Eero Saarinen
Finnish-American architectWikipedia
11
MENTIONS
9
EPISODES
9
PODCASTS
Search complete. 11 mentions across 9 episodes found for "Eero Saarinen".
Sep 11, 2026
David HumphriesHOST
Three of them were doing the slog of culling in Sydney when the fourth arrived late from the United States.
David HumphriesHOST
That fourth judge was the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, the man who gave us the Gateway Arch, the famous TWA terminal.
David HumphriesHOST
He's the wonder boy of mid-century modernism.
David HumphriesHOST
Saarinen looked at what his colleagues had already shortlisted, and then he asked to see the entries they had rejected before he'd arrived.
David HumphriesHOST
And then according to Pitt, the author, he said in a heavy Finnish accent, gentlemen, here is your opera house.
David HumphriesHOST
Entry 218 was Utzon's.
David HumphriesHOST
The other three judges who had already thrown it out came around and In January of 1957, the winner was announced.
David HumphriesHOST
Utzon was in his kitchen in Denmark when the phone rang.
Liana OsterGUEST
It was, the building was the very first US embassy in, in the UK.
Liana OsterGUEST
So it was built back in the 1960s by, uh, Eero Saarinen.
Liana OsterGUEST
And at the time too, kind of just as Mara said, Mayfair, you have these beautiful buildings, red brick and in comes this really interesting building, brutalist by nature.
Liana OsterGUEST
Um, You know, at the time they weren't too happy about it.
Chad StuemkeGUEST
And when you turn the gateway arch sideways or you look at it from its side, it actually looks like an obelisk.
Chad StuemkeGUEST
And Eero Saarinen, the artist, he actually created it this way on purpose.
Chad StuemkeGUEST
So it was an arch from the front, an obelisk from the side, creating the gateway arch, another portal.
Shayn JonesHOST
Something weird to think about, by the way, with all of this portal symbology.
OlympiaHOST
Other designers experimented with completely different forms.
OlympiaHOST
In the 1950s, the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen created his famous tulip chairs and tables supported by a single central pedestal instead of four legs.
OlympiaHOST
Around the same period, designers in Scandinavia became particularly influential.
OlympiaHOST
Scandinavian furniture often combined modernist simplicity with traditional materials like wood, and an emphasis on craftsmanship and comfort.
KathyNARRATOR
The Roosevelt roof is big enough to park a pair of 747s.
KathyNARRATOR
From some angles, it can put you in mind of Eero Saarinen's well-shaped skating rink at Yale, but its sod floor and planted beds of prairie grasses also suggest earth lodges that tribal nations built across the Great Plains.
KathyNARRATOR
The roof's curves and still outcroppings for skylights make the building nearly disappear in a landscape of hills and hoodoos.
KathyNARRATOR
Up on the Butte, the library sits to one side, seating center stage to an expanse of green about the size of an NFL stadium, ringed by a boardwalk.
KathyNARRATOR
The Roosevelt roof is big enough to park a pair of 747s.
KathyNARRATOR
From some angles, it can put you in mind of Eero Saarinen's well-shaped skating rink at Yale, but its sod floor and planted beds of prairie grasses also suggest earth lodges that tribal nations built across the Great Plains.
KathyNARRATOR
The roof's curves and still outcroppings for skylights make the building nearly disappear in a landscape of hills and hoodoos.
KathyNARRATOR
Up on the Butte, the library sits to one side, seating center stage to an expanse of green about the size of an NFL stadium, ringed by a boardwalk.
Johnny VHOST
I thought both of those were very clever, I think, of the things.
Johnny VHOST
But I will also have to give it that in FPL, maybe the least creative team won in Allen and Saarinen.
Johnny VHOST
So they didn't even have a team name.
Adam HammesGUEST
We didn't either until the night before.
29 MINS LATER
Johnny VHOST
That is your top 10 for MPO.
Johnny VHOST
Over on the FPO, we haven't even talked about the winners yet.
Johnny VHOST
It was a playoff between Allen and Saarinen, official team name, and Onskagens and Taylor Chosek, which...
Johnny VHOST
They they didn't really have a set name.
speaker_0NARRATOR
What saved them was pure chance.
speaker_0NARRATOR
The American architect Eero Saarinen arrived late to the judging, pulled Utzon's rejected folder back out, and said, this one, this is genius.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Those are the white sails you can picture rising over the harbor.
speaker_1NARRATOR
But winning the competition was the easy part.
EmilyNARRATOR
He was holding a tiny notebook with his careful, slanted handwriting exposed beneath a page of loose sketches.
EmilyNARRATOR
We collided halfway between a knockoff Saarinen and a tower of deconstructed frames.
EmilyNARRATOR
The punchline was that we both apologized for being the clumsy one.
EmilyNARRATOR
Our first shared drink was a cheap Pinot Grigio drunk from shatterproof plastic, both of us pretending we couldn't distinguish it from Grand Cru.