Search results
Jan 23, 2024 · Eero Saarinen, a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer, is known for mid-20th-century buildings and furniture designs. Born in Finland in 1910, Saarinen immigrated to the U.S. in 1923. His early design exposure began through his father, Eliel Saarinen, a noted architect.
- 1910
- Eero Saarinen
- Kirkkonummi, Finland
- 1923
Eero Saarinen (/ ˈ eɪ r oʊ ˈ s ɑːr ɪ n ə n, ˈ ɛər oʊ-/, Finnish: [ˈeːro ˈsɑːrinen]; August 20, 1910 – September 1, 1961) was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer who created a wide array of innovative designs for buildings and monuments, including the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan; the ...
- Overview
- Life
- Furniture design
- Legacy
Eero Saarinen, (born August 20, 1910, Kirkkonummi, Finland—died September 1, 1961, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.), Finnish-born American architect who was one of the leaders in a trend toward exploration and experiment in American architectural design during the 1950s.
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.
Britannica Quiz
Architecture: The Built World
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aug 20, 2018 · This, however, is the story of Eliel and Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architects whose combined portfolio tells of the development of modernist architectural thought in the...
- Tom Dobbins
Finnish-American Architect and Designer. Born: August 20, 1910 - Kirkkonummi, Grand Duchy of Finland, Russian Empire. Died: September 1, 1961 - Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Movements and Styles: The International Style. , Modern Architecture. 1 of 9. Summary of Eero Saarinen.
- Finnish-American
- August 20, 1910
- Kirkkonummi, Grand Duchy of Finland, Russian Empire
- September 1, 1961
Counted among their ranks is Eero Saarinen (pronounced air-oh), the prodigious Finnish American architect and industrial designer known for his neo-futuristic style. He lent his services to the spy agency before achieving world-wide fame as one of the masters of American 20th-century architecture.
People also ask
Why is Eero Saarinen famous?
Are Eliel & Eero Saarinen the same architect?
What was Eero Saarinen architecture?
Who are Eliel & Eero Saarinen?
How did Eliel and Eero Saarinen influence design?
Who is the most famous architect Besides Eero Saarinen?
Aug 7, 2021 · Finnish architect Eero Saarinen is known for his incredible neo-futuristic architecture and design. He came from a family of creatives—including a successful architect father named Eliel Saarinen. The younger Saarinen was also an industrial designer and created popular chairs under the Knoll furniture company, most notably the Tulip chair.
_MWAA.jpg?1534522436&q=who%20is%20eero%20saarinen%20based%20on%20real%20people&ck=A4F05572CAFB97F717EDE133193189F9&idpp=rc&idpview=singleimage&form=rc2idp "who is eero saarinen based on real people1")
