The Eliel Saarinen Collection​

The Eliel Saarinen Collection

While others would have been content to rest on their laurels after a successful career in the country of their birth, Eliel Saarinen saw a future away from his native Finland. In 1923, at the age of fifty, he sailed to America in search of a new architectural frontier. Soon thereafter, while a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Eliel Saarinen had the good fortune to befriend George G. Booth, a newspaper magnate and patron of the arts. Booth found in Saarinen a man sympathetic to his dreams of a vast educational center to be developed at Cranbrook, his 260 acre estate twenty miles north of Detroit. Saarinen found the ideal patron in Booth - sensitive, respectful and appreciative of good design.

For the next 25 years, Saarinen devoted his creative energies to an academic community that soon grew to include the Cranbrook School for boys, the Kingswood School for girls, an Academy of Art, and a Science institute. Saarinen carefully transformed a raw and gentle landscape of existing farm buildings and yards into an extraordinary visual delight. Saarinen constructed a hierarchy of form, function, and purpose. He saw space as a totality, believing that an object should be designed within its next largest context; a brick within a wall, a chair within a room, a room within a house, a house within a street, etc.

In addition to the furnishings for the Cranbrook School itself, Saarinen constructed a residence for his family from 1928-1930. While it contained both living and working spaces, into this residence Saarinen designed a suite of furniture that stands as a remarkable achievement in the history of furniture design. From numerous sketches of armchairs, lounge chairs, cabinets and tables for his residence, one pattern was selected - a series of vertical rectangles with a triangular section towards the top.

One of the most important rooms in the house was the octagonal dining room. Paneled in a honey-color oak with niches in each corner, the space featured an elaborate inlaid table surround by chairs with fluted backs. The richness of detail and demonstration of the art of design and handicraft have since become most associated with this gifted, transplanted architectural genius.