The architecture of Finnish-born American resident architect Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) fascinated Robin Boyd from both a theoretical and aesthetic standpoint. Boyd made the formal dexterity of Saarinen’s mid-century buildings the focus of many articles in the late 1950s, including ‘Engineering of Excitement’, ‘The Counter-Revolution in Architecture’, and ‘Under Tension’, as well as discussion and illustrations in The Puzzle of Architecture (1965). In 1956-7, when he was Bemis Visiting Professor at MIT, Boyd visited many of Saarinen’s buildings including the General Motors Technical Center in Detroit and Kresge Auditorium at MIT, as well as the Saarinen office in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan where Saarinen gave the visiting Australian a tour of the office and showed him a model of the structurally innovative Ingalls Hockey Rink then under construction at Yale University. On his return to Melbourne, Boyd’s interest in Saarinen was undiminished: The cable-borne roof of his house at Walsh Street echoes Saarinen’s Hockey Rink, and Saarinen became a regular (usually positive) reference point in Boyd’s writing on for the state of contemporary architecture.