Eero Saarinen: Furniture for Everyman

EERO SAARINEN

FURNITURE FOR EVERYMAN

BRIAN LUTZ

THE FIRST FURNITURE DESIGNS The original Trust Indenture for the Cranbrook Foundation, dated 1927, called for the establishment of an educational community that would ultimately include a church, an art school, a science institute, an elementary school and two preparatory schools, one for boys – Cranbrook School – and one for girls – Kingswood School Cranbrook.

It was the custom of Eliel Saarinen to provide creative opportunities for his family by inviting their contributions to

his architectural projects. For example, in the design of Cranbrook School, which was begun in 1926, Eliel completed the master plan, Loja produced a model of the plan and Pipsan decorated the ceilings and trusses. Eero, age sixteen, designed many of the decorative metalwork elements to be used throughout the school.

Eero Saarinen was a gifted child, possessed of prodigious talents, the most obvious of which was his ability to draw.

“I was a very lucky little boy,” he said. “As a child, I would always draw and I happened to be good at it. Therefore I got more attention from drawing than anything else. That made me draw more and more.”25 Under Eliel Saarinen’s direction, Eero’s drawings became design exercises, then design objects, first the ceramic figures found on the earliest Cranbrook buildings, and eventually pieces of furniture for the buildings’ interiors.

Eliel Saarinen’s architectural plans for Cranbrook included housing for faculty. In September of 1928, the Cranbrook

board authorized the building of two of these residences, one for the Saarinen family and a second for Géza Maróti, the sculptor.26 The next year, while Eero was still in high school, Eliel asked him to contribute to the design of the furnishings of the family’s Cranbrook residence, Saarinen House. Eero’s assigned portion was the master bedroom; he completed drawings for a suite of furniture: twin beds, a nightstand, a table and a dressing table bench. This was Eero Saarinen’s first

The bedroom furniture Saarinen designed was simple, perhaps cautious as a first attempt, but not lacking in a personal

meditation on form. The pieces the young novice drew up were a departure from the popular style of bedroom furniture of the time and, in particular, a departure from the Art Déco style of his father’s furniture for the house.27 Eero’s designs were convincingly modern, straightforward and spare in terms of their detailing. Flat planes of veneered wood stock were the dominant elements throughout, the hard lines of the planes softened with radiused corners—Saarinen’s first furniture curves. A simple rolling triple-curve molding was applied to the edges. The pieces were all painted in the same grey-green color as the bedroom walls. It is possible to detect the influence of early modernists in these first pieces by Saarinen. The cantilevered shelves and the strong horizontal theme of the nightstand and table suggest Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style.28 The minimalist box-like configuration of the tables and bench conveys a sense of Le Corbusier’s theory of the arrival of the machine age in which “hierarchical decoration is crushed.”29 Like Le Corbusier’s early chairs, Saarinen’s bedroom designs were pleasing in their simple geometry and linear discipline.

Eero Saarinen’s Cranbrook House bedroom furniture was produced in the Cranbrook cabinet shop run by Tor Berglund,

the Swedish master cabinet maker (fig. 3). Berglund, an associate of Eliel Saarinen, had been invited by George Booth to join the staff at Cranbrook as part of an effort to establish a number of craft studios. The intention was that these studios would become economically self-sufficient, producing and selling works designed at Cranbrook.

Top ion press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Top ion press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Lambert theres hired black models since the placing them into such prestigious and glamorous

THE FIRST FURNITURE DESIGNS The original Trust Indenture for the Cranbrook Foundation, dated 1927, called for the establishment of an educational community that would ultimately include a church, an art school, a science institute, an elementary school and two preparatory schools, one for boys – Cranbrook School – and one for girls – Kingswood School Cranbrook.

It was the custom of Eliel Saarinen to provide creative opportunities for his family by inviting their contributions to

his architectural projects. For example, in the design of Cranbrook School, which was begun in 1926, Eliel completed the master plan, Loja produced a model of the plan and Pipsan decorated the ceilings and trusses. Eero, age sixteen, designed many of the decorative metalwork elements to be used throughout the school.

