An Architecture of Multiplicity
Eero Saarinen was born in 1910 in Kirkkonummi, Finland, to Eliel Saarinen, a prominent Finnish architect and urban planner, himself the son of a Lutheran pastor, and Loja Gesellius, a textile artist trained as a sculptor. Eero’s early life was spent in the creative atmosphere of Villa Hvitträsk, the family home his father designed on a wooded bluff overlooking a lake outside Helsinki, which became a center of Finnish artistic life. Eliel Saarinen was critical of the indiscriminate use of different styles so prevalent in nineteenth-century architecture. Instead, his practice drew on the Finnish crafts movement and on modernist currents, particularly those originating in Germany, as his Helsinki Central Station and decentralization plan for Helsinki (1905–14 and 1917–18, respectively) demonstrate. After winning worldwide acclaim with his second prize in the international competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower in 1922, Eliel emerged as a major force in the international architectural community. A year later, he uprooted his professional practice and his young family and emigrated to the United States, initially to Evanston, Illinois, and then to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he soon developed the buildings and the architectural curriculum of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, an arts school located just outside of the burgeoning city of Detroit. Thus, Eero Saarinen arrived in the United States for the first time in 1923 at the age of twelve. With his father as director of the graduate department of architecture and city planning and his mother in charge of the weaving studio, the young Eero Saarinen was immersed in a community devoted to the arts. And, as he matured, there was little doubt that he would follow in his parents’ footsteps and choose an artistic path. At the age of eighteen, when the time came for him to decide on a field of study, Saarinen hesitated briefly over whether to pursue sculpture or architecture before deciding on the former, which he studied in Paris at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere from 1929–30. This Montparnasse atelier was where, inspired by the teaching of Antoine Bourdelle, well-known sculptors like Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder also studied. But by the fall of 1931 Saarinen had already changed his mind and enrolled in architecture at Yale University’s School of Fine Arts. He completed the four-year curriculum in three years, graduating with honors in 1934. Unlike the experimental atmosphere at Cranbrook, Yale’s architecture program was traditional. The modernist-inspired Bauhaus-type alternative, more radical in breaking with history, came later, when
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Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe emigrated to America, the former taking up a professorship at Harvard in 1937, the latter establishing himself as director of architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago in 1938. Thus, like nearly all other architecture schools at the time, Yale followed the model of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, emphasizing design practice above all. Students were regularly required to complete esquisses or fast designs, as well as projects, or elaborated designs. And in addition to standard subjects such as theory, history of architecture, archaeological research, calculus, structure, and construction, course requirements included drawing, watercolor, and modeling.12 12. Bulletin of Yale University. School of Fine Arts, New Haven, academic year 1931–32, Yjg 81 A2, 37–44, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.
