Eliel Saarinen
b. Rantasalmi, Finland, 1873;
d. Michigan, 1950.

Eliel Saarinen is a Finnish famous architect who, by preserving a rigour from Art Nouveau and never quite succumbing to the full sentiment, produced exacting structures and restraint ? especially at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan ? which can be seen to pre-empt many of the concerns of later Finnish architects. Eliel Saarinen studied at Helsinki Polytechnic, graduating in 1897, and from 1896 to 1907 was in partnership with Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren, perhaps the most important practice in Finland. In 1923, he migrated to the USA, where he began another extensive career, designing, and then teaching at Cranbrook. Eliel Saarinen joined in partnership with his son, Eero Saarinen, in 1937. Though Saarinen’s cultural significance is greater than Sonck’s, it is important to see them together in the early stages of the so-called National Romantic movement. Saarinen’s early monumentalism owed more to OLBRICH and the Vienna Secession movement. His work expressed a natural and, we could say, a Nordic refinement of the more fluid Art Nouveau from Europe. But it was never a mere restrained adaptation of, say, Voysey. Material, form and culture played a more solid picturesque and symbolic role in Saarinen’s work. The amalgam of local Finnish farm settlements with the emerging Arts & Crafts elements echoed also H. H. Richardson and Webb (the Red House). The peak of a demanding eclecticism and timely internationalism in this picturesque period was undoubtedly the Finnish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair (carried out with Gesellius and Lindgren, 1900). The excess and flair of such borrowing and adaptation, tinged with an untutored symbolism, might also account for some of Saarinen’s later second- thought refinements. Already by 1902, with Hvittrask, a clearer development of the vernacular was achieved, emphasized again by the Helsinki Railway Station project (1904). Saarinen subsequently revised the station; a stronger, cleaner massing occurred, with, however, the beginnings of that systematic heaviness: all front and interior. We get a further clue to Saarinen’s subsequent direction and neat monumentalism in his Chicago Tribune Competition design (1922), which, tough placed second, led him to immigrate to the USA. In 1925 his calm monumental restraint emerged in the Cranbrook project which was to occupy him for years. Saarinen indicated just how well an abstracted classical style could suit the Finnish sensibility. And though this sensibility was interrupted by the arrival of Functionalism in Finland, Cranbrook indicates what is now being seen as a consistent link with the Minimalism and the thematic drive to overcome frivolous decoration seen in the 1960s and 70s. The links back to Asplund and Saarinen should be clear.

List of major buildings / works:
Finnish Pavilion, World Fair, Parts, 1900.
Hvittrask, Kirkkonummi, 1902.
Suur-Merijoki Country House, Viipuri, 1902.
Nordic Bank Building, Helsinki, 1904.
Finnish National Museum, Helsinki, 1910.
Helsinki Railway Station, 1914.
City Plan for Greater Helsinki, 1918.
Tribune Tower, Chicago, 1922.
Berkshire Music Centre, Tanglewood, Mass., 1938.
Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, 1941.
Tabernacle Church of Christ, Columbus, Indiana, 1942.
Civic Centre, Detroit, 1947.

Bibliography:
Eliel Saarinen, The City: its growth, its decay, its future, New York, 1943;
Eliel Saarinen, Search for Form, New York, 1948.
A. Christ-Janer, Eliel Saarinen, Chicago, 1948.
Hausen, Herler et al (eds) Eliel Saarmen, Otava, Helsinki, 1991.