EeroSaarinen.net

In terms of lifespan, architects are the opposite of rock stars. They tend to live long and do great work after their 80th birthday. Philip Johnson was still designing when he died at the age of 98. As you read this, Oscar Niemeyer, now 101, is probably scheming up his next project. Frank Lloyd Wright checked out at 91, six months before his Guggenheim Museum was to open. But Eero Saarinen is an exception. When the Finnish-born architect and furniture designer died at 51 (with nine buildings in progress), he was as famous as an architect could be. He’d designed a slick new landmark for St. Louis (the Gateway Arch) and had been on the cover of Time magazine. Perhaps most indicative of his place in 1950s America, President Eisenhower was scheduled to detonate a celebratory atom bomb at the opening of Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. But that part of the festivities was cancelled.
     Critics have said that Saarinen was too much of a corporate hired gun, designing safe buildings for large companies like CBS and IBM. His office parks, according the New York Times’ Nicolai Ouroussoff, “reinforced the sweeping shifts that reflected the dark side of the postwar era: the racial tensions and white flight, the excesses of the consumer culture, the suburban isolation.” And that may, in part, be true. But he was also behind some undeniably innovative designs. Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, a rich survey of his work at the Museum of the City of New York, succeeds at displaying the man’s range.