Home   Architects   Styles  

Objects

 

Library

   
 

 

 

 

 

 

WORKS / BIOGRAPHY / BOOKS

 

 

EERO SAARINEN
 
 
 
 
  Name   Eero Saarinen
       
  Born   August 20, 1910
       
  Died   September 1, 1961
       
  Nationality   Finland and United States
       
  School    
     
       
  Official website    
     
 
BIOGRAPHY
   

Eero Saarinen shared the same date of birth with his famous architect father, Eliel (20 August 1873 and 1910); both the elder and the younger Saarinen were and are very likely to remain the only father-son duo recipients of the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects.

The younger Saarinen was born in Kirkkonummi (Kyrksläte), Finland (then Russia) and grew up in the secluded retreat of “Hvitträsk,” the home/studio where Eliel Saarinen entertained many of Finland’s intellectuals and artists and produced ideas in architecture and planning. Saarinen attended high school at a special progressive school housed within the University of Michigan’s School of Education (then nearby Baldwin High School in Birmingham, Michigan) and apprenticed in the Cranbrook architectural office from 1928 to 1931, taking eight months in Paris, France, beginning in late 1929 to study sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. After his return to Cranbrook, Saarinen developed furniture designs from 1930 to 1931 that concurrently embraced a conscious variety of styles, from handicraft to an industrial aesthetic. He entered Yale University in the fall of 1931 and completed Yale’s five-year program in three years.

With the award of a traveling fellowship, Saarinen visited Europe and the Near East and then worked in Finland, where he came in more direct contact with European modernism. Thus began his own synthesis of historic architecture and the progressive trends of technological innovation and its expression. On his return to the United States in 1936, Saarinen entered into a partnership with his father separate from Cranbrook (Eliel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen, 1936–42). Through small commissions, independent competition entries, and collaborations, he achieved national recognition for his American modernism. He briefly worked as a designer for the office of Norman Bel Geddes on the General Motors “Futurama” building for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In buildings such as the Kleinhans Music Hall (1938–41, with Kidd and Kidd) in Buffalo, New York, and Crow Island School (1940, with Perkins, Wheeler and Will of Chicago) in Winnetka, Illinois, as well as first place in the 1939 national competition for the Smithsonian Art Gallery (unexecuted), the Saarinens became synonymous with a progressive style free of the radical overtones of the International Style.

Charles Eames was among the younger designers with whom Eero collaborated, and their molded-plywood furniture designs for the “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” competition and exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1941) established their position among a new generation of modernists. World War II saw a number of transformations in their practice, changes that also represented the gradual independence of the son from the aesthetic dispositions of his father. It was at the end of this period that Eero’s entry in the 1948 competition for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (St. Louis, Missouri) was awarded first prize (both father and son submitted designs under the firm name, resulting in a brief confusion as to the winner). Presenting a “Gateway to the West,” its abstract 630-foot-high catenary-arch form combined symbolism with technological daring and structural innovation.

Saarinen’s aesthetic took on its own character during the 1940s with buildings such as the suspended tensile-roof structure of the “Demountable Space”/Community House project (1941, with Ralph Rapson) for the United States Gypsum Company, the “Unfolding House” project (1943–44) based on trailer/containers, and the “Serving Suzy” restaurant project (1944) featuring a mobile food service for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. Built works included the Opera-Concert Hall and Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood (1940–41) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (a structure that employed laminated wood arches and tensile rod-suspended roofs); the steel Case Study House #8 and #9 (1945–50, with Charles Eames; #9 built as John Entenza House) for Arts & Architecture in Pacific Palisades, California; and the lightweight Music Tent (1949, with Smith, Hegner and Moore, Associate Architects) for the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation Music Festival in Aspen, Colorado.

The most significant example of this evolution was the postwar, $100 million General Motors Technical Center (1951–56, designed with Smith, Hinchman and Grylls, Associate Architects) in Warren, Michigan. The initial scheme of 1945 combined familiar design motifs of Eliel Saarinen, such as the interplay between a horizontal space (the man-made lake) and the vertical accent of a water tower and the younger Saarinen’s desire for industrial objects. After three years, a new scheme, influenced by Mies van der Rohe, was proposed. This included the use of a standard planning module and a new thinskin technology for the building envelopes based on car-manufacturing techniques, including the innovation of neoprene gaskets for window installation, modeled on the system developed for car windshields. The GMTC plan formed the background of a portrait of Saarinen on the 2 July 1956 cover of Time magazine.

The 1950s saw work ranging from the reductivist, anonymous, and abstract, such as the visually neutral indeterminacy of the IBM Manufacturing Plant (1956–59) in Rochester, Minnesota, and the Bell Telephone Laboratories (1957–62) in Holmdel, New Jersey, to the evocative expressionism in the forms of the thin-shell Trans World Airlines (TWA) airport terminal (1956–62) in New York City and the suspended roof of the David S. Ingalls Hockey Rink (1956–59) at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Structure and construction were used to serve themes other than structure in Saarinen’s search for form. Formal invention was paralleled by technical innovation, where technique and evocative imagery were often merged. Representation was manifested in metaphorical forms, most notably in the TWA terminal’s evocation of a “bird in flight.” The Ezra Stiles and Samuel F.B.Morse Colleges (1958–62) at Yale University consisted of injection-formed concrete walls that alluded to a medieval community of scholars. The campus of Concordia Lutheran Senior College (1953–59) in Fort Wayne, Indiana, represented a Scandinavian village. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, the Kresge Auditorium (1950–55) and MIT Chapel (1953–55) oppose the advanced thin-shell technology of the auditorium dome against the primal imagery of a closed brick cylinder placed in a circular moat for the chapel. His only tall building, the Columbia Broadcasting System Headquarters (1960–64) in New York City, was also the last design of his career. Its solid, masonry cladding proposed his first departure from the modernist glass box, where he alluded instead to the context of Manhattan.

 

PETER C.PAPADEMETRIOU

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3.  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
TIMELINE
   

20 August 1910 Born in Kikkonummi, Finland, son of architect Eliel Saarinen;

1923 emigrated to the United States ;

1929–30 Studied sculpture at the Académie de la Grand Chaumière, Paris;

1934 studied architecture at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; bachelor’s degree in fine arts ;

1934–36 received a Charles O.Matchum Fellowship for travel in Europe ;

1936–41 Worked in father’s architectural practice, Ann Arbor, Michigan ;

1940 naturalized in the United States ;

1941–47 partner, with father and J. Robert Swanson, Saarinen, Swanson and Saarinen, Ann Arbor ;

1942–43 employed in the Office of Strategic Studies, Washington D.C. ;

1947– 50 partner, Saarinen, Saarinen and Associates, Ann Arbor ;

from 1950 Principal, Eero Saarinen and Associates, Birmingham, Michigan ;

1962 Fellow, American Institute of Architects; fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gold Medal (posthumous), American Institute of Architects ;

1 September 1961 Died in Ann Arbor, USA.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
FURTHER READING
   

Selected Publications

Eero Saarinen on His Work, edited by Aline B.Saarinen, 1962; revised edition, 1968

 

MORE BOOKS

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
RELATED
    AIRPORT;
 
 

 

 

 


Architects

Library

New Projects

Objects

Schools

 


About

Contact

Support us