The Fifties were supposed to be about conformity, yet in the arts it was a time of revolutionary innovation. Jackson Pollock and his unruly tribe turned painting upside down. Miles Davis and others pioneered new frontiers in music, while Allen Ginsberg and friends took care of poetry.

But probably nobody had a bigger impact than the architects and designers, who actually changed the way people lived and worked. And unlike the abstract expressionist painters and Beat generation poets, the revolutionaries who designed buildings and products—such as Charles and Ray Eames, Russel Wright and Eero Saarinen—had clients. The fruitful nature of the relationship between Saarinen and these business-like new patrons emerges from a revealing exhibition about the great architect entitled “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future.” (After a summer in Washington, “Shaping the Future” will travel to Minneapolis, St. Louis, New York, and New Haven.)

Saarinen was the right talent in the right place at the right time, and credited his clients as something approaching co-creators. Corporate America in the Fifties was rich, forward-looking, and gifted with seemingly limitless horizons. Saarinen seemed to understand its aspirations almost instinctively, harnessing modernism to give companies such as General Motors, John Deere, and IBM signature buildings that embodied their new ideas about themselves and their workplaces. But these sleek, suited-up edifices were far from the whole Saarinen story. He also designed Dulles Airport, near Washington, the famous TWA terminal at what was then Idlewild (now JFK) Airport, and the iconic St. Louis Gateway Arch—in addition to all that nifty mid-century furniture so beloved nowadays by hipsters. Clearly, when the commission called for it, Eero Saarinen could soar.

Daniel Akst is a writer living in New York. He previously wrote for THE AMERICAN about the business photography of Bill Wood.

Photographs (clockwise from top left) General Motors Technical Center, Warren, Michigan; IBM Rochester plant, locally nicknamed the “Blue Zoo,” Rochester, Minnesota; Bell Labs, Holmdel, New Jersey; John Deere world headquarters, Moline, Illinois.

Credit: GM, Bell Labs and John Deere: Ezra Stoller/Esto; IBM: Baltgazar Korab Ltd.; Saarinen: Arnold Newman/Getty Images.