A born leader, Ambitious, Dominant, Strong-willed, Creative, Decadent, Indulgent, Sensual, Warm-hearted, Generous, Industrious, Progressive, Faithful, Loving, Arrogant, Patronising, Dogmatic, Intolerant



Above: Eero Saarinen. Photo © Oscar White/CORBIS

A commanding, perfectionist, creative Leo type, Saarinen enjoyed the public spotlight. He was not only the creative centre of his office, but also the discoverer of many talented people who worked for him: Kevin Roche, Charles Eames, Robert Venturi and the landscape architect Dan Kiley. He loved sculpture (he studied art at the Cranbrook Academy) and integrated contemporary American sculptures by Rossek and Lippold into his architecture. His sculptural approach to architecture was evidenced in his early St. Louis Jefferson Westward Expansion Arch, a sort of enlarged Möbius strip, and also in the "space-age", more biomorphic twa Terminal in New York, as well as in the Ingalls Hockey Rink in New Haven. The hockey rink inspired the emerging Japanese Metabolists in their first realised buildings (Kenzo Tange's Olympic Stadium in Tokyo being an almost direct copy of the hockey rink).

Saarinen's oeuvre encompassed large corporate headquarters, university buildings and churches. He emerged as the great 1950s' American corporate architect. As a "royal" Leo he could identify with the 1950s' image of the corporation as pater familias; he would often cite the (family) headquarters building as a kind of castle in the surrounding pastoral landscape. His John Deere & Co. Building is heavily landscaped and placed adjacent to a lake. Saarinen came up with innovative and original architectural solutions, incorporating new materials such as foam core and naturally rusted steel. His work could be perversely original. Instead of the classical Greek temple/museum entrance of ascension via a plinth, in Saarinen's cbs Building in New York one descends into a sunken court. The campus is a theme present throughout Saarinen's career. The relationship between Kresge Auditorium and the mit Chapel plays on the English common along with the integral American conception of the agrarian as civic space. Here Saarinen contrasts the sacred and the civic standing in a dialogue across a grassy knoll. A medieval moat surrounds the irregular arches on which the solid brick cylinder of the mit Chapel stands. Its strange yet discreet form is further elaborated on the interior by a series of curvilinear undulating walls, in contrast to the free-span thin shell structure of the auditorium.

Saarinen's works foreshadow Venturi's use of wit and inflection towards the surrounding architectural vernacular. Saarinen's humour is seen in his Women's Dorm at the University of Pennsylvania. The building has an ivy-covered, gently curved brick facade that mimics the neighbouring neo-Gothic university buildings. Visitors enter the dorm via a drawbridge-like stone bridge over a sunken "moat" (protecting the girls). The interior, in extreme contrast, is a sun-drenched atrium featuring a sunken cafeteria on the bottom level and the girls' rooms on the mezzanine level. Looking upwards from the entrance lobby, one can see the bordello-like French doors where scantily clad girls display themselves. Dan Graham, Jessica Russell

As one of the most influential conceptual artists of his time, Dan Graham first emerged in the 1960s alongside the Minimalists. His work crosses multiple mediums including performance, film and video, exploring shifts in individual and group consciousness and the limits of public and private space. This has evolved into the installations and pavilions for which Graham is most internationally famous. All his projects are democratically rooted in everyday urban life.

Jessica Russell studied and practiced art in Melbourne, Australia, where she also worked in film and television before relocating to New York where she currently studies architecture at The Cooper Union.