The Furniture of Eero Saarinen:
Designs for Everyday Living
and a celebration of other architects’ decorative art
Curated by Hugh Grant
September 3 to November 28, 2010
For information on the events for this exhibition, click HERE
Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) designed some of America’s architectural landmarks—the TWA Building at New York’s JFK Airport, the St. Louis Arch and corporate offices for CBS, IBM and John Deere—but he remains better known for his tables and chairs. All this was achieved before his untimely death at age 51. The Furniture of Eero Saarinen: Designs for Everyday Living celebrates Saarinen’s collaboration with Charles Eames and life-long friend Florence (Schust) Knoll to create his most noted designs—the Grasshopper, Womb and Tulip chairs and the iconic Pedestal series of tables—which are still popular and still produced by Knoll, Inc.
Kirkland Museum welcomes the traveling exhibition The Furniture of Eero Saarinen: Designs for Everyday Living this fall. Saarinen began his design career in 1928 while still in high school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan where his father, architect Eliel Saarinen, was director. In its unique incarnation at Kirkland Museum, The Furniture of Eero Saarinen: Designs for Everyday Living will be augmented by objects from Kirkland Museum’s nationally acclaimed decorative art collection and will be displayed in Kirkland Museum’s trademark salon style. Saarinen’s daughter, Susan, is loaning several family pieces, never before on public view, thus adding depth to the compelling story of Eero Saarinen’s influence on architecture and design.
The core exhibition debuted at the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) and is traveling around the world. It includes examples of Saarinen’s early furniture designs, sketches, photographs and descriptions of each of Saarinen’s furniture designs and commissions. Knoll has provided archival examples from the Knoll Museum in East Greenville, Pennsylvania, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, as well as pieces of Saarinen’s timeless designs currently in production by Knoll.
Examples of Saarinen’s furniture designs remain extraordinarily influential works of art and have been acquired for the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art.
The exhibition is made possible by the Knoll Museum in East Greenville, Pennsylvania, Knoll, Inc. and the generous support of Saarinen Landscape Architecture, ZModern, and Modernism Magazine.
