The Story of Eero Saarinen’s Famous Tulip Chair
The classic furniture design from the Finnish-American architect’s 1950s Pedestal Collection was also one of his last creations.
In 1922 at age 12, Eero Saarinen won his first design contest, illustrating a story entirely with matchsticks for a Swedish newspaper. The prize was 30 Swedish kronor (about $8 at the time). The Finnish-American architect grew up surrounded by design. His father, Eliel Saarinen, was a well-known architect and his mother, Loja Saarinen, was a talented sculptor and textile maker. By the time he was a teenager, Eero was designing furniture and fixtures with his father, who was president at the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.
The Tulip chair from Eero Saarinen’s Pedestal Collection for Knoll consists of a reinforced plastic and aluminum stem with a curved fiberglass shell.
Photo: Knoll, Inc.
In 1929, Eero left for Paris to study sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the following year enrolled in the Yale architecture program. In the ’30s, he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the family firm, also returning to teach at Cranbrook, which is where he became friends with Florence Knoll and Charles Eames, who turned into formative collaborators.
Eero’s first major recognition for furniture design was for a molded plywood chair he designed with Eames for the Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition in the early ’40s. That same decade, he entered a long and fruitful design partnership with Knoll and submitted the winning design for the St. Louis Gateway Arch—even though the telegraph announcement, addressed to "E. Saarinen," was initially mistaken to be for his father, who’d also entered the national design competition. Still, while Eero’s architectural feats garnered serious recognition (and a spot on a July 1956 cover of Time magazine), his furniture ranks among the most celebrated of the 20th century.
Longtime friends and collaborators Florence Knoll and Eero Saarinen develop prototypes for the Pedestal Collection, which includes a dining chair, armchair, dining and coffee tables, and stools.
Photo by Knoll, Inc.In the late ’50s, Eero designed the Pedestal Collection for Knoll to alleviate the visual clutter he famously hated in American homes caused by a jumble of furniture legs in one room. "The undercarriage of chairs and tables in a typical interior makes an ugly, confusing, unrestful world," he said. "I wanted to clear up the slum of legs."
The furniture series, which features a dining chair and an armchair, as well as dining, coffee, and side tables, and stools, trades the standard four legs of chairs and tables for one central tulip-like pedestal, hence the moniker. Saarinen’s intention to "make the chair all one thing again" extended to materials. He wanted to mold the Tulip chair from one material, but it was technologically impossible at the time. Instead, a reinforced aluminum stem with a fused plastic finish supports the curved fiberglass shell.
Though Saarinen completed the Tulip chair design for Knoll in 1956, with manufacturing beginning the following year, the patent drawing was filed in June 1960.
Courtesy of Eero Saarinen Collection. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.
An archival shot of the Tulip Chairs in production at the Knoll factory.
Photo: Knoll, Inc.
A Knoll press release announces the Pedestal Collection’s debut in 1958.
Photo: Knoll, Inc.
Eero included the Tulip chair in several of his projects, including the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, and the TWA Terminal at New York’s Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International Airport). Architectural historian Jayne Merkel, who wrote the 2014 monograph Eero Saarinen, once said that "the TWA terminal is Saarinen’s pedestal chair turned into a building." The form draws on his early training as a sculptor.
Though the Pedestal Collection was Eero Saarinen’s last—the prolific modernist architect and industrial designer died of a brain tumor in 1961—thankfully, his sculptural nod to the future of design has lived on. His award-winning Tulip chair has become a symbol of 1950s style and the midcentury-modernist foreshadowing of space-age aesthetics. Real and knockoff versions of the Tulip chair have made frequent cameos on Star Trek sets and appeared more recently in blockbusters like Barbie.
With its minimal base and narrow, simple stem, the clean-lined design of the Tulip Chair aimed to provide a solution to visual clutter of, as Saarinen put it, an "ugly, confusing, unrestful world."
Photo courtesy Saint Louis Art Museum
An early ad for the Pedestal Collection highlights its curvilinear form.
Photo: Knoll, Inc.
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Knoll Saarinen Tulip Armchair
Eero Saarinen called himself a “form giver,” and everything he designed – from the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to his Womb™ Chair to his Pedestal Table – had a strong sculptural quality. “The underside of typical tables and chairs makes a confusing, unrestful world,” said Saarinen. In a 1956 cover story in Time magazine, he announced that he was designing a collection to “clear up the slum of legs in the U.S. home.” Later that year, he completed his Pedestal Table Collection, followed by his Tulip Chair Collection (1956), both of which feature cast-aluminum bases inspired by a drop of high-viscosity liquid. The seat swivels for easy entrance to or exit from a table. Each chair is stamped with the KnollStudio logo and Eero Saarinen’s signature. Photo courtesy of Design Within Reach
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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
ShopKnoll Saarinen Tulip Armless Chair
When Eero Saarinen designed his Pedestal Collection for Knoll in 1956, he created an alternative to the "ugly, confusing, unrestful world" that he thought tables and chairs had become known for. The Tulip Chair—available with or without arms—sits on a cast-aluminum base that was inspired by a drop of high-viscosity liquid and can be topped with a black or white Rilsan®-coated finish. The molded fiberglass shell seat swivels so that it’s easy to slide in and out from a table. Since Saarinen saw himself as a “form giver,” his design was inevitably sculptural—and has become an iconic silhouette used throughout modern homes. Each Tulip Chair is stamped with Saarinen’s signature and the KnollStudio logo.
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This article was originally published on January 28, 2015. It was updated on August 20, 2024, to include current information.
Top photo by Leslie Williamson
Related Reading:
How an Usual Request From Florence Knoll Spawned Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair
How a WWII Leg Splint Inspired the Eames Molded Plywood Lounge Chair
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