Saarinen, Eero

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Eero Saarinen

Personal

Born August 20, 1910, in Kirkkonummi, Finland; immigrated to the United States, naturalized citizen, 1940; died of a brain tumor, September 1, 1961, in Ann Arbor, MI; son of Eliel (an architect) and Loja (a sculptor and weaver) Saarinen; married Lily Swann (a sculptor), 1939 (divorced, 1953); married Aline Bernstein Louchheim (an art critic), 1954; children: (first marriage) two children; (second marriage) one son. Education: Académie de la Grand Chaumière (Paris, France), studied sculpture, 1929-30; Yale University, B.F.A., 1934.

Career

Architect and furniture designer. Saarinen and Swanson (architectural firm), Ann Arbor, MI, cofounder and designer, 1936-41, expanded as Saarinen-Swanson-Saarinen, 1941-47, and Saarinen, Saarinen & Associates, 1947-50; Eero Saarinen and Associates, Birmingham, MI, founder and designer, 1950-61. Major works include Community House, Fenton, MI (with Eliel Saarinen), 1937-38, Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, MA (with Eliel Saarinen), 1938, Kleinhaus Music Hall, Buffalo, New York (with Eliel Saarinen), 1938-40, Tabernacle Church of Christ, Columbus, IN (with Eliel Saarinen), 1939-42, houses, School and Community Hall, Center Line, MI (with Eliel Saarinen and J. Robert Swanson), 1941, A. C. Wermuth House, Fort Wayne, IN (with Eliel Saarinen), 1942, schools, Willow Run, MI (with Eliel Saarinen and J. Robert Swanson), 1942, Summer Opera House and Chamber Music Hall, Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, MA (with Eliel Saarinen), 1942, Lincoln Heights Housing Area, Washington, DC (with Eliel Saarinen and Swanson), 1943, General Motors Technical Center, Warren, MI (with Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls), 1945-56, Metropolitan Milwaukee War Memorial, Milwaukee, WI, 1946-57, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, (Gateway Arch), St. Louis, MO, 1948-65, Kresge Auditorium and Chapel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (with Anderson and Beckwith), 1953-56, Irwin Miller Residence, Columbus, IN (with Alexander Girard and Dan Kiley), 1953-57, Concordia College, Fort Wayne, IN, 1953-58, dormitory complex, University of Chicago, 1955-58, United States Chancellery Building, Oslo, Norway, 1955-58, United States Embassy, London, England (with Yorke, Rosenberg, and Mardall), 1955-60, Ingalls Hockey Rink, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 1956-59, Law School, University of Chicago, 1956-60, Terminal, Trans World Airways, Kennedy Airport, New York, NY, 1956-62, dormitory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1957-60, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, International Business Machines Corporation, Yorktown, NY, 1957-61, Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, 1957-62, Deere and Company Headquarters, Moline, IL, 1957-63, Dulles Airport, Chan-tilly, VA (with Ammann and Whitney), 1958-62, Samuel F. B. Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges, Yale University, 1958-62, Columbia Broadcasting System Headquarters, New York, NY, 1960-64, and North Christian Church, Columbus, IN, 1964. Also designer of furniture, including "Tulip" chair, the "Womb" settee, and pedestal stools, among other designs for Knoll International. Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, instructor, 1939-49. Exhibitions: "Between Earth and Sky," Matthew Architecture Gallery, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 2003; retrospective, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2005; many others. Military service: British Office of Strategic Services, served 1942-45.

Awards, Honors

First prize (with Charles Eames), Organic Design in Home Furnishings, New York's Museum of Modern Art, 1941, for molded plywood furniture designs; first prize, Designs for Postwar Living, California Arts and Architecture, 1946; Gold Medal, American Institute of Architects, 1962; winner of numerous architectural competitions.

Writings

Eero Saarinen on His Work: A Selection of Buildings from 1947 to 1964 with Statements by the Architect, edited by Aline B. Saarinen, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1962, second edition, 1968.

Contributor to periodicals, including Architectural Forum, Architectural Record, Journal of the American Institute of Architects, and National Association of Housing Officials Journal.

