Eero Saarinen (1910–1961), son of architect and Cranbrook Academy of Art director Eliel Saarinen and his wife Loja, a textile artist, studied sculpture in Paris in France and architecture at Yale University in the USA before working in furniture design with Norman Bel Geddes and as an architect with his father.
Saarinen worked on further furniture projects with his friend Charles Eames, a student at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and in 1950 he finally set up his own practice in Bloomfield Hills.
The expressiveness of his work drew on the greatly expanded technical possibilities of new materials: steel and concrete in architecture, plywood and plastic in furniture design.
Together with Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen won the "Organic Design" competition organised by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) under Eliot Noyes. Their design in plywood and foam rubber was the first three-dimensionally moulded shell chair, but it could never go into series production due to a lack of manufacturing technology. Only later did plastics technology advance far enough, and it was not until 2006 that Vitra began producing the Organic Chair.
As an architect, Saarinen is associated above all with Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the TWA Flight Center at Kennedy International Airport in New York. Over the years, he received numerous awards and prizes for his work, which has been the subject of many exhibitions.
