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Eero and Onward Miller Summer House in Ontario In 1950, Irwin Miller, then head of the prominent family that had earlier commissioned the firm's First Christian Church, reestablished the family's patronage with two additional commissions. They proved to be the first of many commissions to leading architects awarded through family support, with results that have made Columbus, Indiana, an architectural mecca. For the Miller family's summer retreat in Canada, Eero Saarinen designed a luxurious house in Ontario (1950-1952). Located north of Toronto and encompassing three lakes within its bounds, the area attracted people of wealth from the beginning of the 20th century and continues, into the 21st, to be a place of luxurious escape. Responding to a terrain that has been likened to that of the Adirondacks, Saarinen designed an informal, camp-like lodge with angled wings built of richly textured stone and wood, a modern interpretation of rusticity. Broad terraces link the house to its setting, while sleekly contemporary furniture both within and without — much of it designed by fellow Cranbrook students Ray and Charles Eames — affirms its mid-20th-century date. —David G. De Long Miller House in Indiana Then, in 1953, Irwin Miller gave Saarinen the commission for his family's primary dwelling in Columbus. Completed in 1957, it stands as once of Saarinen's major achievements, an elegant composition that infuses midcentury modernism with uncharacteristic richness. Designed as a largely open pavilion with private suites at each corner, it incorporates elegantly refined materials and luxuriously crafted details. Sculpturally spare steel column shafts terminate in open capitals with cross-shaped profiles that link to regularly spaced linear skylights, creating an effect in which light itself seems to delineate component parts of the house, suggesting separation without physical barriers. Alexander Girard (1907-1993), the renowned American designer, collaborated on the interiors, and photographs taken over time show how seasonal moods were effected in a time-honored manner with changeable coverings and accessories: bright reds and oranges for winter, whites for summer. The recessed seating area recalls a similar device that Saarinen and Eames had earlier used in Case Study House No. 9. On the walls behind, changing art works record the family's active collecting. Dan Kiley (Daniel Urban Kiley, 1912-2004) designed the expansive gardens that give the house special prominence, and there, too, are works of art, each well positioned within landscaped features so as to further enhance the setting. Rarely has the American Midwest been so persuasively shaped. —David G. De Long United States Chancellery in London The U.S. Chancellery in London (1955-1960) must have proved troublesome, at least to judge by the countless facade studies that Saarinen prepared, yet the results were refined. Wanting to relate in terms of scale and detail to the low neo-Georgian buildings then being erected around the Grosvenor Square setting they shared, yet apparently determined to do so in a structurally rational manner rather than through applied details, Saarinen developed a facade of interlocking, carefully proportioned windows in which the frames themselves were structural. As he said: "We sought harmony in various ways. The mass and general cornice height — the silhouette against the sky — conform to those of the buildings in the future square. There is continuity of material: the Portland stone which is trim and ornament on the red brick pseudo-Georgian buildings becomes the material for the embassy." —David G. De Long Deere & Company Headquarters In a third commission of 1956 for a corporate client — the Deere & Company Headquarters (Moline, Illinois, 1956-1964) — Saarinen dealt more decisively with the site and with the building's primary material, a newly available steel marketed as Cor-Ten. Set within a lushly landscaped setting where it bridged between two hills, the building became one with its site, gently defining one edge of an expansive lake that reflected its intricately detailed facade. The steel that Saarinen selected for both its structure and open screen of sunshades seemed calculated to celebrate the material of the company's farm machinery, as Saarinen himself suggested. It also provided economies of construction, for the steel, engineered so it developed a self-protecting layer of corrosion, required no added layer of fire protection, and could thus be left exposed. This Saarinen exploited to its fullest, detailing each component with exacting care, even erecting a full-scale bay to study its intricate properties. It set a high standard for the many suburban office complexes that seemed to become almost a corporate cliche in the years that followed, yet its elegant image again provoked critical dismay. —David G. De Long >>> Balthazar Korab was trained as an architect in Paris. He left Le Corbusier in 1954 to work in Eero Saarinen's office, beginning a career of over 50 years as an award-wining architectural photographer. David G. De Long is emeritus professor of at the University of Pennsylvania, where he chaired the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation from 1984 to 1996. C. Ford Peatross, Hon. AIA, FSAH, FHABS, is curator of the Architecture, Design, and Engineering Collections in the Print and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. This article is excerpted from Eero Saarinen: Buildings from the Balthazar Korab Archive, edited by David G. DeLong and C. Ford Peatross, a Norton/ Library of Congress Visual Sourcebook, copyright © 2008, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum...
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