The campus as one project: Eero Saarinen

Decades before technology parks made it standard, Eero Saarinen treated a company's entire workplace as a single design problem. The General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, completed in 1955, composed laboratories, offices and water basins into one measured campus; the MIT commissions of the same year and the Yale hockey rink of 1958 brought the same discipline to universities. Finnish-born in 1910 and Yale-trained, he drew the master plan and the interiors with equal seriousness.

That is why his chairs read as architecture: the Tulip series and the Womb, created for Knoll, carry campus logic down to a single seat. On Indian projects, La Mercanti plans them into the office landscape from day one.