Eero Saarinen Biography
Eero Saarinen (Kirkkonummi, August 20, 1910 – Ann Arbor, September 1, 1961) was a Finnish naturalized American architect and designer. The son of Eliel Saarinen, he moved to the United States from Finland in 1923, graduated from Yale in 1934, and then trained at the Cranbrook Institute of Architecture and Design, of which his father was a trustee. Here he met Charles Eames, with whom he collaborated on various projects. Like Eames himself, he dedicated himself to researching new technologies in the use of materials, in particular in the molding of fiberglass. One of his highly demanding works was the General Motors technical center in Warren (Michigan), finished in 1955, in which the indications of Mies van der Rohe's industrial rationalism can be felt, but in less classicistic forms. From the same year are the chapel and the Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which mark for Saarinen the acquisition of a more coherent and personal language. After these beginnings of eclectic research between rationalism and romanticism of Scandinavian origin, Saarinen established himself in the new American architecture with the Yale Hockey Rink in New Haven, completed in 1958, a sort of immense dinosaur in reinforced concrete, expressive not only in its form but also in the internal space. This spatial and expressionistic conquest was confirmed in Dulles airport in Washington, but above all in his masterpiece: the TWA terminal in John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York (finished posthumously in 1962), a very light and expressive bundle of wings in flight placed on the ground, in which the internal space is shaped and modeled in every detail. He married Aline Saarinen, who was a noted art historian, and died prematurely of a brain tumor at age 51 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
