In the vernacular of furniture, the chair is the apparatus that forms the intimate bond between the individual and the room, as the great architect and designer Eero Saarinen no doubt observed. A chair may only be empty space until someone sits in it , but it is abundant with the personality and style of the individual that are his or her own. It is also a reflection of the designer. Eero’s name is often invisible to those who make use of the objects of his talent; he is an author without a pen, a designer who turns necessity into virtuosity. The same perspicuous work which expresses the tenets of one’s soul also reveals in his designs a part of his working brain.

How one uses a chair and the use for which it was designed, for instance, deliver it from the commonplace into the dulcifying realm of near-art. A chair is stylishly organized as part of a room, which may offer clemency from the burdens and squalor of everyday life – a place to call one’s own – and reveals the station of an individual in relation to a collective. The view from within a chair is always different than the view from without.

Consider one of Eero Saarinen’s most famous designs, the tulip chair, with its sleek and ergonomic contours, which in the ‘50s and ‘60s was the epitome of the term “space-age”. It was widely popularized in the original Star Trek as the chair in which the bridge crew sat. Looming above them was the bulky captain’s chair, which was dominated by the gesticulating and expressive William Shatner, around whom the crew acted as satellites. The furniture communicated without any words the particulars of the characters and their relationships to each other.

A chair might also suggest succession, whether with a throne or a business chair or a paternal hand me down. An empty chair can be a specter of the past, a lurid ossuary of reposed memories and outmoded routines. It is difficult to imagine, for those who are not exclusively dependent upon the affection or continuity of a forbearer, the imposition and pressure that a vacant space creates by the inexorable fact of its emptiness.

Eero’s relationship with his own father, Eliel Saarinen, might not be quite so metaphorical, but Eliel, who worked on such buildings as the National Museum of Finland and helped galvanize the art nouveau movement, was a difficult act to follow. Steeped in that environment, Eero was inculcated from a young age with the very love for architecture and design that his father had carried so deeply, but he seemed to have a natural gift for it as well, a kingly inheritance wrapped in organic matter. From the womb those talents were incubated in Hvitträsk, a studio home for the members of Gesellius, Lindgren, and Saarinen, an important Finnish architectural firm at the time.

European is often considered a pretense for worldliness, whether or not there is any truth in that vagabond notion, but the fact of his birth, nestled in sanguine and security in the city of Kirkkonummi, afforded him endless opportunities. The Saarinens could move between elite circles with ease. After immigrating to the US with his family in 1923 when he was just 13-years-old, Eero studied under his father at the Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and continued his education at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and the Yale School of Architecture; separate they offered architectural prestige, but together they were sublime.

Eero collaborated with Charles Eames on many of his nascent designs in the field of organic home furnishings, for which they won a competition in 1940, and went onto design such furniture as the grasshopper and womb chairs, the latter of which features a round and amniotic design, enclosing the person who sits in it. While the euphoria of the modernist spirit celebrated the free expression of the existential philosophies that it so routinely mimicked, Eero Saarinen found codified in the natural world the kind of practicality and design that could be fashioned into industrial design furniture.

Eero also collaborated with his own father, Eliel, as an article from the National Building Museum explains, on the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, which was a collection of research buildings that reflected a transition from father to son. Eero described the layout as “a constellation of buildings” spanning over 300 acres and clustered around a single pool. It was this pool, along with a water tower, that reflected Eliel’s own design. Life magazine dubbed the GM campus a “Versailles of Industry”. Like a collection of furniture in a room, each building maintained a sense of identity yet contributed to a cohesive whole. A dedication ceremony for the $100 million structure was held in 1956, which President Eisenhower attended. The buildings are still used as the center of GM design and ingenuity today.

According to the book “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future”, Eero had difficulty conceptualizing his designs in the same way that his father did, but this professional weakness is lathered in irony since it is his accomplishments that are best remembered. Though he is known for designing the Washington Dulles International Aiport and CBS Black Rock in New York, his most famous piece of work is the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis, Missouri: the gateway to the west. Designed in 1947 by Eero Saarinen and structural engineer Hannskarl Bandel, it was opened to the public on July 10th, 1967, six years after his death.

Its soaring sweep to the sky, which commemorated the Louisiana Purchase during a time of postwar fervor and the great expansion of American idealism and influence, capped Eero’s lifetime achievements and conflated together local identity with that of the larger community – that is the tradition-laden east and the large and untamable west – without a seam. To simply step through it is to be transported to a different place. Perhaps unlike a traditional author the monument may not be called “The Gateway Arch” by Eero Saarinen, but it most certainly will be part of his lasting legacy.

>Written by d/visible contributor Jacob Stutsman.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Technology, Architecture, Art & Design, Interior Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.