Eero Saarinen [Hardcover]

Jayne Merkel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2005

Eero Saarinen was one of the world's most celebrated architects at the time of his death at the age of 51; he designed and built more than 35 buildings in his lifetime and collaborated on 30 more with his father, renowned architect Eliel Saarinen. Eero's career began in childhood: As the son of the esteemed Eliel, designer of Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Eero grew up in an intellectually charged environment surrounded by art and design, and entered his first architectural competition while still in grade school. Eero Saarinen trained and practiced with his father until the early 1950s, when he established his own firm and began to design some of the most influential institutions of his day, among them residential colleges and a hockey rink at Yale University, an auditorium and chapel at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, American embassies in London and Oslo, and corporate complexes for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories that spearheaded the creation of the modern suburban office park. While all of these projects blur the boundaries between architecture, art, and landscape, none share a single, identifiable style. Saarinen explored new materials and techniques in every building, developing innovative uses of granite, glazed bricks, reflective glass, concrete, and curtain-wall technology to suit each program. Such wide-ranging approaches to his architecture made Saarinen difficult to classify, and interest in his work dissipated soon after his death. This volume is the most thorough monograph published to date on Eero Saarinen and the first major publication on the architect in 40 years. Organized chronologically in 14 chapters, it traces Saarinen's life and career from his childhood in Finland to collaboration with his father, through his iconic airport projects of the 1960s, documenting more than 60 commissions and competitions. The approximately 300 illustrations include period photography by renowned architectural photographers Ezra Stoller, Balthazar Korab, Harvey Croze, and others; rarely seen original sketches, concept drawings, and plans; and more recent color photography. The book also quotes numerous interviews with Saarinen's colleagues and architecture critics, such as Robert A.M. Stern, Florence Knoll, and Cesar Pelli, examining how Saarinen was viewed in his own time and today.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

In 1956, when Saarinen made the cover of Time, he was America's most renowned architect. His sculptural modernism-evident in such commissions as the T.W.A. terminal at Kennedy Airport, the CBS building, and the St. Louis Arch-was in perfect accord with the country's postwar mood. He trained at the school founded by his father, the celebrated Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, and established important relationships there with his future collaborators Charles and Ray Eames. An indefatigable worker, he oversaw more than forty staff architects at the height of his practice, and created in detail hundreds of possible designs for each project. After his death, in 1961, his work fell into critical neglect. Merkel's handsome volume presents the first truly comprehensive survey, and seeks to demonstrate how Saarinen could be "mainstream and avant-garde at the same time."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

About the Author

Jayne Merkel is an architectural historian and critic and serves on the editorial board of Architectural Design in London. She was the editor of Oculus, the journal of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, from 1995 to 2002. A prolific writer, she is the author of five books, and over the past 25 years has written for Art in America, Progressive Architecture, and Harvard Design Magazine, among many other publications. She was the architecture critic for The Cincinnati Enquirer from 1977 to 1988, and is a former director of the graduate program in criticism at Parsons School of Design in New York. Author's residence: New York, NY

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Phaidon Press (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 071484277X
• ISBN-13: 978-0714842776
• Product Dimensions: 11.7 x 10.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #451,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jayne Merkel is an art historian and critic who writes for Architectural Design/AD magazine in London, Architectural Record and The Architects Newspaper in New York. She is the author of Eero Saarinen, several books on contemporary architects and architecture, and numerous museum catalogues. Her script for the documentary film "The Gateway Arch, A Reflection of America" received an Emmy in 2007. A former editor of Oculus magazine in New York and former Architecture Critic of The Cincinnati Enquirer, her writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Connoisseur, Design Book Review, Harvard Design Magazine, Landscape Architecture, Progressive Architecture, the New York Times, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Wilson Quarterly, and other periodicals. She has taught writing, criticism, and art history at various colleges and worked as a curator at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Taft Museum, and University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Saarinen Rediscovered, August 25, 2005

By 

Sara Caples (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eero Saarinen (Hardcover)

Disclosure: I'm an architect who began the journey towards the profession by writing an undergraduate thesis on Saarinen in the late 1960s.
Many of the things that were intriguing about his work then-the curious combination of 50s zen emptiness with passages of delicate, almost decorative, details-and the search for form which veers from neo-Miesian boxes to the curves and cylinders of MIT to the neo-vernacular stone of the Yale Colleges to the sinuous curves of the TWA and Dulles terminals-these explorations fascinate still and have much to teach us.
Merkel's book takes all these strains, examines their roots and development in a clear and comprehensive way.
Merkel has made a wonderful book, one that brings Saarinen's work back to life.
The images are stunning and so full of information, a nice balance of design process and completed buildings.
The text is full of fascinating information, much of it freshly researched-a compelling read.
The book design is gorgeous, and I don't just mean the stunning visual design.
Merkel has focused on design explorations and the strong built work of Saarinen without stalling us unduly in the less successful work.
If you're interested in Saarinen's work, get this book!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insights into Saarinen, September 23, 2005

By 

Martha Dunkelman - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eero Saarinen (Hardcover)

Merkel's book is one of those monographs that open so many doors onto the work of an artist or architect that you never view it in quite the same way again. Saarinen's buildings are analyzed in all their surprising variety, with an open acknowledgment of their differences, rather than an insistence on an individual style. The special emphasis placed on the critical responses to the projects when they were built is particularly enlightening and should serve as a model for the study of modern architectural history. The author, with a refreshing willingness to deal with negative material as well as positive, asks and answers the very interesting question of the reasons for the decline in Saarinen's reputation after his untimely death. This book is very valuable as a study of Saarinen and also for its insights into the development and fluctuations of movements in modern architecture.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful, Superbly Researched and Written, October 1, 2005

By 

Susana Torre (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eero Saarinen (Hardcover)

Merkel's handsome volume is a pleasure to read and to view, as it contains great vintage photographs of Eero Sarinen's projects. The author's special contribution is her insightful contextualization of Saarinen's original and eclectic output through discussions of his background, working methodology, and the critical reactions his buildings elicited.