![]() First, he was committed to the exploration of new building technologies and materials, and he searched constantly for ways to advance the art of architecture by producing innovative formal solutions that reflected scientific and chemical discoveries. Three overarching themes emerge from a review of the hundreds of projects, built and unbuilt, that Saarinen produced over the eleven-year period of his architectural maturity. General Motors Technical Center: Styling Building stairs. He seemed the perfect combination of European sophistication and American dynamism. architecture on the map, it would be Eero Saarinen, with his renowned father, his Ivy League education, his professorial pipe, and his Finnish accent. And you think ‘Boy! Let’s do that!’” The reporter from Time was clearly impressed: “Saarinen admits he has to ask himself ‘Is that creating a new architecture?’ And he replies ‘Isn’t it just bringing back things that have been lost to architecture? We must still create, but we would like to bring back some of the great awarenesses that existed in the past, expressed in our own forms and technology.’” 4įor a generation of Americans who aspired to cultural respectability and hoped someday to match their material prosperity and technological know-how with real artistic accomplishments, Saarinen’s words were both reassuring and encouraging. ![]() What’s more, Time suggested, the architect was confident about the merits of his own contribution: “When you do a job like this,” he noted enthusiastically about his work at the new General Motors Technical Center, “your mind goes back to Versailles, the Tivoli Gardens, San Marco, the way Italians used pavements. ![]() architects with all the fervor that Left Bank Jazz addicts reserve for Dizzy Gillespie and Satchmo Armstrong.” 3 Time believed that Eero Saarinen was leading the charge in this cutting-edge group, offering a combination of technical ingenuity and artistic vision with a rich sense of history. On July 2, 1956, Saarinen’s portrait graced the cover of Time, accompanying a lead article titled “ The Maturing Modern.” Declaring America the new leader in contemporary design, the magazine proclaimed, “In Paris, architectural students eagerly follow the new work of younger U.S. These projects put a very public stamp of approval on Saarinen’s distinctive approach to architecture, handing him the lion’s share of responsibility for creating a new American style for the postwar age. Louis in 1947 (for which he proposed a glistening “ Gateway Arch” that would serve both as a monument and as a huge observation platform over the prairie), the American embassies in Oslo (1955–59) and London (1955–60), and the new jet-age Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. 1 He won plum government jobs as well, including the Jefferson Memorial in St. During the late 1940s and ’50s Saarinen had been awarded high-budget commissions to design new corporate headquarters and campus-like research centers for many of the household names of American industry and manufacturing: General Motors (1948–56), TWA (1956–62), IBM (1957–61), Bell Telephone (1957–62), John Deere (19563), and CBS (1959–64), to name only a few. ![]() The darling of corporate America, Saarinen had risen to great heights over the course of his short career (his father Eliel, with whom he had collaborated since the late 1930s, had died in 1950), filling a widespread yearning among American clients for a new kind of modern architecture that would combine the clean lines of the International Style with something of the “Americanness” and familiar imagery of Frank Lloyd Wright. When Eero Saarinen died suddenly of a brain tumor on September 1, 1961, he had already become, at the age of only fifty-one, one of the most successful architects in the United States.
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