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Important philosophical volume by foremost architectura...)
Important philosophical volume by foremost architectural conceptualist emphasizes organic design, interrelated study of all arts. He provides introductory, retrospective, and prospective analysis, explores the creative instinct, organic order, form and vitality, form and time, form and logic, form and function, the dogmatic, mechanized, and the creative mind, and more.
(Eliel and Eero Saarinen occupy a unique position in the h...)
Eliel and Eero Saarinen occupy a unique position in the history of modem design. From Helsinki's famous railroad station to the Cranbrook Academy to the CBS Headquarters their work spans two continents and eight decades and has had a major influence on twentieth-century architecture and city planning. Eliel Saarinen: Projects stands alone in its treatment of the elder Saarinen's Finnish work in terms both of scholarship and production. Saarinen's ability to present his plans in expressive drawings was his trademark. Often considered independent works of art, 200 of these drawings are reproduced here in full color and augmented by 900 black and white illustrations in an unusually fine example of architectural bookmaking.
Saarinen's Finnish years represent the laboratory within which he developed the skills and the concepts to advance an aesthetic of modem design responsive to international trends yet steeped in regional expression. Eliel Saarinen: Projects follows every permutation of the architect's career from the Finnish Pavilion at the 1900 Paris World's Fair, which brought Saarinen and his partners to the forefront of the international scene, to his design of stamps and banknotes, his large city planning projects, and his successful competition for the Chicago Tribune office building, which in 1923 prompted Saarinen's move to the United States.
Marika Hausen provides a biography of Saarinen and a critical assessment of his handling of interiors and details, his execution of drawings, his use of stone and wood, and his design of building types ranging from country house to urban projects, followed by commentaries on the most important individual projects, including the famous studio/home of Hvitträsk. Kirmo Mikkola discusses Saarinen's work in town planning, documenting 30 of his most important projects. Tytti Valto writes about Saarinen's partnership with Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren, covering some 210 architectural and town planning projects produced by the firm. And Anna-Lisa Amberg describes and catalogs Saarinen's arts and crafts and industrial design projects.
Eliel Saarinen: Projects has been in preparation for almost a decade. Research was sponsored by the Kone Foundation. A publication of the Museum of Finnish Architecture.
Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen was a Finnish-American architect, educator, and city planner.
Background
He was born on August 20, 1873 in Rantalsami, Finland, the second of the six children of the Lutheran pastor Juho Saarinen and his wife, Selma (Broms) Saarinen. He was two years old when the family moved to Ingermanland in the vicinity of St. Petersburg, Russia.
Education
Visits to the Hermitage Museum opened his eyes to painting, and for a time he was undecided whether to be a painter or an architect.
He went to school in Finland. Saarinen was educated in Helsinki at the Helsinki University of Technology.
Career
In 1896, while still a student, he and his classmates Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren founded their own firm. Recalling the beginning of his career, Saarinen claimed that "in those days architecture did not inspire one's fancy. Architecture was a dead art form, and it had gradually become the mere crowding of obsolete and meaningless stylistic decoration on the building surface. "
Saarinen was only twenty-seven when the firm of Gesellius, Lindgren, and Saarinen created the Finnish pavilion for the Paris Exposition of 1900. Its odd, proud tower proclaimed that the designers, even though Russian subjects at the time, were under the spell of their own folklore.
Two years later came the commission for the National Museum in Helsinki, completed in 1910. This was a bold granite monument, but Saarinen first proved himself at Hvitträsk, the great rambling country house that he and his partners built for themselves at Luoma, eighteen miles outside Helsinki. Begun in 1902, it was one of the remarkable houses of the western world in the early twentieth century. It was set on the shore of the White Lake, from which it derived its name and its high-pitched red-tile roof and its pine timbers and granite made the most of its romantic site.
Lindgren resigned from the firm in 1905 and Gesellius two years later, leaving Saarinen the sole owner of the estate. The major work of Saarinen before World War I was the superbly monumental Helsinki railroad station (1904 - 1914), which served as a wartime hospital before Finnish independence permitted its intended use.
His last commission in Finland, and one of his most brilliant, was a seven-story bank on the Keskaterinkatu in Helsinki; the simplicity of its facade showed that in 1921 he far surpassed an American prototype, the DeVinne Press Building in New York (1885), by Babb, Cook, and Willard.
In the meantime he had been active as a city planner, redesigning Reval in Estonia and in 1912 winning second prize in the competition for the layout of Canberra in Australia. Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells won first prize in 1922 in the competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower, Saarinen placed second.
