FOIAWEAR — EERO SAARINEN / A Place in Architectural History Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 019

In 1942, before anyone outside a drafting room knew his name, a 32-year-old Finnish-American architect walked into the OSS and was put in charge of the war's most delicate models. Eero Saarinen was already "the most versatile and gifted young designer and architect in this country" — and the spy agency put that gift to work building true-to-scale models of weapons for training, situation rooms, and the display equipment used in the War Department's conference rooms. He even created a revolutionary three-dimensional organization chart that showed how problems and work-flow moved through the whole organization.

Saarinen served as Chief of the Special Exhibits Section of the OSS Presentation Division until 1944, and his work was commended by the Undersecretary of War, the Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance and the Director of the Women's Army Corps. He was deemed irreplaceable.

After the war he became one of the masters of American 20th-century architecture — the Gateway Arch in St. Louis (the tallest man-made national monument in the US), the TWA Flight Center, Dulles International Airport (the world's first jet airport) and the CBS Building. He kept building models his whole life, large enough to peer inside for a complete inspection — the same obsession with the perfect curve that served the OSS.

The artwork is a stylised tribute — the Gateway Arch rendered as the kind of architectural scale model Saarinen built for the spies. It is not a reproduction of any specific model.

This shirt is offered in both dark and light garment colours — the arch in copper on Black, Navy, Espresso, and in a matching dark-ink print on Mustard, White, Light Green.

The QR code on the front opens the CIA's article on Eero Saarinen, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/eero-saarinen-a-place-in-architectural-history/

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

FOIAWEAR is an independent brand and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency or the United States government.