Eero Saarinen

1910–1961 · Finnish-American · 12 buildings on the wall

Eero Saarinen (1910–1961) was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer known for sweeping concrete shells, arches and cable-hung roofs. The son of the architect Eliel Saarinen, he grew up at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and studied at Yale. For Knoll he designed furniture such as the Womb chair and the Tulip chair. He died in 1961, aged 51, before several of his best-known buildings were finished.

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The Kresge Auditorium at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1955) is a thin concrete shell, one-eighth of a sphere, that touches the ground at only three points. The David S. Ingalls Rink at Yale (1958) hangs its roof on cables from a single concrete backbone, earning the nickname "the whale". The TWA Flight Center in New York (1962) spreads a thin concrete roof like a bird's wings on four Y-shaped piers, and the Washington Dulles Airport Terminal (1962) hangs precast concrete roof panels on cables across the building. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis (1965) is a 192-metre weighted catenary clad in stainless steel and the world's tallest arch. Eero Saarinen's projects are studied for the way structure creates form.

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