Eliel Saarinen
Eliel Saarinen designed the Finnish Pavilion in Paris in 1900, the National Museum and the railway station in Helsinki. He moved to the United States in 1923 and led the Cranbrook Academy of Art. His son Eero Saarinen also became an architect.
Eliel Saarinen was born in 1873 in Rantasalmi in Finland, which was then a grand duchy under Russia. He studied painting at the university and architecture at the Polytechnic Institute in Helsinki at the same time, graduating in 1897. While still a student he founded a practice with his fellow students Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren. Together they quickly won important commissions, and they took part in Finnish National Romanticism, in which architects and artists drew inspiration from the Kalevala, Karelian building traditions and Finnish nature. Around 1900 Finland’s relationship with Russia was tense, and architecture became a way of expressing a distinct Finnish identity.
The practice made its breakthrough with the Finnish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. In Helsinki they designed the Pohjola insurance company building and the National Museum, and outside the city they built Hvitträsk, their shared studio and home. In 1904 Saarinen won the competition for Helsinki Central Station, built in 1909–1919 in a more austere style, with a granite façade and large statues holding lamps. He also drew up town plans. In 1922 his entry won second prize in the competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower, and the following year he moved to the United States, where he designed and directed the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He later designed churches and concert halls, often together with his son Eero.
Eliel Saarinen died in 1950. He made an unusual journey from Finnish National Romanticism to American modernism. His competition entry for the Chicago Tribune influenced skyscrapers in the 1920s even though it was never built, and Cranbrook became one of America’s most important schools of architecture and design, where Charles and Ray Eames and Florence Knoll, among others, studied. His son Eero Saarinen became one of the best-known architects of the post-war period. Helsinki Central Station is still one of Finland’s best-known buildings. Finnish National Romanticism was closely related to its Swedish counterpart, and Swedish architects such as Östberg and Wahlman were Saarinen’s contemporaries and shared his interest in materials, craftsmanship and Nordic tradition.