“Welcome to my father’s church.” This is how Susan Saarinen commenced a lecture at Eero Saarinen’s 1964 North Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana, where design professionals and enthusiasts gathered in late September for Exhibit Columbus, an annual exploration of architecture, art, design, and community that alternates between symposium and exhibition years. Now in its third year, the event has brought renewed energy to the small city that has an abundance of architectural gems.
The daughter of the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen and the sculptor Lilian Swann, Susan spent her early years at Cranbrook, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where her grandfather, architect Eliel Saarinen, was the director. After resisting going into the family business, she came late to landscape architecture—a field that melds, she says, her love of natural materials and inherent design sensibility. She earned a Certificate of Landscape Design from Radcliffe College in 1986 and, in 1993, a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Colorado Boulder, near where she now lives and has her own firm. RECORD sat down with Susan in a rear pew at Eliel’s First Christian Church (1942).
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