JP: The Modern Architectural Revolution, Eero Saarinen. Eero Saarinen was the son of a father who was famous for his Helsinki Railroad Terminal and renowned for his early modern entry in the Chicago Tribune building competition. Eero told me, I grew up under his drawing table. He taught me that architecture has always to be considered an art. A briar pipe is a useful accessory to considered thought. Eero employed its pauses to good effect in the methodical conversation which reflected his probing mind. A number of these 1956 interviews were made in the comfortable surroundings of his remodelled nine-room Victorian home, not far from the campus of Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He was one modern architect who did not live in a modern house. He explained, the house is not really architecture. I think it's been much too overblown and made too important. His career was jump-started early with the General Motors Technical Center, a complex of twenty five buildings around a man-made lake. It's been described as the Industrial Versailles. Eero went on to design an array of admired, distinctly different buildings based on his agreement with Le Corbusier's belief that each problem has within it its own solution. Saarinen died at the height of his creative powers. His career was cut short at fifty one. He left us a legacy of work of abiding quality and distinctive imagination.

JP: What, in your opinion, are three great works of modern architecture, or maybe three great influences of modern architecture? ES: Yes, I'd rather speak about the influences. I think we have these three great forces that are with us every time we think about architecture. There is Wright and his life work. There is Corbu, his life work, and there is Mies and his. I think the specific jobs or the specific buildings, one has to take one from each of these as a symbol. I mean, we have Wright who, well, I've asked that several times when talking with students. I've asked how they define the influences of these. And I remember one of the best answers I got was that Wright started it all, Corbu gave it form, and Mies controlled. Now, it can be deeper and richer than that, but I feel, for instance, that Wright started it all. Wright has given us the greatest inspiration about use of space, has also shown us the plastic form of architecture, architecture in relation to nature, architecture in relation to the material, and to a certain degree to structure, and he has shown us also the dramatisation of architecture, which I think is a very important thing. We're at a period of architecture where those that, you know, some try to, in their work, be influenced by him directly. I could never do that, and I think that's wrong, and in fact, I think what they've done is pretty lost up. His influence on one is and should be much more, not through the form itself, but through the philosophy, the principles, and maybe enthusiasm behind his forms. And I think it may well be that fifty years from now, we will sort of feel him stronger amongst us than right now. We live too close to him now. That is the way I look at Wright, and I think of Wright as the greatest, greatest living architect. Well, I might add one little thing to that, that so much of Wright's forms are really of quite a different era, and the young architect and the student who isn't aware of that sort of slides right into that, and wrongly so. But boy, don't ever underestimate Wright.