Eero Saarinen

Eero Saarinen was a Finnish born American architect and industrial designer known for expressive, sculptural structures that broke from the boxy rectilinear vocabulary common in mid twentieth century modernism. His TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport, with its swooping, bird like concrete shell, and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, a soaring catenary curve of stainless steel, both became instantly recognizable symbols of postwar American architecture. As a furniture designer for Knoll, he created the Tulip chair and table, a single pedestal design intended to eliminate what he called the slum of legs beneath conventional furniture. Saarinen died relatively young, but the range and ambition of his built work left an outsized influence on both architecture and design in the United States.