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- Saarinen’s architecture marks a shift from mid-20th-century modernism to a more expressive form, avoiding a single style and creating unique designs for each project. His work expanded modern architecture’s aesthetic possibilities, introducing sculptural forms and expressive designs, exemplified by the TWA terminal’s representation of flight.
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- 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.
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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.
- Kresge Auditorium. The Kresge Auditorium and the Kresge Oval are two Saarinen projects on the MIT campus. Saarinen was given a complicated task when granted the project: create an architectural identity that would unite everyone on MIT’s campus.
- MIT Chapel. The exterior of the MIT Chapel is relatively modest in size and façade compared to its magical interior. Like the other projects on this list that Saarinen designed for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he also designed the landscaping around it.
- Dulles International Airport. The main terminal of the Dulles International Airport is a great example of the dramatic forms that define much of Saarinen’s work.
- TWA Flight Center. The TWA Flight Center is one of Saarinen’s most iconic works. It is the second design in an airport on this list and is also a perfect example of his neo-futuristic architecture.
- Finnish-American
- August 20, 1910
- Kirkkonummi, Grand Duchy of Finland, Russian Empire
- September 1, 1961
- General Motors Technical Center, Warren, Michigan, USA. Along with structures such as the Lever House and Seagram Building in New York, the General Motors Technical Center is one of the projects that best exemplifies the new identity of American corporate modernism in the 1950s.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology Chapel, Cambridge, USA. The MIT Chapel is part of a pair of structures (the other being the Kresge Auditorium) clustered together on the university's campus that Saarinen designed along with all of the landscaping.
- J. Irwin Miller House, Columbus, Indiana, USA. Saarinen rarely designed residences during his mature career, yet the Miller House, built for a corporate scion in the architecturally prominent small town of Columbus, is the best example of these.
- Ingalls Ice Rink, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Saarinen completed several buildings for Yale, his alma mater, among which the Ingalls Ice Rink was the first.
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. [16]
Eero Saarinen, a luminary in the realm of architecture, left an indelible mark on the 20th century with his innovative designs and groundbreaking approach to modernism. This article delves into the life, influences, and architectural legacy of Eero Saarinen, showcasing his exceptional contributions to the world of design.
Aug 20, 2017 · Even when he did not directly contribute to a design, Eero Saarinen would still have a dramatic effect on the path of architecture in the 1950s: famously, it was Saarinen who retrieved Jørn...
