Landmark museum retrospective of renowned architect Eero Saarinen to launch international tour October 2006. The 50th anniversary year of the Museum of Finnish Architecture climaxes with the extensive retrospective exhibition on Eero Saarinen: Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future from October 7 to December 6, 2006

Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future is the fi rst retrospective on the Finnish - born architect, whose buildings and furniture transformed 20th century architecture and design and continue to inform visual culture today.

The press review will be attended by the Finnish and American organisers as well as Eero Saarinen’s relatives. The exhibition will be introduced by its American curator, Mr. Donald Albrecht.

Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future is accompanied by a 450 - page book with over 450 illustrations, published by Yale University Press. Besides this, a small exhibition catalogue in Finnish, Swedish and English will be published with the support of the American Embassy in Finland.

The exhibition is organized by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, The Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, and The National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., with the support of the Yale University School of Architecture.

Eero Saarinen
When Finnish - born American architect Eero Saarinen died prematurely at age 51 in 1961, he had already become one of the most celebrated designers of the modern era. In the years following World War II, he produced a series of masterpieces of breathtaking individuality, including the 630 - foot - tall, stainless steel St. Louis Gateway Arch (1948 - 1964) along the Mississippi River, commemorating America’s westward expansion; the TWA Terminal (1956 - 1962) at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, where swooping concrete vaults thrilled travelers with the new glamour of worldwide flight; and “a Versailles of Industry” of aluminum and glass for General Motors (1948 - 1956) near Detroit.

Deploying progressive construction techniques and a highly personal, exuberant, and often metaphorical aesthetic, Saarinen’s work defied Modernist orthodoxies and gave iconic form to the postwar American ideal of an open-ended society of unbounded choice and diversity – an ideal that persists to this day. In his search for a richer and more varied modern architecture, Saarinen became one of the most prolific and controversial practitioners of his time, and one of the most influential.