My Father the Visionary
Eero Saarinen
Eero Saarinen, born in Kirkkonummi, Finland, in 1910, was an influential architect and designer. A pioneer in the mid-century modern aesthetic, Saarinen is perhaps best known for his designs of the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis, the TWA Flight Center in New York City, and the Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC. Working with the furniture company Knoll, he designed some of the most iconic pieces of the twentieth century, including the Tulip Womb Chair. Saarinen, who died at age fifty-one in 1961, had three children, Eric, Susan, and Eames.
Eric (age three) with Eero, 1945
my father was always competing with his father, Eliel, a world-famous Finnish architect whom I called Farfar. Eliel had moved the family to the United States in 1923 to design, build, and teach at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He and my grandmother Loja, whom I called Mormor, had two children, my aunt Pipsan, who became a textile and furniture designer, and my father, who became an architect. By the time I was born, in 1942, my father was working with Farfar at his firm, Saarinen, Swansen and Associates, but was making a name for himself, too, in particular with his collaborations with his friend Charles Eames.
I was five years old when my father won the competition to design the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis. He and his father had entered the competition separately. They had built a divider that ran the length of their shared office at Cranbrook. My father worked on one side, assisted by Charles, and my grandfather worked on the other. My dad’s design was a catenary arch, and I remember that at this time, our basement had a bunch of chains hanging from the ceiling that my dad used to figure out the shape. When he won, the telegram was sent to his father, congratulating him on his design. Farfar and the office celebrated for three days straight. On the third day, the phone rang at my grandparents’ house. It was George Howe, the head of the jury. “I’m sorry,” he told Farfar. “My secretary got confused. That telegram was meant for your son, the other E. Saarinen.” That was a big moment in my father and grandfather’s relationship.
Farfar was a huge part of my dad’s life and a huge part of my life, too. In fact, my earliest memories are of him coming up to me and poking his finger into my stomach. He made a pfffft noise like a balloon and I would laugh and laugh. He was a generous teacher and gifted at inspiring others. He had a great sense of humor and was totally devoted to his family. He was everything my father wasn’t.
Mormor was a part-German, part-Swedish, part-Finnish sculptor. She was very organized, very Teutonic. She designed her own clothes and ran Cranbrook’s weaving department. But she was also extremely supportive of her husband. My dad was always looking for a wife like Mormor. When he met my mom, Lilian, he thought she was perfect. She was a beautiful woman, funny and full of intuition. She was a member of the first US Women’s Olympic Alpine Ski Team in 1936, but her true passion was art. She used to go to the Detroit Zoo to paint, sculpt, and draw the animals. As my father would eventually find out, however, she also suffered from chemical imbalances and depression. And then, when I was about three, she contracted tuberculosis and went to live at a sanatorium. We didn’t see her for three years. My father was so busy at the time, we hardly ever saw him, either. Instead we lived with friends of my maternal grandparents. We didn’t spend time with either our mother or our father during that period except once, when my father took us to the sanatorium to wave hello at our mother, fifty yards away on the screened-in porch.
When my mother came back, she was taking Seconal to sleep and drinking at the same time. That was a bad combination. My mother hired a nanny to help cook and do laundry and take care of us while my father was at work, but he said that she could barely manage us even then. Still worse, in his eyes, was that she was more interested in her own art than in his. She loved my dad, but she wasn’t Mormor.
When I was eleven, Aline Bernstein, a writer for the New York Times, took the train to Detroit to write a profile of my father. She was a real knockout. She and my father had an immediate, deep connection. I later found out that they slept together that very night. Soon after they met, I walked into our home to see my mother packing boxes. She was in tears.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Your father and I are divorcing,” she replied, “and he is kicking us out of the house.”
I think Aline wanted my mother as far away as possible. My father, meanwhile, made my mom file for divorce—even though she didn’t want to—because he thought it would look bad if he was the one who filed. I hated my father for a long time because of that.
Though my sister and I lived with my mother, she drank a lot, and eventually my father and Aline insisted I attend a boarding school. Once, when I was a teenager, my dad came to the school. He asked me what I wanted to do, what my interests were, and I told him I was in the chess club. So we played chess, and he systematically beat me over and over again. Then he left.
Soon I went away for college. But during the summer, I worked at Dad’s architecture firm back in Michigan. I quickly found that I wasn’t passionate about architecture. However, by the end of the summer, I had saved up enough money to buy a car, and I decided to leave. My plan was to drive to Cape Cod, where my mom and sister were spending the summer. I asked my father for permission. He said absolutely not. Aline intervened. “He’s not going to crash,” she said, “and if he gets into trouble, he’ll figure out how to deal with the situation.”
I got to Cape Cod with only a few misadventures. But shortly after I arrived, Aline called. “Get on a plane and come out to Bloomfield Hills,” she told me. I did. When I arrived at the house, my dad was reading a book about Michelangelo and mumbling.
“Let’s go to the Bloomfield Hills Hunt Club,” suggested Aline. We had never been there in our lives, but I said okay. When we got to the club, I stretched out on a cot by the pool. Then Aline put an eye mask over my eyes and a blanket over my body. “Just wait here,” she said. “Your father will be right over.”
I remained there, wondering what was going to happen. Even-tually I heard his footsteps on the pool deck and a little bit of scuffling and some whimpering. Then I heard my father mumbling, “I can’t,” and shuffling off. A few minutes later, Aline came back over, removed the eye mask, and told me to go back to Cape Cod. I was very confused but didn’t question what had happened. It was just another instance of my father being inscrutable.
A few weeks later, I was back in Cape Cod when Aline called again to tell me my father had a brain tumor and was going into surgery. There was a one-in-ten-thousand chance he would survive. That’s what he couldn’t do. He couldn’t tell me he was dying. Shortly after, she called back and said he was dead. I started laughing, laughing at the irony that I—who hated him—now had to walk down the path to the ocean and tell my mother, the person who really loved him, that he had died. I was quiet for a full year after that. I was wounded and felt a lot of shame. I had very low self-esteem. My dad had died, and I couldn’t do anything to make him proud or change the fact that he was gone. Our relationship, which had always been strained, would forever be left unresolved. For a long time, I was lost, but eventually I found my way to my own art.
I became a filmmaker and cinematographer. I shot film for Gimme Shelter and Jimi Plays Berkeley. I worked with Roger Corman on Death Race 2000 and with Wes Craven on The Hills Have Eyes. This work, I felt, gave me some sort of validation. Each film proved I was there. Then, fifty years after my father died, I decided to make a documentary about him. It was called Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future. As I began researching my father, I found a trove of love letters between him and Aline that she had donated to the Smithsonian. Reading those letters was like taking uppers and downers at the same time. My father and Aline were drawn to each other—to hell with my mother. But Aline was good for him; she got him on the cover of Time magazine. Being with her was the only practical way for him personally and professionally to find happiness, and yet he sacrificed us for it.
For the first time, making the film, I really saw my father’s brilliance. I used all my skills as a filmmaker to document his work. I even shot in 6K, a resolution so high you can’t yet project it. But I wasn’t just shooting for now. I was shooting for the future. My dad always said what he wanted was to be part of the history of architecture, and I’m happy that’s something I helped preserve.