Good evening, everyone:

As explorations of architectural creativity that may or may not carry lessons for our headquarters/campus reimagination/neighborhood revitalization efforts, we’ve scrolled through Frank Gehry’s unpredictability, Zia Hadid’s elegance, and Antonio Guadi’s embrace of nature. I wanted to toss one more into the mix: Eero Saarinen, who spent his formative creative years five miles from our current headquarters.

Saarinen trained in architecture under his father, Eliel Saarinen, who helped define 20^th century Finnish architecture through projects like the Helsinki Central Station (1919).

The founder of Cranbrook, George Boothe, was so taken with Saarinen’s runner-up submission for the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower Commission that he asked him to come to Bloomfield Hills to oversee the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Saarinen sought – much as the German Bauhaus had – to create a holistic integrative approach to design, combing planning, architecture, sculpture, weaving, drawing, painting, and ceramics. It was an approach that would forever change American modernism, producing luminaries in all those fields: the sculptor Henry Bertoia (see my recent note on his sculpture in the lobby of the new GM headquarters); planner Edmund Bacon (responsible for major works in Philadelphia); architects and furniture designers Ray and Charles Eames, Florence Shust Knoll, and my father; fabric artists Lilly Swan Saarinen and Ruth Adler Schnee; ceramicist Maija Grotell.

And architect Eero Saarinen.

The younger Saarinen’s career was relatively brief. After a half-dozen years at Cranbrook, he was enlisted to undertake projects across the country during and after WWII, only to die far too young in 1961, at age 51, from a brain tumor.

His career was meteoric. In less than a twenty-year span, he designed multiple structures that remain iconic today – and that exerted immeasurable influence over subsequent generations of architects. Indeed, my father – who collaborated with him for a half-dozen years – once said to me that he believed Saarinen would have become the greatest American architect of the twentieth century had his life not been cut short.

Consider just a handful of his projects:

• The General Motors Technical Center in Warren:

• The main terminal at Dulles Airport:

Ø  the TWA Flight Center at Kennedy Airport, which has been renovated and transformed into a hotel, with a little help from Kresge:

• The North Christian Church in Columbus, IN:

• the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center:

• St. Louis’ Gateway Arch:

Ø  The IBM Thomas Watson Research Center in New York:

• AND! The Kresge Auditorium at MIT:

No less than Gehry and Hadid, Saarinen pushed convention well beyond the fence-line of what had gone before:

. . . the sculptural curves of the Arch or Watson Research Center or Kresge Auditorium;

. . .  the two airports’ structural innovations in the use of steel, reinforced concrete, and cables;

. . .  a human-oriented sensibility that broke away from the more rigid International School vernaculars of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, or Le Corbusier;

. . . the uniqueness of each of his design statements given the challenge being presented (he once noted, “The problem contains the solution."), making it difficult to pin down a description of the Saarinen visual “style” (contrast, for example, the very different design “solutions” to what might appear to be the same “problem” – an airport).

When I mentioned to Liz Diller that I was doing a series of notes on audacious architecture, she smiled and said, “Don’t forget Saarinen.” Indeed.

Rip

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