Eliel Saarinen

Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen (, ; August 20, 1873 – July 1, 1950) was a Finnish and American architect, designer, and urban planner. Saarinen worked in a diverse range of styles in his native Finland and, after emigrating in 1923, the United States. He was the father of architect Eero Saarinen and designer Pipsan Saarinen Swanson. Through his rejected 1922 design of the Chicago Tribune building he indirectly played a significant role in the influence and development of Art Deco architecture.

Early life and work in Finland

Saarinen was born in Rantasalmi on 20 August 1873 to Lutheran clergyman Juho Saarinen and his wife, Selma. Saarinen was educated in Helsinki at the Helsinki University of Technology. From 1896 to 1905 he worked as a partner with Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren at the firm Gesellius, Lindgren, Saarinen. His first major work with the firm, the Finnish pavilion at the Paris 1900 World Fair, exhibited an extraordinary convergence of stylistic influences: Finnish wooden architecture, the British Gothic Revival, and the Jugendstil. Saarinen's early manner was later christened the Finnish National Romanticism and culminated in the Helsinki Central railway station (designed 1904, constructed 1910–14). Saarinen first settled in Evanston, Illinois, where he worked on his scheme for the development of the Chicago lake front. In 1924 he became a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. His iconic tea urn (c. 1934) was first exhibited in 1934–35 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Over the years, the tea urn has been widely exhibited, including in St. Louis Modern (2015–16) at the St Louis Art Museum, Cranbrook Goes to the Movies: Films and Their Objects, 1925–1975 at the Cranbrook Art Museum (2014–15), and in 2005–07, in the touring exhibition Modernism in American Silver: 20th-Century Design, organized by the Dallas Museum of Art, which also traveled to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. In 1951–52, the tea urn was featured in the Eliel Saarinen Memorial Exhibition which traveled to multiple venues across the United States. 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 Saarinen (1910–1961), became one of the most important American architects of the mid-20th century as one of the leaders of the International and Neo-futurist styles. Saarinen's student Edmund N. Bacon achieved national prominence as Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970.

Eliel Saarinen received the AIA Gold Medal in 1947.

Significant works

Saarinen designed entire city districts of Helsinki, but they were never built due to cost. This picture shows his plan for the Haaga district. Illustration of the Kalevala House, an unbuilt building designed by Saarinen.