Sensitivity & Crust

To his friends and associates, Architect Eero Saarinen was known as "a man who is always en charette." The term goes back to the heyday of Paris' Beaux Arts, when young architectural students, late with their assignments, would hire little carts to rush their designs to their professors just before deadline. Saarinen was never tardy because of carelessness; it was merely that he was such a perfectionist that he could not let a plan out of his office until the very last moment. As he himself said, he worked "in elephant time." But before his death last week at 51, he dotted the U.S. and Europe with some of the best modern buildings of the 20th century.

His father, Eliel. was Finland's top architect. Fortunately, he was also a warmhearted man who did everything he could to encourage his little "Poju" (Sonny) when the boy began to show a talent for drawing. In 1923, when Eero was twelve, Eliel decided to move to the U.S. Young Eero went through the Yale School of Architecture, and in time he and his father went into partnership.

Mies & More. Eero was never a man to follow another blindly. He was enormously indebted to the disciplined ("Less is more") approach of Architect Mies van der Rohe. Yet he came to regard the strict functionalism of his elders in the International Style more as a "purgative" than a final answer. For the mammoth General Motors Technical Center in Detroit, Saarinen thought not only of Mies but of Versailles, Tivoli and San Marco.

When M.I.T. commissioned him to do an auditorium, he not only rejected the International cube, but also Louis Sullivan's dictum of "form follows function." He put up an auditorium encased in a gleaming white three-cornered shell that could just as well have been an exhibition hall or a supermarket. For the chapel at M.I.T., his inspiration was the grottoes of Capri, which get their magic light from the sun bouncing off the sea.

Womb & Wing. The purists were horrified, and Saarinen's work was always to be controversial. In his U.S. embassy in London he attempted to adapt a wholly modern building to the Georgian style of

Grosvenor Square. To many critics, the compromise failed. Nevertheless, there was always in Saarinen's designs--from his famous "womb" chair to the soaring, winged, 6,000-ton concrete roof of his TWA terminal at Idlewild to his new Dulles International Airport at Chantilly, Va., with its moving waiting room--a daring, a willingness to experiment with form that few of his contemporaries had. "An architect must have a combination of sensitivity and crust," he said, and he had both.

With his second wife Aline, he lived in an anachronistically Victorian farmhouse in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.,-where he covered page after page with notations for new designs while firing up a forest of matches to keep his ever present pipe alight. His office was full of new commissions (among them: the new CBS building near Rockefeller Center), and when he entered the University of Michigan Hospital a fortnight ago, he had been planning to pick up an honorary degree from the Technical Institute of Hannover, an award held by only five living men. The doctors' diagnosis was brain tumor; they operated, but the case was hopeless.

-Where his father got his first big U.S. job: designing the Cranbrook Institute campus.

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