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His chief sin was to produce some buildings, like the 1962 TWA Terminal, that were downright sculptural in an era that deplored any deviation from the rectilinear norm. History has not necessarily been kind to his father, though he’s come in for more-sympathetic appraisal in recent years.Įero, whose practice was in Bloomfield Hills, was always an outlier in the modernist movement. My whole goal,” he added, “was to raise my dad out of the ashes.” The three-year project, Eric said, ended up being “very cathartic and psychologically centering for me. “I had a pile of books probably three feet high of all my father’s work, because I really wanted this to be a true story.”
#AMERICAN MASTERS EERO SAARINEN TV#
My father kept the house, so all our friends, and the school right next door - that was all gone.”Įric, his sister and mother moved to Massachusetts.Įric, who’s spent decades filming TV commercials, was initially reluctant to sign on when first approached by filmmaker Peter Rosen, who’s produced “American Masters” episodes on Jascha Haifetz, Garrison Keillor and Arthur Rubinstein.įinally Eric gave in, on the condition that he act as director of photography, as well as narrator - instinctively recognizing that photographing his father’s work, which he didn’t know well, might clear a path to understanding the man whose memory had been, up ’till then, mostly bitter. “We were kicked out of the house,” he said. He was just 12 when his father left his mother. “I hated my father,” Eric said by phone from his home south of Los Angeles. What could have been just a straight profile of a significant architect morphs into a deeper story about a son’s quest to know and reconcile with his late father, When Eero married his second wife, New York Times art critic Aline Bernstein Louchheim, he largely abandoned his original family.
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Giving the story added punch is the fact that it’s narrated by Eric Saarinen, Eero’s son from his first marriage to sculptor Lilian Swann Saarinen. On Tuesday, PBS “American Masters” will present “Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future,” which traces the meteoric trajectory of this remarkable career. Louis, the Jetsons-style TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport, the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., and much of the furniture at Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills. Saarinen was the creative genius behind the Gateway Arch in St. He died on the operating table at the University of Michigan Hospital. Eero Saarinen, son of the man who built Cranbrook, was a modernist architectural giant just hitting his stride when he was felled by a rapidly advancing brain tumor in 1961.