Saarinen Executive Chair by Knoll

Knoll® Saarinen Executive Chair

Features

Frame: Molded reinforced polyurethane shell. Contoured plywood seat form.

Swivel Base: Five-star steel base in protective black epoxy finish. Stainless steel or optional black epoxy top caps

Casters: 2” twin wheel hard casters for use on carpeted floors. Wheel and housing components in black textured plastic. Optional soft casters for use on wood and other resilient flooring.

Upholstery

Urethane foam cushion. Upholstery with matching full surround welt detail. Available in Mariner fabric and Volo leather.

Knoll History

The Knoll Company was founded in 1938 in New York by furniture craftsman Hans Knoll, who aspired to produce modern furniture that would be elegant, functional and affordable. In 1946, he married designer Florence Schust, who had been trained as an architect, and who would ultimately be recognized as one of the most influential women in 20th century design. She played a key role in the company's development, championing the Bauhaus approach and recruiting some of its most famous luminaries, such as Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen and Marcel Breur, resulting in Knoll becoming the only authorized seller of the some of the world’s most revered mid-century furniture designs.

Beginning in the 1940s, Knoll pioneered the concept of developing a working relationship with corporate clients and designing to meet their needs. In the ensuing decades, Knoll introduced tables to accommodate electronic technology, and office chairs with a fresh premise: rather than the sitter constantly adjusting the chair, the chair would adjust to the sitter! The result of this approach was a line of innovative office chairs combining ergonomic support with intuitive adaptability. Today, in addition to acclaim as a design leader, Knoll is also recognized for pioneering sustainable, “green” design policies designed to protect the biosphere.

In recognition of Knoll's contributions, the Louvre's Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris staged a 1972 exhibit devoted solely to the company's furniture. Knoll also currently has more than 40 pieces in the permanent Design Collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Eero Saarinen

The purpose of architecture is to shelter and enhance man's life on earth and to fulfill his belief in the nobility of his existence — Eero Saarinen

Eero Saarinen (August 20, 1910 – September 1, 1961) was a Finnish American architect and industrial designer of the 20th century famous for varying his style according to the demands of the project. As a young man, Saarinen studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where his father was an instructor. At the academy, he had a close relationship with fellow students Charles and Ray Eames, and became good friends with Florence Knoll (nee Schust). In 1929, he went on to study sculpture in Paris and then to the Yale School of Architecture, completing his studies in 1934.

Saarinen first received critical recognition for the Organic chair he designed together with Charles Eames for the “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” competition in 1940, for which they received first prize. Saarinen's Womb Chair, a chair that promises repose whatever your position, is still one of the most popular designs to come out of the 1940s. His space-age molded plastic Tulip chair (used on the original Star Trek television series) featured a single pedestal base for a clean visual look by doing away with what he referred to as a “slum of legs.”

“To me, the drawn language is a very revealing language…one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect”
— Eero Saarinen

In 1947 Saarinen won a competition to design the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis and his enormous, symbolic arch design became the popular “Gateway to the West.” The Arch was Saarinen's first great triumph, but there would be many more. For Eero, architecture was a discipline like the fine arts, and in particular, sculpture. He called himself a “form giver” and everything he designed had a strong sculptural quality, such as the sloping and futuristic looking TWA Terminal at JFK Airport in New York made to look like a bird in flight.

Although his career was cut short by death at age 51 in 1961, Eero Saarinen was one of the most prolific, unorthodox and celebrated masters of 20th-century architecture, both at home and abroad.