Blue looks good against the green grass of summer as well as the snow of winter. Of course, blue was also IBM’s official color.) Merkel makes another point about the color: Saarinen wanted the building to look good through all four of Minnesota’s brutal seasons. (While many critics thought the blue vulgar, Saarinen said it was inspired by Minnesota’s spectacular blue sky. Saarinen believed deeply in new technologies and experimented with several in Rochester, the most obvious being the vibrantly blue glass membrane that was also the world’s thinnest exterior wall at the time. The grouping of buildings around internal courtyards, for example, encourages friendships and collaborations, even as the overall campus looks aloof and slightly intimidating from afar. For one thing, IBM’s Rochester inventors have been awarded more than 2,700 U.S. Watson wanted the facility’s identity to be “both populist and aristocratic, contemporary and historic.” Quite an undertaking, but the facility has probably succeeded on all these counts. Watson required that Saarinen’s facility be designed for future expansion, be a good neighbor to the community, foster IBM’s own community of loyal employees, and visually express the character of the new IBM. Merkel calls Rochester the first corporate mixed-use campus-it combined manufacturing, distribution, basic research, engineering and design. The Rochester plant was IBM’s first building outside the East Coast-and also Saarinen’s first corporate campus (a concept he’s said to have invented). He had just taken over from his father, Watson Sr., and wanted to use design and architecture to promote his own vision for IBM’s global leadership, says Museum of the City of New York curator Donald Albrecht, who oversaw the 2009 exhibit, “ Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future.” Watson specified a modernist building to symbolize IBM’s transformation from a national company headquartered in the East to a corporation undergoing exponential growth, with facilities and companies all over the world. Eero Saarinen’s life’s work is kept in the United States.The Rochester plant was commissioned in 1956 by IBM CEO Thomas Watson Jr. He designed there in 1934 the renovation of the Swedish Theatre, completed in 1936, and in 1936 an entry for the competition of the Finnish Pavilion for the Paris World Fair. The museum has Eero Saarinen’s drawings from the time the newly graduated arhitect was employed with the office of Jarl Eklund in Helsinki. His pieces of furniture include the womb chair and sets of chairs designed for Knoll. Just before his death he made sketches for the Columbia Broadcasting System skyscraper in New York, his last building.Įero Saarinen is also known for his furniture desings, in which he used plastic. His other works include the Auditorium of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Dulles Airport in Virginia, the Embassy of the United States in London and the Milwaukee War Memorial Centre. One of Saarinen’s main works is the General Motors Technical Centre in Detroit built in 1956. The best example Saarinen provides of the sculptural possibilities of reinforced concrete is probably the TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York from 1962. This work reflects in a simplified way the strong sculpturality characteristic of Saarinen’s architecture. He had won the competition for its design in 1948. Saarinen made his breakthrough with the President Jefferson Monument built in 1959-64 in St. In 1939 he won the competition for the Arts Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, in 1940–41 together with Charles Eames the furniture competition of the Museum of Modern Art and in 1944 the Arts & Architecture housing competition in California. Saarinen was a frequent participant in architectural competitions. After his father’s death in 1950 Eero established an office of his own. Their office was at the Cranbrook Academy of Arts, whose buildings Eliel Saarinen had designed. Citizenship of the United States was granted to him in 1940.įrom 1938 to 1950 Eero Saarinen worked in collaboration with his father Eliel Saarinen. After graduating, he traveled in Europe for a couple of years. Eero Saarinen moved to the United States with his family at the age of 13.
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