Eero Saarinen, the adopted American who drew a monument

Few naturalized citizens have signed the American skyline the way Eero Saarinen did. He arrived from Finland in 1923, graduated from Yale in 1934, and in 1948 won the competition for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis: the Gateway Arch, built through the sixties. The General Motors Technical Center in Warren followed in 1955, then Dulles Airport outside Washington. When he died in Ann Arbor in 1961, at fifty-one, America was still constructing what he had drawn.

His furniture entered everyday life by the same door: the Womb chair of 1948 and the Tulip collection of 1956, both designed for Knoll, and both part of the catalogue La Mercanti brings to American corner offices.