DesignerFinnish-American
Eero Saarinen
3 active items
Eero Saarinen arrived in the United States in 1923 at age thirteen, when his father, architect Eliel Saarinen, accepted a position at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The younger Saarinen absorbed design thinking from childhood, studied sculpture in Paris and then architecture at Yale, graduating in 1934. He returned to Cranbrook, where the academy's ethos of integrating craft, art, and function shaped everything he would later do.
His first major recognition came in 1940, when he and Charles Eames shared first prize in MoMA's Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition. The partnership with Eames pointed toward what would preoccupy Saarinen for the rest of his career: furniture that treated the human body not as a mechanical problem but as something to be cradled. The Womb Chair of 1948, conceived after Florence Knoll described wanting something that felt like a basket full of pillows, translated that ambition into a fiberglass shell upholstered in foam and fabric. It entered production through Knoll, the company that would become the primary vehicle for his furniture output.
The Pedestal Collection, completed for Knoll in 1956 and in production from 1957, grew from Saarinen's irritation with what he called the slum of legs under a typical interior, the visual confusion of multiple supports crowding a room's floor. He wanted a single continuous form from floor to seat. Technology constrained him: plastic alone could not bear the structural load, so the bases were cast aluminum, while the chairs used fiberglass shells. The result, sold under the name Tulip, gave each piece the silhouette of a flower stem rising from a single point. Tables in marble or plastic laminate completed the family. The Tulip chair became one of the most reproduced furniture designs of the twentieth century.
As an architect, Saarinen pursued a different logic in nearly every commission, refusing to settle on a signature style the way many of his contemporaries did. The General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan applied a Miesian rigor to an industrial campus. The TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport, completed after his death, used paired concrete shells to evoke flight from every angle, inside and out. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, won in competition in 1948 and completed in 1965, became the largest sculpture in the United States. Dulles International Airport introduced the mobile lounge concept to aviation and remains in service today.
Saarinen died on September 1, 1961, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from complications of a brain tumor surgery, aged fifty-one. Several of his most significant buildings were still under construction.
At auction, Saarinen's furniture, primarily the Pedestal series, circulates steadily through Nordic and European sales. The 75 lots recorded on Auctionist concentrate in tables (43 lots) and chairs (24 lots), with houses including SAV Magasin 5 (13 lots), Bukowskis Helsinki (8 lots), and Quittenbaum (5 lots). Top results include a Knoll table at 48,210 SEK and a Tulip dining table at 22,000 EUR, confirming that authenticated Knoll-produced examples command the strongest prices. Six lots are currently active.