Word: architecte
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sire & Sisu. Saarinen credits his natural competitiveness partly to his Finnish sisu* and the example of his hardworking, hard-playing father. Eliel Saarinen was Finland's No. 1 architect (the Helsinki railroad station and National Museum) and town planner (Helsinki, and Canberra, Australia). He set up headquarters in a romantic, rustic, 38-room retreat which he and his partners built overlooking Hvitträsk (White Lake), 18 miles outside Helsinki. After he married a sister of one of his partners, Sculptress Loja Gesellius, they turned it into a center of crafts and architecture. Among the stream of visitors...
...Tivoli Gardens. Boy!" The younger Saarinen clinched his position as top U.S. architect with the $100 million, 25-building General Motors Technical Center outside Detroit, hailed by Architectural Forum as "an architectural feat which may be unique in our time." A model of modern architecture, the G.M. center has glistening expanses of aluminum, greenish glass and grey porcelain façades, interchangeable office paneling and windows "zippered in" with neoprene gaskets...
...years later Eero proudly walked off with first prize in a Swedish newspaper matchstick-design contest, collected 30 Swedish kronor ($8). The same week, his father received a telegram from Chicago announcing that he was runner-up in the international Chicago Tribune Tower contest, with a design that Skyscraper Architect Louis Sullivan hailed as "a voice, resonant and rich, ringing amidst the wealth and joy of life." Eliel Saarinen promptly dipped into the $20,000 prize to move his family to the U.S. When the family landed in Manhattan, Eero Saarinen was twelve...
Growing up the son of a world-famed architect was no easy problem for Eero Saarinen. He had to win through to a style of his own. First clear-cut sign that he was going to be something more than just the son of a famous father was the national competition for the St. Louis Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in 1948. The elder Saarinen submitted a formal monumental design; Eero's entry was an audacious, 590-ft. stainless-steel arch that looked like a giant, glistening croquet wicket-which he had conceived while bending a wire and wool pipe...
...Architect Saarinen and his wife and son live in a made-over, nine-room Victorian brick farmhouse of 1860 vintage, smoothed off, brightened and painted white inside, and furnished with Eero's furniture. (His mother lives on the back lot in a sleek modern house he designed to fit her favorite, handloomed, 25-ft.-long Finnish rug.) In cutting away a section of one wall to throw light on the main stairway of his old house, Saarinen has made the exterior what he considers "better Victorian than ever." The garage has been converted into a joint study, where Eero...