Eero Saarinen

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Saarinen's Gateway Arch frames The Old Courthouse, which sits at the heart of the city of Saint Louis, near the river's edge. (Courtesy NPS)

Eero Saarinen (August 20, 1910, in Kirkkonummi, Finland – September 1, 1961, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States) was a Finnish-American architect and product 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
2 Works
3 Reputation
4 A list of works
5 References
6 Notes
7 See also
8 External links

[edit] Biography

Eero Saarinen with Florence Knoll inspecting prototype of the Tulip chair

The son of Eliel Saarinen, the family emigrated to the United States of America when Eero was thirteen years old. He grew up within the community of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, the buildings for which his father had designed and where his father also taught. Eero studied under his father as well as on courses in sculpture and furniture design. Eero had a close relationship with fellow students Charles and Ray Eames, and became good friends with Florence (Schust) Knoll. He then went on to study architecture at Yale University, completing his studies in 1934. After that he toured Europe and north Africa for a year and spent another year back in Finland, after which he returned to Cranbrook to work for his father as well as teach at Cranbrook. He became a naturalized citizen of the USA in 1940. On his father's death in 1950 Saarinen founded his own architect's office Eero Saarinen and Associates.

In 1954, after having divorced his first wife, Saarinen married Aline Bernstein, an art critic at The New York Times, who then worked vociferously on her husband's public relations. They had a son, Eames, named after his collaborator Charles Eames. (Aline Saarinen was later head of the Paris news bureau of NBC-TV).

[edit] Works

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. This chair, like all other Saarinen chairs was taken into production by the Knoll furniture company, founded by the Saarinen family friend Florence (Schust) Knoll together with her husband Hans Knoll. Further attention came 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 - at that time more renowned - father.

The first major work by Saarinen, started together with his father, was the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, designed very much in the rationalist Miesian style, in steel and glass, but with the added accent of panels in two shades of blue. With the success of the schme, 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, and dormitories, an ice rink and an auditorium at Yale University. Undoubtedly his most famous work, however, is the 'expressionist' concrete shell of the TWA Flight Center, New York.

He served on the jury for the Sydney Opera House commission and was crucial in the selection of the internationally-known design by Jørn Utzon.

Saarinen died, while undergoing an operation for a brain tumor, at the age of 51. Saarinen's former associates, the firm of Roche-Dinkeloo, with partners Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, completed Saarinen's unfinished projects, including the St. Louis arch.

[edit] Reputation

Neglected and sometimes mocked during his lifetime by the architectural establishment, Saarinen is now considered one of the masters of American 20th Century architecture.^[1] There has been a veritable surge of interest in Saarinen's work in recent years, including a major exhibition and several books. This is partly due to the Roche and Dinkeloo office having donated their Saarinen archives to Yale University, but also because Saarinen's ouvre can be said to fit in with present-day concerns about pluralism of styles. He was criticised in his own time - most vociferously by critic Vincent Scully - for having no identifiable style (Miesian rationalism for the several company headquarters; oranic or abstract expressionism for several individual structures such as the TWA Flight Center, as well as his furniture designs; but also classicising eclecticism, for instance in the USA embassy in London): one explanation for this is that Saarinen adapted his modernist vision to each individual client and project, which were never exactly the same.

[edit] A list of works

TWA_Flight_Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport

1953 Kresge Auditorium, MIT campus, Cambridge Massachusetts

Remodelling of the Swedish Theatre, Helsinki (with Jarl Eklund)
Concordia Senior College campus, now Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana [1]
The Miller House, Columbus, Indiana.
Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Missouri
TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport
Washington Dulles International Airport
Kresge Auditorium and MIT Chapel at MIT
Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey
Case Study House #9, the John Entenza House (collaboration with Charles Eames)
CBS Building (Black Rock) New York
Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center, New York
General Motors Technical Center, Warren, Michigan
US Embassies in Oslo and London
North Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana
Law School and Woodward Court dormitory (demolished 2002) at the University of Chicago
Kleinhans Music Hall, Buffalo, New York; designed in collaboration with his father Eliel Saarinen
Morse College, Ezra Stiles College, and Ingalls Rink (affectionately known as "The Whale") at Yale University
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. Originally a women's dormitory, the building was made with a "drawbridge" to symbolically keep men out.
IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York
IBM Rochester, a plant in Rochester, Minnesota
John Deere World Headquarters, Moline, Illinois
The "Tulip chair" and "Womb" chairs
Earl V. Moore Building, housing the University of Michigan School of Music
East Terminal at Ellinikon International Airport, Athens Greece (1960-63), posthum finished.
Milwaukee County War Memorial Center, Milwaukee, WI

[edit] References

The Tulip chair produced by the Knoll company

Antonio Román, Eero Saarinen: An Architecture of Multiplicity (2006).
Pierluigi Serraino, Eero Saarinen, 1910-1961: A Structural Expressionist (2005).
Jayne Merkel, Eero Saarinen (2006).
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht (eds), Eero Saarinen. Shaping the Future (2006)

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 exhibiton is accompanied by the book Eero Saarinen. Shaping the Future.