognised a quality in Utzon's design which had eluded the rest of the jury and ultimately assured the commission of Utzon.

Eero Saarinen and Associates was Saarinen's architectural firm; he was the principal partner from 1950 until his death in 1961. The firm was initially known as "Saarinen, Swansen and Associates", headed by Eliel Saarinen and Robert Swansen from the late 1930s until Eliel's death in 1950. The firm was located in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan until 1961 when the practice was moved to Hamden, Connecticut. Under Eero Saarinen, the firm carried out many of its most important works, including the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (Gateway Arch) in St. Louis, Missouri, the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, the TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport that he worked on with Charles J. Parise, and the main terminal of Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C.. Many of these projects use catenary curves in their structural designs. One of the best-known thin-shell concrete structures in America is the Kresge Auditorium (MIT), which was designed by Saarinen. Another thin-shell structure that he created is the Ingalls Rink (Yale University), which has suspension cables connected to a single concrete backbone and is nicknamed "the whale." Undoubtedly, his most famous work is the TWA Flight Center, which represents the culmination of his previous designs and demonstrates his expressionism and the technical marvel in concrete shells.^[1]

Miller House in Columbus, Indiana

Eero worked with his father, mother and sister designing elements of the Cranbrook campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, including the Cranbrook School, Kingswood School, the Cranbrook Art Academy and the Cranbrook Science Institute. Eero's leaded glass designs are a prominent feature of these buildings throughout the campus.

Death [edit]

Saarinen died while undergoing an operation for a brain tumor at the age of 51. His wife, Aline, coincidentally, would also die of the same ailment. His partners, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, completed his 10 remaining projects, including the St. Louis Arch. Afterwards, the name of the firm was changed to "Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, and Associates", or Roche-Dinkeloo.

Reputation [edit]

Eero Saarinen was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1952. He is also a winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1962.

Saarinen is now considered one of the masters of American 20th century architecture.^[1] There has been a surge of interest in Saarinen's work in recent years, including a major exhibition and several books. This is partly because of the Roche and Dinkeloo office having donated their Saarinen archives to Yale University, but also because Saarinen's oeuvre can be said to fit in with present-day concerns about pluralism of styles. He was criticized in his own time—most vociferously by critic Vincent Scully—for having no identifiable style; one explanation for this is that Saarinen adapted his modernist vision to each individual client and project, which were never exactly the same.

Works [edit]

Main terminal of Dulles International Airport at night

Interior of the MIT Chapel

The Swedish Theatre at night

• Remodelling of the Swedish Theatre (with Jarl Eklund) - Helsinki, Finland
• Concordia Senior College campus, now Concordia Theological Seminary - Fort Wayne, Indiana[1]
• University of Chicago Law School and Woodward Court dormitory (demolished 2002) - Chicago, Illinois
• The Miller House - Columbus, Indiana
• Berkshire Music Center Opera Shed -Tanglewood, Massachusetts
• Gateway Arch - St. Louis, Missouri
• TWA Terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport - Queens, New York
• Washington Dulles International Airport - Dulles, Virginia
• Kresge Auditorium and MIT Chapel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Bell Labs Holmdel Complex - Holmdel, New Jersey
• Case Study House #9, the John Entenza House (collaboration with Charles Eames)
• CBS Building (Black Rock) - New York, New York
• Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center - New York, New York
• General Motors Technical Center - Warren, Michigan
• Embassy of the United States, Oslo - Oslo, Norway
• Embassy of the United States, London - London, England
• North Christian Church - Columbus, Indiana
• Kleinhans Music Hall (designed in collaboration with his father Eliel Saarinen) - Buffalo, New York
• Ezra Stiles College, Morse College, and Ingalls Rink (affectionately known as "The Whale") at Yale University - New Haven, Connecticut
• Noyes House dormitory at Vassar College. Its lounge is affectionately called the Jetsons lounge because of its curved architecture.
• Hill College House at the University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  • Originally a women's dormitory, the building was made with a "drawbridge" to symbolically keep men out.
• IBM Pavilion, 1964-1965 New York World's Fair
• IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center - Yorktown Heights, New York
• IBM Rochester plant - Rochester, Minnesota
• John Deere World Headquarters - Moline, Illinois
• The "Tulip chair" (popularized by its use on the original Star Trek television series
• The "Womb" chair
• North Campus of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Michigan
  • Includes the Earl V. Moore Building, housing the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance
• East Terminal at Ellinikon International Airport - Athens, Greece (posthumously finished)
• Milwaukee County War Memorial Center - Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Medbury, Fitch and Harvey Ingham Halls, Quadrangle Dormitories ("The Quads"), Hubbell Dining Hall, and Oreon E. Scott Chapel at Drake University - Des Moines, Iowa
• Firestone Baars Chapel at Stephens College - Columbia, Missouri
• Crow Island School - Winnetka, Illinois

See also [edit]

• Eero Saarinen structures
• Thin-shell structure
• Tensile architecture
• List of notable brain tumor patients

Notes [edit]

References and further reading [edit]

• A&E with Richard Guy Wilson, Ph.D.,(2000). America's Castles: Newspaper Moguls, Pittock Mansion, Cranbrook House & Gardens, The American Swedish Institute. A&E Television Network.
• Roman, Antonio (2003). Eero Saarinen. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 1-56898-340-9. 
• Serraino, Pierluigi (2006). Saarinen, 1910–1961: a Structural Expressionist. Köln: Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-3645-1. 
• Merkel, Jayne (2005). Eero Saarinen. London: Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-4277-X. 
• Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa (2006). Eero Saarinen. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-11282-3. 
• Saarinen, Aline B. (ed) (1968). Eero Saarinen on His Work. New Haven: Yale University Press. 
• Knight, Richard (2008). Saarinen's Quest, A Memoir. San Francisco: William Stout Publishers. ISBN 978-0-9746214-4-9. 

An exhibition of Saarinen's work, Eero Saarinen: Realizing American Utopia, has been organized by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York in collaboration with Yale School of Architecture and the Museum of Finnish Architecture. The exhibition will tour in Europe and the USA from 2006 to 2010. The exhibition is accompanied by the book Eero Saarinen. Shaping the Future.

In 1973, the Aline and Eero Saarinen papers were donated to the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, by Charles Alan, Aline Saarinen's brother and executor of her estate. In 2006, these primary source documents on the couple were digitized in their entirely and posted online on the Archives' website.

External links [edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Eero Saarinen

• http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Crow_Island_School.html
• Eero Saarinen letter to Florence Knoll Bassett, 1935–1936, Florence Knoll Bassett papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
• Lines of Authority Time Magazine retrospective article
• Eero Saarinen – Design Dictionary Illustrated article about Eero Saarinen
• Saarinen rising: A much-maligned modernist finally gets his due
• Great buildings online entry
• Earl V. Moore Building School building designed by Eero Saarinen
• 860 photos of 19 buildings designed by Saarinen^{[dead link]} from the Balthazar Korab Collection at the Library of Congress
• Saarinen's Village: The Concordia Campus Through Time
• Digital image database at the Yale University Library, contains 1296 images and drawings from Saarinen's archives
  • Finding aid to the Eero Saarinen Collection at Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library
• Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future The 50th Anniversary Exhibition of the Museum of Finnish Architecture
• Saarinen Tulip Chair
• Eero Saarinen: Realizing American Utopia
• Eero Saarinen Exhibitions at Cranbrook Art Museum

National Building Museum

• http://www.nbm.org/about-us/publications-news/blueprints/eero-saarinen.html

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