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.
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.
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.
He was known for his work with art nouveau buildings in the early years of the 20th century. He created such famous buildings as Helsinki Central railway station, National Museum of Finland, Vyborg railway station. Besides, he designed the campus of Cranbrook Educational Community, intended to be an American equivalent to the Bauhaus. Saarinen taught there and became president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Among his student-collaborators were Ray Eames (then Ray Kaiser) and Charles Eames; Saarinen influenced their subsequent furniture design. Eliel Saarinen was involved in product design for the Wilcox Silver Plate Co. / International Silver Company in Meriden, CT. His iconic tea urn became extremelly popular. In addition to Cranbrook, the Dallas Museum and the St Louis Museum, The British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art also hold tea urn-related Eliel Saarinen designs. His son, Eero became one of the leaders of the International style architecture. Eliel received the AIA Gold Medal in 1947.
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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. "
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. "
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.
