Word: saarinen
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Grapefruit & Grace. Architect Saarinen sleeps, eats and dreams architecture, reduces just about every experience in life to architectural terms, reaches for the nearest napkin or note pad to graph everything from adolescent rates of learning to the qualities that make up a beautiful woman. Last week, as his wife watched with fascination, he casually turned over his breakfast grapefruit, began carving out elliptical parabolic arches which he then carried off to the office to see if they might do as an idea for the office model of T.W.A.'s new terminal at Idlewild...
Such complete absorption gives Saarinen the bemused air of the absent-minded professor. Flying out last April to see the site of the new Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs (on which he is an architectural consultant), he suddenly turned to his companions, asked: "Just who is Grace Kelly?" Next day he told his wife earnestly: "I really didn't know Kay Francis was marrying that Prince...
...Saarinen is absorbed day and night in the problem of visualization, likes to start working early with models, is notoriously extravagant with paper. In a single evening he will run through 170 ft. of tracing paper; he made more than 2,000 drawings in revising his plan for the London embassy. A girl in his office, whose desk Saarinen sometimes uses late at night, inevitably knows when he has been there. Says she: "It's like slicing down through the excavations at Troy-tracing paper, tobacco, paper, paper, matches, more paper, a cigar stub, paper, paper, paper...
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...
Center of the household for Eero and his older sister, Eva-Lisa, always called Pipsan, was the 90-ft.-long, all-purpose studio and living room where the elder Saarinen worked with his draftsmen while his wife sculptured and sewed. Such a beehive of cultural activity was calculated either to smother or force the children. In the case of Eero and Pipsan, it forced...