Eero Saarinen ‘Tulip’ Armchair in Black Leather

Eero Saarinen (1910–61) absolutely hated clutter. "The undercarriage of chairs and tables in a typical interior makes an ugly, confusing, unrestful world,” the Finnish-American architect and industrial designer once said. “I wanted to clear up the slum of legs.” With the Tulip armchair, he did just that, streamlining the standard four-legged piece into a graceful shape atop a single pedestal. The 1956 design — which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York — was one of Saarinen’s last; he died in 1961. Its sculptural shape displays the best of Saarinen, who referred to himself as a “form giver,” whether that form was a flower-shaped seat or the swooping curve of the Gateway Arch, a more than 600-foot-tall stainless-steel-clad concrete monument in St. Louis, Missouri, that he designed in the late 1940s. The Tulip chair collection was meant to complement Saarinen’s 1956 pedestal collection of side chairs, stools, dining tables and more — another exercise in simplifying. Both collections were designed for Knoll, which continues to produce them today. Visitors to the TWA Hotel, the 2019 reinvention of Saarinen’s iconic airport terminal, will find Tulip chairs dotting the structure. Interestingly, the Tulip armchair’s shape suggests one single plastic form, but despite Saarinen’s many experiments to achieve this, it is actually constructed in two pieces: an aluminum frame obscured in a plastic finish and a fiberglass upper-shell seat. Two parts or one, it achieves Saarinen’s desired streamlined effect.