Eero Saarinen

Eero Saarinen (1910–1961) was a Finnish-American architect and designer. He was born in Kirkkonummi, Finland, the son of the architect Eliel Saarinen, and moved to the United States with his family at thirteen. He died at fifty-one, which is why his built work is smaller than his reputation.

The buildings are the ones people photograph: the TWA Flight Center at what is now JFK, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the Dulles Airport terminal. All three are curves rather than boxes, at a moment when almost everyone else was building boxes.

The Eames connection

Before any of that, Saarinen and Charles Eames were friends and collaborators at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where Saarinen’s father was president. In 1940 the two of them jointly entered the Museum of Modern Art’s Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition, and won it, with moulded plywood seating that anticipated most of what both men did afterwards.

So the shell chair and the pedestal chair come out of the same conversation. If our tulip style chairs and our DSW style chairs look like they are arguing about the same question, that is because they are.

“The underside of chairs and tables makes an ugly, confusing, unrestful world”

Saarinen’s own explanation of the Pedestal Collection, designed for Knoll and released in 1957, was blunt: he wanted to clear what he called the slum of legs. Look under a dining table set with four ordinary chairs and you are looking at twenty legs. He wanted one.

The Tulip chair puts a moulded seat shell on a single flared aluminium column with a weighted base. Structurally the shell and the base are two materials, not one — Saarinen wanted the whole thing moulded in a single piece of plastic, and the technology of 1957 could not do it while keeping the chair stable. He regarded that compromise as unfinished business. It is worth knowing, because the chair is often described as a single moulded form and it never was.

The Womb Chair of 1948, also for Knoll, came from a different brief entirely: Florence Knoll asked him for a chair she could curl up in.

Tulip-style chairs around a real table

Our tulip-style chairs measure W48 × D50 × H85cm with a cushioned 45cm seat, sold in sets of two. Three things decide whether they will work:

• Table height. A 45cm seat suits standard UK dining tables of 74–76cm, leaving around 30cm of thigh clearance. Above about 78cm it starts to feel cramped.
• Table edge per person. Allow 60cm. A 120cm table takes four; a 160cm table takes six. These are armless, so they tuck fully underneath when they are not in use.
• Clearance behind. 75cm, so people can push back and stand without hitting a wall.

One detail if you are mixing styles around one table: the tulip seat sits at 45cm and our DSW and DAW chairs at 44cm. A 1cm difference is invisible in use, but it is the kind of thing worth knowing rather than discovering.

The full range is under dining chairs.

A note on what we sell

Habitat Furnishes is not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by Knoll or the estate of Eero Saarinen. Our chairs are described as “tulip style” because they are our own reproduction of the design, built to the specification published on each product page.