Eero Saarinen

Eero Saarinen (born August 20, 1910, Kirkkonummi, Finland—died September 1, 1961, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.) was a Finnish-born American architect who was one of the leaders in a trend toward exploration and experiment in American architectural design during the 1950s.

Life

Eero was the son of the noted architect Eliel Saarinen and Loja Gesellius, a textile designer and sculptor. The Saarinen family of four, including a sister, Eva-Lisa, moved to the United States in 1923, where they settled first in Evanston, Illinois, and then in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1929 Eero studied sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, but, as he recounted years later, “it never occurred to me to do anything but follow in my father’s footsteps.” Between 1931 and 1934 he studied architecture at Yale University, where the curriculum was untouched by modern theories. His father’s architecture in Finland had focused on a free adaptation of medieval Scandinavian forms, and in the United States he designed various private school buildings from 1925 to 1941, including Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, following this loose, romantic style. At Yale, young Saarinen won a traveling fellowship that made possible a leisurely European visit in 1934–35. He stayed an additional year in Helsinki working with the architect Jarl Eklund.

Eero Saarinen’s professional work in the United States began in 1936 with research on housing and city planning with the Flint Institute of Research and Planning in Flint, Michigan. He joined his father’s practice in Bloomfield Hills in 1938, and one year later their collaborative design—tranquil yet monumental—for the mall in Washington, D.C., won first prize in the Smithsonian Institution Gallery of Art competition. Unfortunately, the design was never executed.

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Saarinen married Lillian Swann, a sculptor, in 1939, and they had two children, Eric and Susan. This marriage ended in divorce in 1953, and Saarinen was remarried the following year to Aline Bernstein Loucheim, an art critic. A son, Eames, was born later that year.

In 1940 Eero and his father designed Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois, which influenced postwar school design, being a one-story structure generously extended in plan and suitably scaled for primary-grade children. Also in 1940 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1945 Eero joined a partnership with Eliel Saarinen and J. Robert F. Swanson that had been organized in 1939. This partnership was dissolved in 1947, and a new partnership of Saarinen, Saarinen and Associates was then formed that lasted until the elder Saarinen’s death.

In the 11 years that he survived his father, Saarinen’s own work included a series of dramatically different designs that displayed a richer and more diverse vocabulary. In questioning the presuppositions of early modern architecture, he introduced sculptural forms that were rich in architectural character and visual drama unknown in earlier years. The exciting results were welcomed by many who were bored by the uniformity and austerity of the International Style of modern architecture.

Saarinen’s first independent work, one that brought immediate renown, was the vast General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. Here Saarinen arranged five major building complexes, each for a different research study, around a 22-acre (9-hectare) reflecting pool. Strips of planted forest rimmed the 320-acre (130-hectare) site. The precision and modular rhythm of the low buildings recall the designs of the German-born American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as well as the early automobile factories of the U.S. architect Albert Kahn. Saarinen’s technical solution of the curtain wall (metal panels and glass set in aluminum frames) was widely copied. The scale and visual splendour of the centre suggest a 20th-century Versailles.

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In 1953 Saarinen began to design the Kresge Auditorium and chapel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, choosing the basic forms of an eighth of a sphere for the auditorium and a cylinder for the chapel. The partial sphere is a “handkerchief ” dome resting on three points. The auditorium is arranged entirely within this dramatically simple form. The small chapel is a stark red-brick cylinder lighted only from above. Both were completed in 1955. While some critics felt that the solutions were forced and arbitrary, these buildings indicated the search Saarinen had begun for significant and identifying character in public buildings.

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Although Saarinen continued to use rectilinear forms on occasion, such as the United States Embassy in London (1955–60) and the Law School at the University of Chicago (1956–60), it was his freely sculptural designs that achieved greater attention. In 1956 two such works were initiated that can be considered representative: Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (1958), and the Trans World Airlines (TWA) terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City (1956–62). For the Yale hockey rink, Saarinen, avoiding the typical field house, achieved a unique and sympathetic sports building. From a lengthwise curved spine in reinforced concrete, he suspended cables to anchors on the oval periphery. This tentlike form recalls the sloping roofs of Shintō shrines (jinja), suggesting an almost religious space for the game of hockey. A blend of the structural, emotional, and aesthetic, the hockey rink was a project that Saarinen himself was proud of. For the design of the TWA terminal, Saarinen continued exploration of interior and exterior sculptural effects. Based on a symmetrical plan, two major cantilevered concrete shells extend dramatically outward, suggesting wings, and, on the inside, sculptural supports and curving stairways evoke a feeling of movement. In this distinctive and memorable building, Saarinen presented a symbol of flight. While to some it proclaimed virtuosity over logic, Saarinen believed that “we must have an emotional reason as well as a logical end for everything we do.” Later Saarinen designed Dulles International Airport (1958–62), outside Washington, D.C., with a hanging roof suspended from diagonal supports.

Saarinen’s effort was primarily concerned with institutional buildings for education and industry. He built only one skyscraper, the CBS Headquarters in New York City (1960–64), and a couple of houses: one for his widowed mother (1950) in Bloomfield Hills and the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, with its memorable sunken living room (conversation pit). His 1948 prizewinning design for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (later Gateway Arch National Park) in St. Louis, Missouri, was completed in 1965. The Gateway Arch is a graceful and spectacular arch of stainless steel with a span and height of 630 feet (190 metres). It conveys a sense of ceremony and special place yet also one of delight and ease, qualities that are present in all of Saarinen’s works, whatever their function.

Furniture design

Like many contemporary architects, Saarinen was challenged by furniture design, especially the chair, which presents aesthetical and structural problems that are particularly difficult to solve. In 1941 he and the designer-architect Charles Eames won a national furniture award for a chair design in molded plywood. In 1948 Saarinen created a womblike chair using a glass fibre shell upholstered in foam rubber and fabric.

His last furniture designs comprised a series of pedestal-based chairs and tables (1957) that combined a sculptural aluminum base with plastic shells for the chairs and discs of marble or plastic for the table tops. The curvilinear forms of his furniture designs paralleled his growing interest in sculptural architectural forms.

Legacy

As a person, Saarinen was outwardly a stocky, calm man of informal manner and puckish humour, but underneath he was intensely serious about architecture and seemed compulsively competitive with his own most recent designs. His wish that a building make an expressive statement established new horizons for modern architecture. He was exploratory in his thinking and committed to research on every level. His buildings were created with meticulous care, from the original analysis of a client’s problem to the final execution, and were sympathetically received by both the general public and his fellow architects.

Saarinen died of a brain tumour in 1961 at the age of 51, leaving numerous projects to be completed by his associates. Always immersed in architecture, he had no other real interest. He never wrote a book, and he commented only occasionally on his buildings and architectural philosophy. He largely initiated a trend, however, toward exploration and experiment in design—a trend that departed from the doctrinaire rectangular prisms that were characteristic of the earlier phase of modern architecture.