Eero Saarinen was a gifted child, possessed of prodigious talents, the most obvious of which was his ability to draw.

“I was a very lucky little boy,” he said. “As a child, I would always draw and I happened to be good at it. Therefore I got more attention from drawing than anything else. That made me draw more and more.”25 Under Eliel Saarinen’s direction, Eero’s drawings became design exercises, then design objects, first the ceramic figures found on the earliest Cranbrook buildings, and eventually pieces of furniture for the buildings’ interiors.

Eliel Saarinen’s architectural plans for Cranbrook included housing for faculty. In September of 1928, the Cranbrook

board authorized the building of two of these residences, one for the Saarinen family and a second for Géza Maróti, the sculptor.26 The next year, while Eero was still in high school, Eliel asked him to contribute to the design of the furnishings of the family’s Cranbrook residence, Saarinen House. Eero’s assigned portion was the master bedroom; he completed drawings for a suite of furniture: twin beds, a nightstand, a table and a dressing table bench. This was Eero Saarinen’s first

The bedroom furniture Saarinen designed was simple, perhaps cautious as a first attempt, but not lacking in a personal

meditation on form. The pieces the young novice drew up were a departure from the popular style of bedroom furniture of the time and, in particular, a departure from the Art Déco style of his father’s furniture for the house.27 Eero’s designs were convincingly modern, straightforward and spare in terms of their detailing. Flat planes of veneered wood stock were the dominant elements throughout, the hard lines of the planes softened with radiused corners—Saarinen’s first furniture curves. A simple rolling triple-curve molding was applied to the edges. The pieces were all painted in the same grey-green color as the bedroom walls. It is possible to detect the influence of early modernists in these first pieces by Saarinen. The cantilevered shelves and the strong horizontal theme of the nightstand and table suggest Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style.28 The minimalist box-like configuration of the tables and bench conveys a sense of Le Corbusier’s theory of the arrival of the machine age in which “hierarchical decoration is crushed.”29 Like Le Corbusier’s early chairs, Saarinen’s bedroom designs were pleasing in their simple geometry and linear discipline.

Eero Saarinen’s Cranbrook House bedroom furniture was produced in the Cranbrook cabinet shop run by Tor Berglund,

the Swedish master cabinet maker (fig. 3). Berglund, an associate of Eliel Saarinen, had been invited by George Booth to join the staff at Cranbrook as part of an effort to establish a number of craft studios. The intention was that these studios would become economically self-sufficient, producing and selling works designed at Cranbrook.

Top ion press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Top ion press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Lambert theres hired black models since the placing them into such prestigious and glamorous

FLORENCE KNOLL: KNOLL ASSOCIATES

Florence Margaret Schust, the only

child of the eldest son of the founder of the Schust Baking Company in Saginaw, Michigan, developed a keen appreciation of the arts as a child. Orphaned at age twelve, Schust was brought to Cranbrook by her guardian in 1931 to visit the new Kingswood school for girls. She took an immediate liking to the school and enrolled in the fall of 1932. A determined, selfreliant teenager, Schust had made her intentions to study architecture quite clear, which struck Eliel Saarinen as something quite extraordinary. Schust’s resolute commitment to becoming an architect surely found resonance with the elder Saarinen’s notion of full immersion in art as part of life. But it was the Saarinens’ generous Finnish nature, Eliel and Loja’s personal response to Schust’s situation as an only child whose parents were both deceased, that set the stage for the deep friendship and working relationship. Many years later she explained: “Eliel decided I should come up to Cranbrook [Academy of Art] when I had finished with Kingswood. Then, before I knew it, he asked if I would like to go to Finland with them in the summer, and he wrote the sweetest letter to my guardian saying they would take good care of me. I became a really close member of the family from then on. I lived with them [at Hvitträsk] in the summers.”121 (fig. 40)

These were good times for Florence Schust. In a personal recollection written for inclusion in her papers donated to the

Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, she explained: “Life with the Saarinens was not just work. In spite of their Scandinavian reserve, they had a great sense of fun and had amusing friends, and gave great dinner parties. We made interesting trips in Finland and on the Continent at the end of each summer. In the thirties travel was slow by boat or train. The advantage was a leisurely trip through the unexplored countryside.” One such trip was to Hungary in 1935 with Eero Saarinen, seven years her senior, and Carl Milles, the Swedish sculptor who was a faculty 2 This page ion press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Lambert theres hired black models since the placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, humdrum fashion shthere isntbert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young

FLORENCE KNOLL: KNOLL ASSOCIATES

Florence Margaret Schust, the only

child of the eldest son of the founder of the Schust Baking Company in Saginaw, Michigan, developed a keen appreciation of the arts as a child. Orphaned at age twelve, Schust was brought to Cranbrook by her guardian in 1931 to visit the new Kingswood school for girls. She took an immediate liking to the school and enrolled in the fall of 1932. A determined, selfreliant teenager, Schust had made her intentions to study architecture quite clear, which struck Eliel Saarinen as something quite extraordinary. Schust’s resolute commitment to becoming an architect surely found resonance with the elder Saarinen’s notion of full immersion in art as part of life. But it was the Saarinens’ generous Finnish nature, Eliel and Loja’s personal response to Schust’s situation as an only child whose parents were both deceased, that set the stage for the deep friendship and working relationship. Many years later she explained: “Eliel decided I should come up to Cranbrook [Academy of Art] when I had finished with Kingswood. Then, before I knew it, he asked if I would like to go to Finland with them in the summer, and he wrote the sweetest letter to my guardian saying they would take good care of me. I became a really close member of the family from then on. I lived with them [at Hvitträsk] in the summers.”121 (fig. 40)

These were good times for Florence Schust. In a personal recollection written for inclusion in her papers donated to the

Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, she explained: “Life with the Saarinens was not just work. In spite of their Scandinavian reserve, they had a great sense of fun and had amusing friends, and gave great dinner parties. We made interesting trips in Finland and on the Continent at the end of each summer. In the thirties travel was slow by boat or train. The advantage was a leisurely trip through the unexplored countryside.” One such trip was to Hungary in 1935 with Eero Saarinen, seven years her senior, and Carl Milles, the Swedish sculptor who was a faculty 2 This page ion press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Lambert theres hired black models since the placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, humdrum fashion shthere isntbert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young

MODEL 72 AND 73 CHAIRS

The success of the Womb chair overshadowed the fact that the

smallest of the three original chairs Saarinen presented was developed together with the biggest one. The Model 72 side chair was also introduced in 1948 (fig.57).

In the years immediately following Saarinen’s return from Washington, he became very active with architectural projects.

A partial list of projects Saarinen worked on with his father and Robert Swanson during this period includes Antioch College (1944-47), Drake University (1945-55) and Stephens College (1946-47).163 Plans for the Gateway Arch in St Louis had also begun.164 A project awarded to Saarinen, Swanson and Saarinen in December of 1944 presented an opportunity to create a campus of office buildings, their furniture and furnishings. That project was the General Motors Technical Center. The initial commission called for twenty-five buildings where nearly five thousand people would work.165 The furniture requirements for this project were quite clear and Saarinen aimed to satisfy them with his new chairs. Whether the 72 and 73 chairs were designed specifically for the GM project or simply adapted from designs already in progress is not clear. But the 72 and 73—and, later, the Model 71 and Model 76—were developed for production to coincide with the GM installations. Florence Knoll remarked years later that for Knoll Associates it was a bit “scary” to face “the first real event in using one of Eero’s designs in such a big commercial establishment.”166 Her experience in managing corporate interiors projects, and Knoll’s close association with Winner eased the concerns of all involved.

