Eero Saarinen

This is one of The Most Famous Architects You Need To Know. Finnish-American architect and industrial designer Eero Saarinen is renowned for his diverse range of designs for structures and monuments. Saarinen is most known for creating the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, the TWA Flight Center in New York City, and the Washington Dulles International Airport west of Washington, D.C. He was Eliel Saarinen's (a Finnish architect) son.

The International Style, the preferred aesthetic for new corporate headquarters and governmental office buildings around the world, developed from the Bauhaus's emphasis on straight lines during the postwar period. Eero Saarinen's mid-century designs acted as a welcome corrective in this context because the modernist ideal of simplicity in essence turned into a kind of corporate conformity. Saarinen used swooping arcs in his architecture instead of the uniform box popularized by the International Style, particularly in the 1962 JFK terminal he designed for the now-defunct TWA airlines. Although its gull-wing roof and exhilarating interior still excite, Saarinen's characteristic of architecture taking flight can be seen in other of his works, such as his 1947 design for St. Louis's majestic Gateway Arch.

The Kresge Auditorium at MIT is among his most well-known thin-shell concrete constructions in the country. Another thin-shell building is Yale's Ingalls Rink, also known as "the whale," which has suspension cables attached to a single concrete backbone. His most well-known creation, the TWA Flight Center, is the result of his brilliant ability to articulate each building's ultimate function in a way that expresses its "style for the job."

Date of birth: August 20, 1910

Accomplishments: Gateway Arch, General Motors Technical Center, Washington Dulles International Airport, TWA Flight Center, Tulip chair

Awards: AIA Gold Medal