TP asked me to research what she thought might be a Saarinen design in a consignment store find. I eagerly researched her pedestal table and four tulip chairs. The question of value has to do with originality. This shape that began as revolutionary is now standard (but still beautiful) design vocabulary.
I spent my youngest years in St Louis, but my mother whisked me off at the age of five to Chicago, before the great St Louis date of October 28, 1965. That’s when workers placed the final piece of stainless steel in the Gateway Arch. A contest entry for the Jefferson Expansion Monument in 1947, Finnish architect Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) created the world’s tallest arch (630 ft). I often passed it as I returned to visit my father’s St Louis house. I always loved Saarinen designs.
“Original” tulip chairs harken back to 1957
Those manufactured by Knoll Associates, NY bear manufacturer’s labels. Later versions also made by Knoll (Knoll International Italy/US, also called Knoll Studios) from the 2000s bear the label “Made in Italy.” Today we see knock-offs from China.
If Knoll made the table it will be heavy enameled cast iron, almost impossible for a one-person to lift, even at small scale. The chair bases, if Knoll, will feature a swivel mechanism housed inside an aluminum base, and fiberglass chair slips. The best of them come with arms.
You pay much more for the originals in the pedestal line. If Knoll Associates, NY manufactured TP‘s table, 1957-to the mid 1960s she’d pay $2,000ish for the table, and the same for the four chairs. She’d pay more for a table with a gorgeous marble top. Now that midcentury modern became SO hot, you find pedestal pieces for much more. At auction you may see fierce competition for pieces dating to the late 1950’s.
Saarinen disliked “a slum of legs”
Saarinen disliked the traditional four legs of furniture and disliked the stretcher bars connecting the legs, calling the cacophony under your rear end “a slum of legs.” He birthed the Pedestal Line, designed by Saarinen, and produced by Saarinen and Don Petitt of Knoll’s Design Development Group. Engineering and production seemed laborious with plastics not as widely used. So Saarinen built a doll’s house to visualize the table and chairs in a quarter scale setting. In his own home in Bloomfield Hills he tried the full-scale versions. By 1958 he designed the Tulip armchair, the stool, the dining table, the coffee, and side table.
He wanted furniture to come in ONE piece, reflecting his early training as a sculptor. “The undercarriage of chairs and tables in a typical interior makes an ugly, confusing, unrestful world. I wanted the chair to be all one thing again.” A motion of siting and rising should remain calm, thus the chair doesn’t slide, the seat swivels.
He modelled the Pedestal designs with clay because he saw furniture in a room as a problem to solve. “What interests me is when and where to use these structural plastic shapes,” he said. “Probing more deeply into different possibilities one finds many different shapes equally logical, some ugly, some earthbound, some exciting, some soaring. The choices really becomes a sculptor’s choice.” In fact Saarinen’s wife Lilly Swann sculpted, and the plastic arts came from his lineage.
Eliel Saarinen
Saarinen’s father Eliel trained as an architect in Finland, coming to the US to teach at the University of Michigan. George Gough Booth and his wife Ellen Scripps Booth purchased 174 acres outside Detroit with the aim to create one of the world finest arts academies. Booth commissioned Eliel Saarinen to design much of the campus at the Cranbrook Academy. Eliel became president of the Academy in 1932. The younger Eero was exposed to his father’s unique teaching style. Students didn’t need experience in a given medium or discipline. A design problem was a problem to solve through experimentation. Cranbrook’s students included Charles Eames, Harry Bertoia, and Florence Knoll.
Historical information about Saarinen and his design lineage proves to me that when one discovers the culture of a time in design history, you discover the basis for a particular design philosophy. We see this in TP’s Pedestal set. Her table is Knoll International and worth $700, but the chairs are knock-offs.