Left: Hvittrask's studio house, 1902-1904. Right: Pohjola building, 1899-1901

Eliel Saarinen bridged the continents as he started his career in Finland but eventually emigrated to the United States.

With such figures it sometimes makes a difference in which order one sees their work. I got to know the ‘American Saarinen ’ before the Finnish one, and was well aware of that line of geological sensibility in his work which achieved an even greater abstraction the farther away that he moved from his origins.

His unbuilt entry to the Chicago Tribune Headquarters Competition of 1922 (won by Hood and Howells) had a vast influence in the United States, and was really the prototype for an entire generation of American commercial and federal buildings employing vertical striations, attenuated pieces and set-backs of one kind or another. But this very concept of the tall building in turn owed something to Louis Sullivan and to Frank Lloyd Wright, or to a certain ‘organic component' in American architecture...[+]