The Finnish architect and designer Eero Saarinen, son of the architect Eliel Saarinen,
was born in 1910. In 1923 the family emigrated to the US. In 1929/30 Eero Saarinen studied
sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière before studying architecture at Yale in
New Haven until 1934. A Yale scholarship enabled Eero Saarinen to travel to Europe again
but he returned to the US in 1936 to work in his father's architectural practice.
Eero Saarinen also took up a teaching appointment at the Cranbrook Academy in
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, of which Eliel Saarinen had been head since the
Academy was founded in 1932. When his father died in 1950, Eero Saarinen took
over his practice, running it as Saarinen & Associates in Birmingham until
196. At Cranbrook Academy, Eero Saarinen met
Charles Eames in the late 1930s.
Experimenting with
Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen co-developed new furniture forms
and the first designs for furniture of molded laminated wood. In 1940 Saarinen
and Eames took part in the "Organic design in Home Furnishings" competition
mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. While
Charles Eames continued
to work on molded furniture in plywood, Eero Saarinen later chose other materials.
For Knoll International, Eero Saarinen designed a great many pieces of furniutre,
including the 1946/47 "Grasshopper" armchair with bent armrests of laminated wood.
In 1947/48 Eero Saarinen designed the "Womb" collection, which was supposed,
as the name suggests, to make those seated on it feel as secure and cozy as a
fetus in the womb. The "Pedestal Group", dating from 1955/56, is an Eero Saarinen
collection of chairs and tables made of plastic and featuring only one central
leg ending organically in a round disc on the floor. The "Tulip chair" also
belonged to this group, with which Eero Saarinen wanted to abolish the "miserable
maze of legs". In 1951 he designed the "Saarinen Collection" for Knoll, consisting
of several office chairs, one of the first lines in designer office furniture. Eero
Saarinen's architectural masterpiece is the signature TWA-Terminal at J.F. Kennedy
Airport in New York (1956-1952). Between 1958 and 1963 Dulles International Airport
in Washington, DC, designed by Eero Saarinen before his death in 1961, was under
construction.