Sidelights

Architect Eero Saarinen once commented that design had a much too limited vocabulary, and that his work was an attempt to "enlarge its alphabet beyond ABC." An innovator in the use of such structural elements as the thin, porcelain-faced panel that can be used as both exterior wall and interior finish, and of reflective mirror glass, Saarinen was also a tireless experimenter in form. Though some of his structures are reminiscent of the International Style that held sway in the early- to mid-twentieth century, he was not controlled by such a standard. According to Peter C. Papademetriou, writing in Grove Art Online, "Saarinen remained free in his conceptions." His individual aesthetic led him to create new architectural forms and structures. Papademetriou concluded: "His systematic, almost engineer-like insistence on analyzing the nature of a project suggested the possibility of an autonomous architecture for each building, a concept of 'the Style for the Job.' He sought to direct contemporary technology in diverse architectural expressions to the advancement of the symbolic and environmental content of that tradition through the exploration of special architectural vernaculars for each project."

Thus, Saarinen's work does not bear one unmistakable stamp; rather it is in its multiplicity of forms that Saarinen's work is understood. His projects cover a broad range of styles, from more cuboid and simple abstract forms employed for industrial research parks for IBM and Bell Telephone Laboratories, to the sweeping symbolism and expressionism of his TWA Terminal at JFK Airport in New York. With the TWA project, his curvilinear forms suggest a bird about to take off in flight. For the Ezra Stiles and Samuel F. B. Morse Colleges at Yale University, however, he reverted to a more staid appearance to suggest a medieval community of scholars. For Yale he also built a hockey rink that suggests the movement of the sport; his St. Louis Gateway Arch has become a totem of the city, a project four decades in the making and one that has become "one of the few great monumental structures of the twentieth century," according to John Winter in the Architectural Review. Saarinen pioneered what has become the traditional look of office buildings with his General Motors Technical Center near Detroit with its grid lighting and ventilation, but unlike its copies, the GM center "has glamour; it has staircases and public areas that can still startle," according to Winter.

Mark Cousins noted in Building Design that Saarinen "believed in architecture as a fine art and worked tirelessly to instill his buildings with what he called 'lasting truths.'" Cousins went on to observe that what sets Saarinen's work apart from that of other architects is his "thorough exploration of materiality" and his "determination to push both the technical potential and the poetic dimension of specific materials." For Elizabeth Donoff, writing in Architecture, Saarinen was "an unsung hero of modern architecture," and writing in Vanity Fair, Matt Tyrnauer noted that "though each of Saarinen's buildings may seem different, there is a strong unifying theme which binds them—what Saarinen referred to as 'total architecture.'" Tyrnauer concluded, "[Saarinen] was the maverick genius of his generation."

Finnish Roots

Born in 1910 in Kirkkonummi, Finland, Saarinen came from a distinguished family of architects and artists. His father, Eliel Saarinen, was an internationally renowned architect, while his uncle, aunt, and grandfather were also well respected in the same field. Saarinen's mother, Loja, was an artist of many talents: sculptor, photographer, weaver, and architectural model maker. Thus Saarinen grew up in a household where drawing and art were everyday affairs and taken seriously. Ambidextrous, the young Saarinen drew well and industriously. At the age of twelve, he won a Swedish matchstick design contest. From his parents he learned an essential design aesthetic: an object should be designed in the context of its next largest space. For example, a chair should be thought of in the context of a room, a room in the context of a home, and the home in the context of its urban neighborhood or rural environment.

When his father won second place in the competition for the Chicago Tribune building in 1922, the elder Saarinen became better known in the United States. As a result, the family moved across the Atlantic, settling in Michigan, where Eliel Saarinen became architect-in-residence and president of the Art Academy of Cranbrook Educational Community, one of the most influential art schools in the United States at the time. Young Saarinen grew up in the house his father designed, and for which his mother provided woven textiles, his sister added wall and ceiling stenciling, and for which Eero himself designed furniture.