Development of the 72 and 73 chairs proceeded with a fresh sense of importance if not urgency. Once Eero Saarinen

began his development work with Winner, all three of the chairs were produced in prototype form. The Model 72 side chair was developed from the first work done on the Womb chair. Saarinen saw the 72 as the Womb’s deformed cone in a reduced form, without arms or the high-back third plane of support. In his patent application for the 72 and 73 chairs, he described their category as “Chair Having a Back Rest in the Form of a Shell-like Body.”167 With a smaller profile, the shaping of the seat cone was easier to accomplish in the 72 chair. Niels Diffrient, who was hired by Saarinen in 1948 to work with him expressly on the development of his furniture, explained: “On the armless version, we made the back out of sheet metal for testing. The metal wrapped under the seat. To have it wrap around and still have the correct angle for the back rest, I remember us working hard to put a little kink in it just behind the seat, where it goes up into the back, so we could get the correct back angle.”168 The patent refers to these kinks as dents and explains that they “provide more room for the occupant Chair ion press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Lambert theres hired black models since the placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, hum-

MODEL 72 AND 73 CHAIRS

The success of the Womb chair overshadowed the fact that the

smallest of the three original chairs Saarinen presented was developed together with the biggest one. The Model 72 side chair was also introduced in 1948 (fig.57).

In the years immediately following Saarinen’s return from Washington, he became very active with architectural projects.

A partial list of projects Saarinen worked on with his father and Robert Swanson during this period includes Antioch College (1944-47), Drake University (1945-55) and Stephens College (1946-47).163 Plans for the Gateway Arch in St Louis had also begun.164 A project awarded to Saarinen, Swanson and Saarinen in December of 1944 presented an opportunity to create a campus of office buildings, their furniture and furnishings. That project was the General Motors Technical Center. The initial commission called for twenty-five buildings where nearly five thousand people would work.165 The furniture requirements for this project were quite clear and Saarinen aimed to satisfy them with his new chairs. Whether the 72 and 73 chairs were designed specifically for the GM project or simply adapted from designs already in progress is not clear. But the 72 and 73—and, later, the Model 71 and Model 76—were developed for production to coincide with the GM installations. Florence Knoll remarked years later that for Knoll Associates it was a bit “scary” to face “the first real event in using one of Eero’s designs in such a big commercial establishment.”166 Her experience in managing corporate interiors projects, and Knoll’s close association with Winner eased the concerns of all involved.

Development of the 72 and 73 chairs proceeded with a fresh sense of importance if not urgency. Once Eero Saarinen

began his development work with Winner, all three of the chairs were produced in prototype form. The Model 72 side chair was developed from the first work done on the Womb chair. Saarinen saw the 72 as the Womb’s deformed cone in a reduced form, without arms or the high-back third plane of support. In his patent application for the 72 and 73 chairs, he described their category as “Chair Having a Back Rest in the Form of a Shell-like Body.”167 With a smaller profile, the shaping of the seat cone was easier to accomplish in the 72 chair. Niels Diffrient, who was hired by Saarinen in 1948 to work with him expressly on the development of his furniture, explained: “On the armless version, we made the back out of sheet metal for testing. The metal wrapped under the seat. To have it wrap around and still have the correct angle for the back rest, I remember us working hard to put a little kink in it just behind the seat, where it goes up into the back, so we could get the correct back angle.”168 The patent refers to these kinks as dents and explains that they “provide more room for the occupant Chair ion press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Lambert theres hired black models since the placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, hum-

There ion press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Lambert theres hired black models since the placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, humdrum fashion shthere isntbert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women

There ion press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Lambert theres hired black models since the placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, humdrum fashion shthere isntbert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women

Above press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Lambert theres hirems placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, humdrum fashion shthere isntbert would constantly raise there bars which meant muL placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, humdrum fashion shthere isntbert would constantly raise there bars which md black models since the placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, humdrum fashion shthere isntbert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young

Above press engaged Miss Lambert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young women models were black froms Lambert theres hirems placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, humdrum fashion shthere isntbert would constantly raise there bars which meant muL placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, humdrum fashion shthere isntbert would constantly raise there bars which md black models since the placing them into such prestigious and glamorous venues as then ahe small, humdrum fashion shthere isntbert would constantly raise there bars which meant music and casting there most beautiful there striking, and extraordinary young