Who was Eero Saarinen, and why has it taken decades since his untimely death in 1961 for people outside Helsinki to get his peculiar genius?
“Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future” is the first major retrospective exhibition on the Finnish architect’s life and work. Organized by New York’s Finnish Cultural Institute, Helsinki’s Museum of Finnish Architecture, the District of Columbia’s National Building Museum and the Yale School of Architecture, the show pulls into Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on January 30. The exhibition includes drawings, models and films of Saarinen’s signature projects — the Arch, the TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport, Dulles International Airport — plus the elegant furniture he designed, such as his “tulip chair.” Washington University architecture professor Peter MacKeith, associate dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, was instrumental in bringing the exhibition to St. Louis. For a long time, MacKeith says, the architecture community had considered Saarinen more of an exotic oddity than a modern master. “There was a long period subsequent to his death in ’61 when
