Designer of the Month: Eero Saarinen

Week 2: Furniture and the General Motors Technical Center

Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.

Eero Saarinen first found fame while still working as part of his father's, Eliel Saarinen's, architecture firm in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where Saarinen had gone to work after his graduation from the Yale School of Architecture in 1934. Saarinen first gained recognition in 1940, when he and Charles Eames collaborated on a range of furniture, using rubber-bonded plywood and metal, for an organic design competition sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[1] Each designer took first place in the competition, and although their winning designs were never mass-produced, they laid the groundwork for Saarinen’s postwar furniture designs, all of which were produced by longtime friend and Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate, Florence Knoll Bassett, chief designer of Knoll Associates.[2]

Florence Knoll Bassett and Eero Saarinen. Courtesy of All Modern.

As the exhibition Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future explains, "His designs, from the Womb chair to the Pedestal series of sculptural chairs and tables, have become icons of postwar design, representing what Playboy magazine called the 'exuberance, finesse, and high imagination' of American furniture design at mid-century."[3] But furniture design, while one of Saarinen's passions, was not the focus of his career, and it was during these early years of his career, working at his father's firm, that Saarinen began to distinguish himself with his architectural designs.

General Motors Technical Center. Photo by Ezra Stoller/Esto. Courtesy of Metropolis Magazine.

With the close of WWII, the Saarinens' architectural practice found itself with a few very important commissions, the most challenging of which was the 20 million dollar General Motors Technical Center, in Warren, Michigan, just outside of Detroit.[4] Although there is some contention as to who, Eilel or Eero, was actually  the impetus for specific designs within the Saarinens' firm, the resemblance of the GM Technical Center to Norman Bel Geddes's General Motors Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, which Eero worked on, suggests that the credit goes largely to the younger Saarinen.[5] Although construction was delayed by WWII, the postwar period saw a boom for the automobile industry; while the original design for the center was relatively small, work on the final scheme, which was greatly expanded to encompass a 900-acre site, began in 1949 and was completed in 1956.[6]

Eero Saarinen, with the plans for the General Motors Technical Center behind him, on the July 2, 1956 cover of TIME Magazine. Courtesy of TIME Magazine.

With a design of 25 low, freestanding buildings, a central lake with fountains, a stainless steel watertower, and wooded area, Saarinen's design for the General Motors Technical Center effectively created a new type of office: the corporate campus.[7] As Saarinen describes it:

Our intention was threefold: to provide the best possible facilities for industrial research; to create a unified, beautiful, and human environment; and to find an appropriate architectural expression...Thus, the design is based on steel - the metal of the automobile. Like the automobile itself, the buildings are essentially put together, as on an assembly line, out of mass-produced units...Some sort of campus plan seemed right, but we were concerned with the problem of achieving architectural unity with these horizontal buildings. The earlier scheme we made in 1945 had its great terrace and covered walk with unified the buildings into one great enterprise, but these had proved expensive and impractical. In the new scheme, developed when General Motors came back in 1948, we depended on simpler visual devices. One of these is the twenty-two-acre pool...Another unifying device is the surrounding forest, the green belt that should in time give the buildings the effect of being placed on the edge of a large glen.[8] 

Throughout the construction of the GM Center, the Saarinens' offices continued to expand, with Eero taking over the business after his father's death in 1950.[9] By this time, Eliel and Eero had proven to favor two very different styles of modernism, with this becoming especially apparent during a certain 1947 design competition.[10]

[1] Rupert Spade, "Introduction," Library of Contemporary Architects: Eero Saarinen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 11.

[2] Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future online, "Furnishing the Twentieth Century," http://www.eerosaarinen.net/furnishing.shtml, (accessed April 14, 2011). 

[3] Ibid.

[4] Rupert Spade, "Introduction," Library of Contemporary Architects: Eero Saarinen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 11.

[5] David G. De Long, "Introduction: Rediscovering Eero Saarinen," in Eero Saarinen: Buildings from the Balthazar Korab Archives, ed. David G. De Long and C. Ford Peatross, (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2008), 12.

[6] Rupert Spade, "Introduction," Library of Contemporary Architects: Eero Saarinen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 12.

[7]  David G. De Long, "Introduction: Rediscovering Eero Saarinen," in Eero Saarinen: Buildings from the Balthazar Korab Archives, ed. David G. De Long and C. Ford Peatross, (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2008), 12.

[8] Eero Saarinen, "Architects and Architecture," in Eero Saarinen On His Work, ed. Aline B. Saarinen, (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1962), 24. 

[9] Rupert Spade, "Introduction," Library of Contemporary Architects: Eero Saarinen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 13.

[10] David G. De Long, "Introduction: Rediscovering Eero Saarinen," in Eero Saarinen: Buildings from the Balthazar Korab Archives, ed. David G. De Long and C. Ford Peatross, (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2008), 12.