Eliel Saarinen

Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen (1873 to 1950) was a Finnish and American architect, designer and urban planner, born in Rantasalmi, Finland. From 1896 to 1905 he was a partner in the Helsinki firm Gesellius, Lindgren, Saarinen. Its Finnish pavilion at the Paris world fair of 1900 combined Finnish wooden architecture, the British Gothic Revival and Jugendstil, and his early manner, later called Finnish National Romanticism, culminated in the Helsinki Central railway station, designed in 1904 and built from 1910 to 1914. He also drew up city plans for Tallinn and for greater Helsinki. After his second-place entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower in 1922 he moved to the United States in 1923, designed the campus of the Cranbrook Educational Community in Michigan and became president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1932. He was the father of the architect Eero Saarinen and received the AIA Gold Medal in 1947.