Eero Saarinen

Eero Saarinen was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer, born in 1910 at Hvitträsk in Finland and brought to the United States at thirteen by his father, the architect Eliel Saarinen. He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, around the Cranbrook Academy of Art, studied sculpture in Paris and architecture at Yale, and worked in his father's practice. His best known work includes the General Motors Technical Center, the Dulles International Airport main terminal, the TWA Flight Center at Kennedy Airport, the Vivian Beaumont Theater and the Gateway Arch, for which he won the 1948 competition. He described his approach as a style for the job, so each project took its own form, and critics in his lifetime complained that he had no identifiable style. He died in 1961 during an operation for a brain tumor, and the American Institute of Architects awarded him a gold medal posthumously in 1962.