Saarinen series: good things take time...
With his Tulip series, Eero Saarinen wanted to clean up. Specifically, the "ugly, confusing, unrestful world" underneath tables and chairs: the tangle of legs had always bothered the Finnish architect and designer.
Saarinen began with hundreds of sketches before making 1:4 scale models and placing them in a kind of doll's house, so he could picture their effect in a room from the outset. As he already had some experience of sculpture, the Finnish-American design icon simply made the first full-size models himself – out of clay.
Saarinen was supported by Don Petitt from Knoll's development department. Together, they found a way to bring Saarinen's visionary designs into mass production. Finally, friends and family became testers, trying out the furniture in everyday life at Saarinen's house in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in the USA.
…and the wait pays off
After a meticulous design process and an extensive testing phase, the final Saarinen series was born: in the end, it took Saarinen five years of experimenting and modelling before he presented the finished form of his series of single-pedestal furniture, known as the Pedestal Collection, to the public.
Originally only the world-famous Tulip Chair was named after the tulip, but today the matching table is also known as the "Tulip Table" – because Knoll's series of single-pedestal furniture belongs together.
