Design Classic: Knoll Saarinen Tulip Side Chairs, Set of Four, 1970s

With his iconic Pedestal collection, architect and designer Eero Saarinen (1910–61) vowed to “clear up the slum of legs,” as he described the visual clutter resulting from traditional furniture frames in a 1956 TIME magazine cover story. Central to this endeavor is the Pedestal table, whose round top on a slender, graceful pedestal would become a near ubiquitous — and oft-imitated — form. The Tulip armchair and the Tulip armless chair continue this streamlining in Saarinen’s modern, space-age aesthetic.

With its simplified silhouette and fiberglass body, the Tulip armless chair is at once elegant and industrial, a feat that Saarinen continually mastered in mid-century modern works ranging from furniture to architecture (think the St. Louis Arch and the TWA Terminal at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, which has reopened as a hotel). The designer originally tried to cast the entire seat in fiberglass, pushing the envelope of modern furniture production, but, to ensure stability, he eventually settled on a cast-aluminum base and fiberglass seat. In 1957, the chair was put into production through Knoll — Saarinen knew pioneering American designer Florence Knoll from his days at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he taught and took on design projects for the school. It has remained one of the legendary firm’s most popular seats ever since.

Given its sculptural shape, the Tulip armless chair can be paired with a Saarinen table for a wholly modern dining set — as it appears throughout the TWA Hotel — or hold its own as a side or accent chair, a popular touch by top residential designers today. The Velcro-attached seat cushion is available in over a dozen upholstery options, though the thoroughly space-age cherry red is undoubtedly the most famous.

Through his work as an architect and designer, Eero Saarinen was a prime mover in the introduction of modernism into the American mainstream. Particularly affecting were the organic, curvilinear forms seen in Saarinen’s furniture and his best-known structures: the gull-winged TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy airport in New York (opened 1962), Dulles International Airport in Virginia (1962) and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri (1965).

Saarinen had a peerless modernist pedigree. His father, Eliel Saarinen, was an eminent Finnish architect who in 1932 became the first head of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in suburban Detroit. The school became synonymous with progressive design and decorative arts in the United States, and while studying there the younger Saarinen met and befriended several luminaries of mid-century modernism, among them Harry Bertoia and Charles and Ray Eames.

At Cranbrook, Saarinen also met Florence Schust Knoll, who, as director of her husband Hans Knoll's eponymous furniture company, would put Saarinen’s best designs into production. These include the Grasshopper chair, designed in 1946 and so named because its angled bentwood frame resembles the insect; the Tulip chair (1957), a flower-shaped fiberglass shell mounted on a cast-aluminum pedestal; and the lushly contoured Womb lounge chair and ottoman (1948). In his furniture as in his architecture, the keynotes of Eero Saarinen’s designs are simplicity, strength and grace.

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