A Global Legacy
Saarinen took second place in the Chicago Tribune Tower competition and moved to America in 1923. His design won far more ecstatic praise than the winning entry by the New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood — the latter would go on to head the team that designed Rockefeller Center.
Saarinen settled in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., north of Detroit, where he built the three campuses of the Cranbrook schools, which the former New York Times critic Paul Goldberger called “one of the masterworks of American architecture.” Saarinen also designed First Christian Church in Columbus, Ind., a building that Frank Gehry said knocked him to his knees; an open-air concert hall for the Tanglewood music festival in the Berkshires; the museum at the Des Moines Art Center; and Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo. He died at Cranbrook in 1950.
Throughout his life, Saarinen remained unafraid to evolve and grow, and never let himself be captive to any particular style, an achievement that made my tour of Helsinki deeply illuminating. A world of difference separates works like Cranbrook and the Pohjola Insurance headquarters, yet a current of inventive genius unites them, exalting the Finnish capital city and a leafy Michigan suburb alike.
Michael H. Hodges, an author in Ann Arbor, Mich., is writing a biography of Eliel Saarinen, to be published in 2028 by Wayne State University Press in Detroit.
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