Frank Lloyd Wright was no Milton Berle. And we certainly aren’t about to declare Eero Saarinen a regular side-splitter. But the Finnish-born architect — a no-nonsense master whose most renowned projects include the severely linear General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich., the fluid forms of the TWA Terminal at Kennedy International Airport, and the poetic skyscraping arch in St. Louis — definitely did enjoy a good joke.
When a corporate client facetiously proposed Victorian furniture for the modern office Saarinen was designing for him, the architect — whose own furniture designs are classics — wrote back suggesting lacquer trays and pillows in lieu of a boardroom table, a scheme he claimed to have pitched elsewhere. “General Motors did not wish to go along with this,” he noted, “they never told me quite why.”
Saarinen inherited his sense of humor — not to mention his talent — from his father, Eliel, an esteemed architect who headed the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloom-field Hills, Mich., and placed second in the 1922 competition to design a tower for the Chicago Tribune. At a reunion celebrating the work of Eero Saarinen and his one-time partner and brother-in-law, Robert Swanson, Cranbrook grad George Matsumoto recalled a visit to the campus by Wright. “We met in the lounge of the girls’ dorm where Wright plopped himself into a big armchair with all the students spread out on the floor before him. From the back of the room where Eliel stood, he said, `They say that Frank Lloyd Wright is usually frank but not often right.'”
Eero’s own quips were frequently dry as well. When asked during a presentation if he could speak a little faster, he paused, puffed on his pipe and replied, “No, but I can say less.”
Sometimes his remarks weren’t meant to be zingers at all, but just came out that way. When young architects came applying for a job, he often tested their drawing skills by asking them to sketch a horse. When one fellow claimed never to have seen a horse, he said, “Then draw a woman with no clothes on.”
One Christmas, he gave his mother a Detroit telephone directory as a present.
“She didn’t think that was very humorous, but everybody else did,” recalls Saarinen’s nephew, Bob Swanson. “In subsequent Christmases, Eero would come up with some sort of form using the pages of the telephone book — a big bouquet or a Christmas goose — and that was something we would always look forward to.”
`A relentless force’
For all his good humor, Eero Saarinen was highly competitive and hard-working. “As far as I’m concerned, he was not an easy person to work with,” states Gunnar Birkerts, who worked with Saarinen in Michigan in the early 1950s on such projects as the Milwaukee County War Memorial in Wisconsin.
“But the uneasiness came from his drive, a relentless force that kind of made him perform continually. Everybody around him was sort of sucked into that, so we were always under a certain pressure to achieve, to perform and to advance. That’s a positive pressure. But the project was everything.”
Charles Eames, the furniture and industrial designer who studied at Cranbrook and later became Eero’s good friend and collaborator once told the quarterly cultural journal The American Scholar, “He was a joy to compete along with and a terror to compete against. It was a healthy situation between us, but Eero would call me up in the middle of the night and start telling me about a design for a chair he had in mind.”
In fact, like Eames’ own molded plywood pieces, two of Saarinen’s chair designs have become hallmarks of mid-20th Century design: the snug, upholstered Womb Chair of 1948 and the Tulip, a pedestal chair made of fiberglass.
Saarinen’s competitive streak emerged early. At 12, he took first place in a matchstick design contest. In high school, he won a national soap-carving contest. As an adult on vacation at the beach, he caught wind of a sand-sculpting competition and joined in. But the most telling manifestation of this drive came when he competed with his own father in the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Competition in 1947.
At that time, Eero was still working with Eliel (he would not work on his own until his father’s death in 1950) and this quest to create a monument in St. Louis is enough to make a Freudian foam at the mouth.
“That was serious competition,” suggests daughter, Susie Saarinen, 59, a landscape architect and artist based in Colorado. “It meant that the almost entirely glass office had to be divided into two. Paper went up down the middle so nobody could see what anybody else was doing. They were very secretive, both of them, and very serious.”
