Eero Saarinen

Saarinen was born at Hvitträsk in Finland on his father Eliel's 37th birthday, arrived in the United States at 13 in 1923, and grew up at Cranbrook, the school and artists' colony his father ran outside Detroit. He studied sculpture in Paris starting in 1929, took an architecture degree at Yale in 1934, then toured Europe and North Africa before returning to work in his father's Michigan office. At Cranbrook he had already become close with Charles and Ray Eames and with Florence Knoll, friendships that shaped his working life more than any professor did. His first real recognition came in 1940, a chair designed with Charles Eames that won the Museum of Modern Art's Organic Design competition.

He won the Gateway Arch competition outright in 1948, and the news, absurdly, reached his father first — the award letter was addressed to Eliel Saarinen by mistake, since both had entered separately. It set off the busiest and shortest career in American architecture. The General Motors Technical Center opened in 1956, all steel, glass, and blue enamel panels. The Womb chair and the single-pedestal Tulip furniture went into production at Knoll, and by decade's end he had designed the CBS Building in New York, the TWA Flight Center at Idlewild, the main terminal at Dulles International Airport, and the U.S. embassies in London and Oslo. In 1957 he sat on the jury that chose Jorn Utzon's design for the Sydney Opera House after the rest of the panel had already set it aside.

Critics said he had no style of his own — that he designed whatever suited each client rather than building one recognizable language — and Yale's Vincent Scully led that argument while Saarinen was alive to hear it. The personal costs are less debated. His first wife, the sculptor Lilian Swann, had exhibited her own work before their 1939 marriage and raised their two children through the years he built his reputation, and the marriage ended in 1954, the same year he married Aline Bernstein Louchheim, the New York Times critic who had interviewed him about the GM project. He kept working at the same pace afterward — seven-day weeks, by his own account — through headaches that turned out, in 1961, to be a brain tumor discovered only once it was already inoperable.

He died in Ann Arbor on September 1, 1961, during the tumor operation, at 51, with TWA, Dulles, and the CBS Building all still unfinished. His partners Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo completed them from his models, and the American Institute of Architects gave him its Gold Medal the following year, posthumously. For decades the buildings were admired more than the architect, filed under his father's shadow or dismissed as a stylistic grab bag — the very complaint Scully had made. A touring retrospective and the fight to preserve the TWA Flight Center, both running from 2006 to 2010, reintroduced him as one of the era's defining designers. The Tulip and Womb chairs never left production.

Eero Saarinen's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Crow Island School building
  Winnetka, Illinois — early acclaim, designed with his father 1940
• Womb chair artwork
  Designed for Knoll 1948
• General Motors Technical Center building
  Warren, Michigan 1956
• Tulip chair artwork
  The single-pedestal furniture group for Knoll 1956
• TWA Flight Center building
  Idlewild (now JFK) Airport — completed after his death 1962
• Gateway Arch building
  Designed in 1948, completed four years after his death 1965

• August 20, 1910 aged 0 Born at Hvitträsk, Finland, on his father's 37th birthday
• 1923 aged ~13 Immigrates to the United States at 13
• 1934 aged ~24 Takes an architecture degree at Yale
• 1939 aged ~29 Marries the sculptor Lilian Swann
• 1940 aged ~30 Wins MoMA's Organic Design competition with Charles Eames
• 1948 aged ~38 Wins the Gateway Arch competition The award letter went to his father, Eliel, by mistake.
• 1954 aged ~44 Divorces Lilian Swann and marries Aline Bernstein Louchheim
• 1956 aged ~46 The General Motors Technical Center opens
• September 1, 1961 aged 51 Dies in Ann Arbor during surgery for a brain tumor, at 51

• Charles Eames 1907–1978
  Designer who with Ray Eames produced molded plywood and fiberglass furniture for American manufacturers. shared the 1940 furniture prize with
• Alfred P. Sloan 1875–1966
  General Motors leader who established the multidivisional corporation and professional management systems copied across industry. commissioned the GM Technical Center
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. dedicated the airport he did not live to see open