SAARINEN: EERO SAARINEN

Eero Saarinen was one of the world's most celebrated architects at the time of his death at the age of 51; he designed and built more than 35 buildings in his lifetime and collaborated on 30 more with his father, renowned architect Eliel Saarinen. Eero's career began in childhood: As the son of the esteemed Eliel, designer of Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Eero grew up in an intellectually charged environment surrounded by art and design, and entered his first architectural competition while still in grade school. Eero Saarinen trained and practiced with his father until the early 1950s, when he established his own firm and began to design some of the most influential institutions of his day, among them residential colleges and a hockey rink at Yale University, an auditorium and chapel at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, American embassies in London and Oslo, and corporate complexes for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories that spearheaded the creation of the modern suburban office park. While all of these projects blur the boundaries between architecture, art, and landscape, none share a single, identifiable style. Saarinen explored new materials and techniques in every building, developing innovative uses of granite, glazed bricks, reflective glass, concrete, and curtain-wall technology to suit each program. Such wide-ranging approaches to his architecture made Saarinen difficult to classify, and interest in his work dissipated soon after his death.