Eero Saarinen Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) was a Finnish-American architect and furniture designer whose inventive structures gave postwar American modernism a new expressive range. In little more than a decade of independent practice he produced corporate campuses, university buildings, airports and the Gateway Arch, as well as furniture classics such as the Womb and Tulip chairs.

Cranbrook and Yale

Born in Kirkkonummi, Finland, the son of the architect Eliel Saarinen and the textile artist Loja Saarinen, Eero emigrated with his family to the United States in 1923 and grew up at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, which his father designed. He studied sculpture in Paris before graduating in architecture from Yale in 1934, and then joined his father’s practice.

Furniture and the Organic Line

With his friend Charles Eames, Saarinen won the 1940 Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition at the Museum of Modern Art. His later designs for Knoll, including the Womb Chair of 1948 and the pedestal Tulip Chair and table, translated the same pursuit of continuous, sculptural form into furniture that remains in production.

A Style for Each Job

After Eliel’s death in 1950, Saarinen led his own firm, Eero Saarinen and Associates, and argued that each commission deserved its own solution. The result was a remarkably varied body of work: the crisp General Motors Technical Center, the domed Kresge Auditorium and cylindrical chapel at MIT, the arching David S. Ingalls Rink at Yale and the soaring concrete shells of the TWA Flight Center in New York.

Legacy

Saarinen died in 1961, aged 51, before many of his major works were finished. His associates Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo completed the TWA Flight Center, Dulles International Airport, the CBS Building and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and he was awarded the AIA Gold Medal posthumously in 1962.