Eliel Saarinen

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Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen (August 20, 1873, Rantasalmi, Finland – July 1, 1950, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, United States) was a Finnish architect who became famous for his art nouveau buildings in the early years of the 20th century.

Hvitträsk in Kirkkonummi,Finland (1903)

Saarinen was educated in Helsinki at the Helsinki University of Technology. From 1896 to 1905 he worked with Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren in their office Gesellius, Lindgren & Saarinen. Their first major work, the Finnish pavilion at the World Fair of 1900, exhibited an extraordinary convergence of stylistic influences: Finnish wooden architecture, the British Gothic Revival, and the Jugendstil. Saarinen's early manner was later christened the Finnish National Romanticism and culminated in the Helsinki Railway Station (designed 1904, constructed 1910-14). He also designed the Finnish markka banknotes introduced in 1922.

Eliel Saarinen moved to the United States in 1923 after his noted competition entry for the Tribune Tower in Chicago, Illinois. Although Saarinen's entry won second place and was not built in Chicago, his design was fully realized in the 1929 Gulf Building in Houston, Texas. Saarinen continued his professional and academic career based in Michigan.

In 1925 George Gough Booth asked him to design the campus of Cranbrook Educational Community, intended as an American equivalent to the Bauhaus. Saarinen taught there and became president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1932. Among his student-collaborators were Ray Eames (then Ray Kaiser) and Charles Eames; Saarinen influenced their subsequent furniture design.

He became a professor in the University of Michigan's Architecture Department; today a professorship at Michigan's A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning is named for him, and the College holds an annual lecture series in his honor.

His son, Eero (1910–1961), became one of the most important American architects of the mid-20th century, as one of the leaders of the International style. Saarinen's student Edmund N. Bacon achieved national prominence as Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970.