But Saarinen was devoted to his father and when Eliel died in 1950 at the age of 51, Eero went into seclusion for a week.
Family that designs together
If there were times when life for Saarinen was indistinguishable from work, it’s no wonder. Born in 1910, Saarinen’s home in Finland was a 38-room residence/studio where his parents — mother, Loja, was a sculptor — were always at work with colleagues or entertaining such guests as Russian novelist Maxim Gorky and 19th Century composer Gustav Mahler. At Cranbrook, where the Saarinens settled in 1923, an extended family of creative students underscored the all-encompassing importance of work for Eero and his sister, Pipsan.
“He grew up under his father’s drafting table,” observes Susie. “And the family did everything together. They designed together, they played together — it was a family unit totally dedicated to whatever was the creative pursuit at the time.”
The atmosphere chez Saarinen fils wasn’t quite the same. Although Susie recalls sitting on the floor and drawing while Handel’s “Water Music” wafted from the record player, her parents’ marriage was troubled and they didn’t get the kids into the act quite the way the earlier generation had. “My father didn’t know what a father should do,” says her brother Eric, 62, a director of television commercials based in Santa Monica, Calif. “He would be extremely strict or he wouldn’t be there.”
Sounds like the typical midcentury dad; great at the office, not so good at home.
Nonetheless, both children fondly recall his fantastic (if infrequent) storytelling. “He liked whodunnit kind of things,” says Susie. “So he would say the State Department called and they had a problem in Iran and there was some scientist we had to get out. And it was absolutely charming and believable.”
“One time, it had something to do with secret plans hidden in the pyramids and Susie had to go because she could fit into small spaces,” remembers Eric. “And there was also a saber-toothed tiger guarding the pyramids with eyes that glowed in the dark. Just way out of whack for a bedtime story.”
Enhancing life on earth
Aside from the occasional ski trip and the bibulous parties he hosted once a project was completed, Saarinen was consumed by architecture. And while he spoke of architecture’s purpose to “enhance man’s life on earth and to fulfill his belief in the nobility of his existence,” his own home was nothing much. “We lived in a dark colonial house,” Eric says of the family’s home in Michigan. “He maybe changed a window, but he never had enough time, or cared, about the house that he lived in.”
Saarinen’s first marriage, to Lillian Swann, a sculptor, ended in divorce in 1953. The following year, he married art critic Aline Bernstein Loucheim (a son, Eames, was born later that year). In an Architectural Forum article by Walter McQuade commemorating Saarinen’s career six months after the architect’s death from a brain tumor in 1961, Aline Saarinen recalled life with her husband.
“Eero would come home around 5:45 and we would have martinis, and play with Eames until about 7:30.” After dinner and coffee, he did a bit more work then the two reconvened for “long, wonderful conversations, discussions, and yellow-pad drawings over nightcaps.”
Saarinen, who was dyslexic, wore glasses (which he was forever misplacing) and always donned a suit and tie for the office. He rarely went to work before 9:30 in the morning, and late nights — for him and anyone under him — were common.
But he was one of those men for whom others were more than willing to work. “He had this enormous commitment from his staff,” notes author Jayne Merkel, whose “Eero Saarinen: Heroic Modern” will be published by Phaidon and in stores next year.
Minoru Yamasaki, designer of the World Trade Center, Cesar Pelli, whose Petronas Towers in Kuala Lampur took the tallest building title from the Sears Tower, and Paul Rudolph, who designed the Art and Architecture Building at Yale University, are among the many well-known architects who worked with him early in their careers.
“He became this sort of pied piper of architecture,” says Merkel. “He believed so strongly in what he was doing that clients and staff members pushed themselves the way he pushed himself.”
As Saarinen himself once told a friend, “I admit frankly I would like a place in architectural history. Whether I do or not and how big a niche depends, in the end, on native talent and one cannot ask for more than one has. But one has to work as hard as one can.”
