Eero Saarinen footstools

Eero Saarinen was born in Finland in 1910 to the architect Eliel Saarinen and the sculptor Loja Gesellius. The family emigrated to the United States in the early 1920s. Eero's father Eliel founded and designed most of the buildings at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.

At the same university, Eero later met Charles Eames, who would become a lifelong collaborator. Saarinen and Eames won MoMA's Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition in 1940, and from then on Eero was taken seriously as a furniture designer.

For Saarinen, there was never any other option but to follow in his father's footsteps. Between 1931 and 1934, he studied architecture at the prestigious Yale University. But the American architectural trend was very different from Eero's father's modern Scandinavian vision. After his studies, Saarinen moved to Helsinki, where he worked under the Finnish architect Jarl Eklund. His career in the United States took off in 1936 and he later joined his father's firm in Bloomfield Hills. Together they created several institutional buildings for education and industry.

Eero Saarinen's had a strong interest in furniture design, especially chairs, which posed many aesthetic and structural challenges. Among Saarinen's most famous works is the Saarinen Dining Table, better known as the Tulip Table. The Tulip Chair and Womb Chair are also famous works, which are produced by Knoll and are part of our extensive range at NO GA. The Tulip Chair has won numerous awards and is undoubtedly a design classic.

In addition to being a prominent furniture designer, Saarinen was also at the forefront of the second generation of modernists. He challenged aesthetic boundaries and explored modern design with forms taken from nature. He started a trend in experimental design that departs from the doctrinaire elements that characterised the earlier phase of modern architecture. Saarinen is recognised as one of the great masters of modern design and architecture of the 20th century, and his works are as groundbreaking and popular today as they were then.