When Eero Saarinen died suddenly of a brain tumor on September 1, 1961, he had already become, at the age of only fifty-one, one of the most successful architects in the United States. The darling of corporate America, Saarinen had risen to great heights over the course of his short career (his father Eliel, with whom he had collaborated since the late 1930s, had died in 1950), filling a widespread yearning among American clients for a new kind of modern architecture that would combine the clean …