Pocketing his $20, 000 award, Saarinen moved early in 1923 to Evanston, Ill. , where he labored over what he thought were the necessary corrections to the Chicago plan of D. H. Burnham. In fact, he despaired of the Chicago plan. Saarinen's project for an underground parking garage at Grant Park came to nothing, but in 1923 he was asked by Emil Lorch, head of the school of architecture at the University of Michigan and the brother-in-law of Sullivan's faithful friend George Grant Elmslie, to teach in Ann Arbor.
Among his students were his future son-in-law, J. Robert F. Swanson; John Ekin Dinwiddie; and Henry S. Booth, son of George Gough Booth, publisher of the Detroit News.
In September 1925, Saarinen moved to Cranbrook, where a $12 million foundation was set up to make Booth's dreams come true. The children's school, Brookside, was entrusted to young Henry S. Booth. The boys' school, begun in the fall of 1926 and opened to the public a year later, was Saarinen's first American commission. Following Booth's suggestion, he remodeled the old farm buildings of the estate for the boys' use, but the court-yards and the handsome brickwork, not to mention the tall tower that dominated the scene, were the marks of an artist who could bring the arts and crafts to terms with the twentieth century. Less successful was the institute of science (1931 - 1933) and the art academy (1926 - 1941).
Far more eloquent, and possibly Saarinen's finest work in the United States, was Kingswood, the girls' school (1929 - 1930), an extraordinarily subtle achievement for the creator of the Helsinki railroad terminal. The decade had seen very little as fresh and original.
Saarinen was to make his greatest mark in America as an educator, but it would be difficult to list all the artists he engaged as head of the art academy to stimulate his students and revive the arts and crafts. Saarinen taught there and became president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1932. Graduates of Cranbrook included city planners Carl Feiss and Edmund Bacon, architects Ralph Rapson of Minneapolis and Harry Weese of Chicago. Of course, the most distinguished of all the graduates was Eero Saarinen, who was far from being overshadowed by his father and easily won an international reputation.
In spite of the administrative load that he carried, Eliel Saarinen remained an active architect, a partner from 1941 to 1947 in the firm of Saarinen, Swanson, and Associates, which included his daughter Pipsan, his son-in-law, and Eero and Eero's first wife, Lily Swann. From 1947 to his death he was the partner of his son in Saarinen, Saarinen, and Associates. In 1937, assisted by Eero, he designed the community center for Fenton, Mich. , whose brick facade confirmed his allegiance to Scandinavian traditions. From 1938 to 1940 father and son worked on the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo. Also in 1938 Eliel, at the invitation of Serge Koussevitzky, planned the Tanglewood Music Shed at Stockbridge, Massachussets, whose ceiling proved that he had looked more than once at the sculpture of Alexander Calder.
In 1939 both Saarinens collaborated with the firm of Perkins, Wheeler, and Will on the Crow Island School at Winnetka, Ill. The efficiency of this one-story brick building won immediate respect. With J. Robert F. Swanson as their associate, both Saarinens received first prize in 1939 in the competition for the Smithsonian Art Gallery in Washington, but this was never built.
Father and son again worked together on the Tabernacle Church of Christ for Columbus, Ind. , in 1940. This was at once delicate and monumental and also distinguished by the tapestry woven by Eliel's wife. To the son rather than the father may be attributed the A. C. Wermuth house at Fort Wayne, Ind. (1941 - 1942), which indicated that Eero was well aware of the international style advocated by Walter Gropius. But Eliel's hand was evident in the Des Moines Art Center (1944 - 1948); the chapel for Stephens College, Columbia, Mo. (1941 - 1952); and Christ Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, completed just before he died at Cranbrook of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Five years before his death, he had become an American citizen.
(City: Growth issues, decay possibilities, and a future look.)
Views
Saarinen was affected by the Jugendstil (the German version of art nouveau) and was conscious of the importance of William Morris' struggle in England for the revival of the arts and crafts. He was an extravagant admirer of the Viennese city planner Camillo Sitte.
Quotations:
"Youth, " he said, "is always close to the future, for in the future it discerns its actions to come. It is through the young that the coming art form is to be found. "
Personality
Eliel Saarinen possessed the gift of encouraging individuals to realize themselves.
Although he had no use for jazz and could not enjoy the work of modern painters as significant as Matisse and Picasso, he was a far from dogmatic teacher and loved to relax at the annual Cranbrook Ball, at which he and his wife, seated on seashell thrones, lorded it over their domain.
Quotes from others about the person
Louis Sullivan called Saarinen "a voice resonant and rich, ringing amidst the wealth and joy of life. "
Interests
Artists
Jean Sibelius was his favorite composer.
Connections
After the divorce from his first wife, Mathilde (who then married Herman Gesellius), on March 6, 1904 Saarinen married his second wife. On Mar. 6, 1904, he married sculptress Loja Gesellius, his partner's sister. She was the mother of his two children, Pipsan and Eero.