Eero Saarinen apprenticed in the Cranbrook architectural office in 1928 and 1929, and then left for sculpture studies in Paris. Upon returning to the United States, his interests had settled more firmly on architecture. He attended Yale University, where he studied fine arts and graduated with honors in 1934. He worked for a time in New York as a draftsman for architect Norman Bel Geddes, then won a fellowship for travel in Europe, where he helped in the remodeling of a theater in his native Finland. Returning to the United States, Saarinen joined his father's practice in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and also took up a teaching post at Cranbrook. Through-out the previous decade, Saarinen had been attempting to define his own modern style, a blending of International Style with the best elements of older architectural forms. He was now ready to put such theorizing into practice.

From Functional Furniture to Multifunctional Buildings

Working in the shadow of his father was not always easy for Saarinen. One of his first independent triumphs, working in collaboration with Charles Eames, was a design for furniture which used molded plywood and metal. Entered in a contest at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940, their design took first place. Saarinen would continue to design furniture over the next decades, including the "Tulip" chair and the "Womb" settee, as well as the "Pedestal" furniture series, all of which were produced by Knoll Associates. Such furniture, using inexpensive materials including foam rubber, steel tubing, plywood, and plastic, could lead, Saarinen thought, to a whole new type of functional and inexpensive modern furniture.

However, it is for his architecture that Saarinen is primarily remembered. Working first as an assistant and then as full partner with his father, he participated in many of the projects of this high-profile firm in the 1940s. The first project to bring Eero Saarinen widespread notice as an architect was his 1945 design for the massive General Motors Technical Center near Detroit. The complex covers some 600 acres, with 60 buildings containing nearly ten million square feet of plant space arranged along three sides of a 22-acre lake. The center includes laboratories, shop buildings, and offices and was designed to be the heart of the company's engineering and research operations. Though begun with his father, this project became Eero's alone by 1948. Inspired by the minimalist aesthetics of Mies van der Rohe, Saarinen wanted to base the construction on elements of the automobile—the company's product. Thus steel was a major component, and neoprene gaskets were used for the window glazing, a system modeled on the installation of windshields. The GM Center was the first time Saarinen used his porcelain-faced "sandwich" paneling for both exterior skin and interior finish.

Saarinen further distanced himself professionally from his father when both entered the competition for the Jefferson Westward Expansion Memorial in St. Louis in 1948. Eero's design for the Gateway Arch won that day. The 630-foot tall metal arch, capable of holding some 160 visitors at a time, was begun on February 12, 1963, and completed on October 28, 1965. The arch, now the defining symbol of the city of St. Louis, stands on the bank of the Mississippi River.

With his father's death in 1950, Saarinen set up his own architectural firm, and throughout the 1950s worked on a series of innovative and landmark buildings. His thin-skin technology and so-called curtain-wall aesthetic was employed in projects from the Noyes House at Vassar College in upstate New York, to the law school of the University of Chicago and the IBM offices at Rochester, Minnesota. With the John Deere buildings, he brought his minimalist perspective to its furthest limits and also first used self-rusting Cor-Ten steel to create a form at once "highly sculptural and articulated," according to a contributor for the International Dictionary of Architects and Architecture.

Designs Airport Terminals

One of Saarinen's most daring projects was his design for the TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport, begun in 1956. Here, as the contributor for the International Dictionary of Architects and Architecture observed, "was perhaps the most advanced of sculptural forms, providing a continuity of space and shape which facilitated passenger flow, but whose complex curves were allegorically meant to suggest flight." Further innovations are found in his designs for another airport project, this time for the entire Dulles International Airport in Virginia, a gateway to the nation's capital. Lesley Jackson, writing in Building Design, praised the Dulles project as "uplifting, with its dramatic, sweeping roofline and gravity defying cresting walls. This is organic architecture at its best; architecture from the gut." Saarinen's final project, the Columbia Broadcasting System building in New York, was more sedate in design. The heterodox Saarinen made a strong departure from the glass boxes of other Modernist skyscrapers, giving the CBS headquarters a solid, masonry facade.

Saarinen died before seeing completion of many of his most famous designs. Within two weeks of being diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1961, he succumbed. He was just fifty-one years of age.

If you enjoy the works of Eero Saarinen

If you enjoy the works of Eero Saarinen, you may also want to check out the following:

The work of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, American architect and designer Charles Eames, and German-born American architect Mies van der Rohe.

