A New Eero Saarinen Exhibition has launched in Helsinki (07.10-06.12) at the Kunsthalle here is the press release. That this is the first retrospective of the Architect is quite staggering given his body of work which, along with the Eames perhaps sums up U.S.A’s post war expansion best in the field of design. His list of clients runs like a who’s who in the Academic and Industrial world, and his Architectural style was flexible, and approach to engineering and materials pioneering. That he was sidelined so long in the Architectural establishment after his death, notably by Vincent Scully, is a grave omission that this exhibition should help to overcome. The exhibition following a couple of major books of him published last year follow the donation of the Saarinen office Archive to Yale University by Kevin Roche in 2002. It is these things which are re-establishing his reputation.
The exhibition introduces photos, drawings, and models both from the donated archives and from some material from the Finnish Architecture Museum, also a documentary film has been made to go with it. From Helsinki it goes on a world tour ending in 2010 at Yale University Art Gallery. I went to see it last weekend and it really will help to renew interest in a post war American great. Oh and I didn’t even mention his furniture design such as the Tulip or Womb chairs. If you want to dig a little the Yale archive has a guide page to looking at the saarinen archive also check out the digital image database page the entire archive seems to be online but is typically quite hard to explore. I’ve geolocated a few of his buildings in Tagzania, which you can look at on the map or download the google earth network link for it. Also see my post Reconsidering Eero.