How an Usual Request From Florence Knoll Spawned Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair
The modernist classic’s curved, organic form was devised in response to the idea that many people haven’t felt truly comfortable since birth.
Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen produced numerous designs for Knoll that became some of the famous furniture company’s most recognizable pieces. Saarinen met Florence Knoll (née Schust) in the mid-1930s at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where his dad, renowned Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, was president. At the time, Knoll was a protégé of the older Saarinen and became close with the entire family. (Eero and Florence also became friends with Charles Eames at Cranbrook, and the three experimented with furniture-making.)
When Florence joined Knoll in the ’40s, she invited Eero to design for the company. In 1946, he designed the Womb chair at Knoll’s request for "a chair that was like a basket full of pillows—something I could really curl up in."
Finnish-American architect and industrial designer Eero Saarinen’s Womb chair, one of many furniture pieces he designed for Knoll, debuted in 1948.
Courtesy of Harvey Croze, Cranbrook Academy of Art
"I told Eero I was sick and tired of the one-dimensional lounge chair…long and narrow," Knoll said. "I want a chair I can sit in sideways or any other way I want to sit in it."
The chair debuted in 1948 as the Model 70, but soon became known as the Womb chair—first as a nickname, and later officially—because of its comfortable, organic form. "It was designed on the theory that a great number of people have never really felt comfortable and secure since they left the womb," Saarinen explained.
Apart from its novel appearance, the Womb chair was also highly innovative from a structural perspective. Saarinen initially attempted the design with molded plywood, a material favored by his friend and prior colleague Eames, but it wasn’t strong enough for the scale he and Knoll envisioned. They eventually turned their attention to fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin, a material being developed for the hulls of Navy boats that was strong, lightweight, low-priced, and extremely malleable. They reached out to a New Jersey–based commercial shipbuilder who specialized in producing fiberglass boats to work with them on the sculpted seating design, but he turned them down a few times. "We just begged him," Knoll said. "He finally gave in and worked with us."
After many iterations and prototypes, the final result was a padded and upholstered reinforced fiberglass shell that sits on a polished chrome steel frame, curving to envelop the sitter. Saarinen applied for a patent on his "truncated cone" method for the chair’s construction the year it was released.
American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell’s 1959 Saturday Evening Post cover featured Eero Saarinen’s Womb chair.
Courtesy Saturday Evening Post
The Womb chair quickly became a cultural icon. A 1958 Coca-Cola advertising campaign showed Santa Claus drinking a Coke in one of the lounges. The seating also made an appearance in a New Yorker cartoon, as well as a 1959 Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell. Over the years, it’s also made a number of film cameos.
Today, the design is still in production, and comes in a range of material options and sizes, as well as with an ottoman or as a settee. The Womb chair, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2023, is a modernist classic—and it continues to be one of Knoll’s top sellers.
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Knoll Womb Chair and Ottoman
When Florence Knoll challenged Eero Saarinen to create a chair that she could curl up in, she found the right candidate for the task. The Womb Chair and Ottoman (1946) feature enveloping forms that continue as one of the most iconic representations of midcentury organic modernism. Applying foam molded over a fiberglass shell created a single-piece form that perfectly facilitates a relaxed posture. Manufactured by Knoll according to the original specifications of the designer. Made in U.S.A.
ShopKnoll Saarinen Dining Table
Architect Eero Saarinen was a genius at creating expressive sculptural forms. From his TWA Terminal (now the TWA Hotel) at New York’s JFK Airport to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to his Pedestal Table (1956), there’s a magic in everything he created. The Saarinen Dining Table began with his observation that “the underside of typical tables and chairs makes a confusing, unrestful world,” and as he explained in a 1956 Time magazine cover story, he was designing a new collection to “clear up the slum of legs in the U.S. home.” Later that year, he completed the Pedestal Table, which stands on a gracefully shaped cast-aluminum base inspired by a drop of high-viscosity liquid. This is the authentic Pedestal Table by Knoll; it’s stamped with the KnollStudio logo and Eero Saarinen’s signature.
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The creator of the ubiquitous Knoll Tulip chairs and tables, Eero Saarinen (1910–1961) was one of the 20th century’s most prominent space shapers, merging dynamic forms with a modernist sensibility across architecture and design. Among Saarinen’s greatest accomplishments are Washington D.C.’s Dulles International Airport, the very sculptural and fluid TWA terminal at JFK Airport in New York, and the 630-foot-high Gateway Arch of St. Louis, Missouri, each of them defining structures of postwar America. Catenary curves were present in many of his structural designs. During his long association with Knoll, Saarinen’s other famous furniture pieces included the Grasshopper lounge chair and the Womb settee. Married to Aline Bernstein Saarinen, a well-known critic of art and architecture, Saarinen also collaborated with Charles Eames, with whom he designed his first prize-winning chair. With rich illustration tracing his life and career, this architecture introduction follows Saarinen from his studies to training to his most prestigious projects, and explores how each of his designs brought a new dimension to the modernist landscape. The author Pierluigi Serraino is a practicing architect and design agitator in the San Francisco Bay Area. His projects and writings have been published in journals such as Architectural Record, A+U (Japan), and the Architectural Review (UK). Among his books are Modernism Rediscovered (2000), Eero Saarinen (2005), The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Personality Study (2016) and Ezra Stoller: A Photographic History of Modern American Architecture (2019). The editor Peter Gössel runs an agency for museum and exhibition design. He has published Taschen monographs on Julius Shulman, R. M. Schindler, John Lautner, and Richard Neutra, as well as several titles in the Basic Architecture series. Photo courtesy of Taschen
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This article was originally published on April 7, 2014. It was updated on July 15, 2024, to include current information.
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