Despite his short working life, Saarinen's legacy is large, blending the legacy of the past with modern architecture in a unique and vital manner. Ironically, however, much of his groundbreaking work is now dated. As Cousins commented, "Eero Saarinen was determined to secure his place in architectural history but, sadly, is now regarded as a relatively obscure figure in the canon of 20th century architecture." Winter also noted that Saarinen's name "once universally respected, rarely comes into architectural debate at present." His most famous buildings are even threatened with renovation. His TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport has long been "obsolete," as Mark Lamster and Joseph Giovannini noted in Architecture, even though it is a "magnificent work of expressive architecture." The authors further noted, "Now, with TWA defunct and the sheen of romance removed from commercial aviation, the terminal is a disheveled and inadequate ward of the state, an orphaned, empty symbol." Extensive retrofitting is needed to bring the building up to twenty-first-century needs in terms of security and passenger volume.

Yet Saarinen's achievements "remain significant," according to Winter. Among these are the GM Technical Center, "the place where the Modern Movement dream of the machine-made, machine-serviced, environment was achieved for the first time." Other Saarinen legacies include the young generation of architects who worked with him or were deeply influenced by his work, and went on to their own careers in the second half of the twentieth century.

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Carter, Brian, Between Earth and Sky: The Work and Way of Eero Saarinen, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI), 2003.

Cheek, Lawrence W., Eero Saarinen: Architect, Sculptor, Visionary, Jefferson National Expansion Historical Association (St. Louis, MO), 1998.

Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 7: 1961-1965, American Council of Learned Societies (New York, NY), 1981.

Doumato, Lamia, The Work of Eero Saarinen: A Selected Bibliography, Vance Bibliographies, 1980.

Hall, Edward, and Mildred Hall, The Fourth Dimension in Architecture, Sunstone Press (Santa Fe, NM), 1995.

Janz, Wesley R., Building Nations by Designing Buildings: Corporatism, Eero Saarinen, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Center for Architecture and Urban Planning Research, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1995.

Kuhner, Robert A., Eero Saarinen, His Life and Work, Council of Planning Librarians, 1975.

Mehrhoff, W. Arthur, The Gateway Arch: Fact and Symbol, Bowling Green State University Popular Press (Bowling Green, OH), 1992.

Merkel, Jayne, Eero Saarinen, Phaidon Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Meyerowitz, Joel, St. Louis and the Arch, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1980.

Moon, George, American Versailles: Eero Saarinen and the General Motors Technical Center, George Moon, 1995.

O'Neal, William Bainter, Eero Saarinen: A Bibliography, American Association of Architectural Bibliographers, 1963.

Roman, Antonio, Eero Saarinen: An Architecture of Multiplicity, Princeton Architectural Press (Princeton, NJ), 2003.

Temko, Allan, Eero Saarinen, George Braziller (New York, NY), 1962.

PERIODICALS

American Institute of Architects Journal, November, 1981, "Eero Saarinen in Perspective."

Architectural Forum, July, 1960, Lawrence Lessing, "The Diversity of Eero Saarinen"; October, 1962, Walter McQuade, "Eero Saarinen, a Complete Architect," pp. 102-119.

Architectural Review, July, 2003, John Winter, "Risk Taker," p. 81.

Architecture, April, 1985, "Saarinen's GM Technical Center Receives AIA's 25-Year Award"; July, 2000, Peter Papademetriou, "Desperately Seeking Saarinen," p. 72; May, 2001, Alan G. Brake, "Saarinen's TWA Threatened," p. 46; December, 2001, Mark Lamster and Joseph Giovannini, "Will This Bird Fly?," p. 104; August, 2003, Elizabeth Donoff, review of Eero Saarinen: An Architecture of Multiplicity, p. 89.

Building Design, March 24, 2003, Lesley Jackson, "Pretty Vacant," p. 18; November 14, 2003, Mark Cousins, "Reach for the Sky," p. 20.

Horizon, July, 1960, Allan Temko, "Eero Saarinen: Something between Earth and Sky."

Interiors, March, 2001, "Eero-ly We Roll Along," p. 35.

Isis, March, 2001, Scott G. Knowles and Stuart W. Leslie, "Industrial Versailles," p. 1.

Vanity Fair, May, 2003, Matt Tyrnauer, "Golden Eero," p. 106.