Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) was incredibly influential in shaping the American postwar design movement. Born in Finland to Loja, a weaver and photographer, and architect Eliel Saarinen, one of the founders of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Eero was primed from the start to take a place among the designers and architects developing and strengthening an environment primed to change the domestic and industrial face of the nation.

Saarinen moved with his parents to the United States in 1923, went to study in Paris in 1929 and returned to enroll in the architecture program at Yale from 1930-34. After graduating he worked briefly as a furniture designer with Norman Bel Geddes, but left in 1937 to join his father's architecture practice in Ann Arbor, renamed Saarinen and Saarinen upon his inclusion.