Single Pedestal Furniture Designed by Eero Saarinen
Knoll Associates, Herbert Matter [Designer]
KNOLL ASSOCIATES. Herbert Matter [Designer]: “Single Pedestal Furniture Designed by Eero Saarinen [poster title].” New York: Knoll Associates, [1957]. Original edition. Poster machine-folded into twelfths (as issued) in original mailing envelope. 26 X 45 -inch offset lithograph with Saarinen furniture specifications to verso. Mailing envelope with a May 1958 postage cancellation. Mild binding crease under the ‘K’ and light aging to fold areas, but a nearly fine, uncirculated copy housed in Publishers mailing envelope.
26 X 45 -inch (66 x 114 cm) poster announcing the arrival of Eero Saarinen’s Pedestal Collection for Knoll Associates. Herbert Matter’s original Corporate ID Design is very much apparent, from the stylized Knoll “K”to the fine-arts Sculptural approach to photographing the furniture.
Allow us to quote Frederica Todd Harlow’s essay published in DESIGN 1935-1965: WHAT MODERN WAS [Selections from the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection. New York/Montreal: Le Musee des Arts Decoratifs de Montreal, in association with Abrams, 1991, p. 226] in full:
“Matter’s geometrically based graphic designs for knoll were the perfect vehicle for promoting the firm’s lean, modern furniture. Matter, who in 1945 was working for Charles Eames in California, was approached by Hans Knoll to design for the latter’s seven-year-old New York form, which was committed, like Matter himself, to a Bauhaus ideal. Matter went to New York in 1946 and devoted the next two decades of his career to Knoll Associates. He was given free rein, first designing the Knoll trademark—which evolved into the red K seen in the upper left corner of this poster—and then some promotional material. Eventually, his techniques of photomontage became synonymous with Knoll’s visual merchandising, and the resultant projects constitute some of Matter’s best work.
This flyer, sent as a folded mailer, features Eero Saarinen’s Pedestal chairs, designed some two years earlier. Matter gave a frontal view of the armchair and a profile view of the side chair, both of them superimposed against a horizontal band of schematic diagrams printed in red, and, below, a comparable horizontal strip of four black and white photographs showing groupings of Pedestal chairs and tables. These rectangular elements provide information and also anchor the chairs in Matter’s typically clean, tight composition. He created visual interest by varying the scale of his images. It is ultimately the pictorial elements, rather than the copy, that convey the product’s message. The single line of red sans serif type functions as a compositional repeat of the red stripe of plans above. This dramatic poster conveys a great deal of information in a simple fashion while at the same time satisfying many interests.”
Herbert Matter (1907 – 1984) was born in Engelberg, a Swiss mountain village, where exposure to the treasure of one of the two finest medieval graphic art collections in Europe was unavoidable. In 1925, he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Genf, but after two years, the allure of modernism beckoned him to Paris. There, the artist attended the Academie Moderne under the tutelage of Fernand Leger and Amédée Ozenfant.
In Europe during the late Twenties and early Thirties, a new language was born -- a combination of journalism, manipulated photography and the rebellion of the confines of the typesetters case, all in the service of selling everything from ideas to political and social ideologies.
Inspired by the work of El Lissitzky and Man Ray, Matter began to experiment with his Rollei camera as both a design tool and an expressive form—a relationship that never ended. In 1929, his entry into graphic design was completed when he was hired as a designer/photographer for Deberny and Piegnot. There he learned the nuances of fine typography, while he assisted A. M. Cassandre and Le Corbusier. Matter's Paris years ended in 1932, when he was expelled from France for not having the proper papers. He returned to Swizerland where he created a series of iconic posters for the Swiss Tourist Office.
Matter came to America in 1936. He was offered roundtrip passage to the United States as payment for work with a Swiss ballet troupe. He spoke no English, yet traveled across the United States. When the tour was over, he decided to remain in New York. At the urging of a friend who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, Matter went to see Alexey Brodovitch, who had been collecting the Swiss travel posters (two of which were hanging on Brodovitch's studio wall). Matter soon began taking photographs for Harper's Bazaar and Saks Fifth Avenue. Later, he affiliated himself with a photographic studio, "Studio Associates," located near the Condé Nast offices, where he produced covers and inside spreads for Vogue.
During World War II, Matter produced multiple advertisements for the Container Corporation of America. In 1944, he became the design consultant at Knoll, molding its graphic identity for 12 years. As Alvin Eisenman, head of the Design Department at Yale and long-time friend, points out: "Herbert had a strong feeling for minute details, and this was exemplified by the distinguished typography he did for the Knoll catalogues."
Although Eero Saarinen (1910 – 1961) made his reputation in the United States following World War II, he had his roots in Europe. Until 1923, he lived in Finland with his mother, textile artist Loja Saarinen, and his father, the renowned architect and town planner, Eliel Saarinen. For Eero, architecture was a discipline like the fine arts, and in particular, sculpture. He called himself a "form giver" and everything he designed had a strong sculptural quality.
Saarinen began his career as a student at Yale University and after travels and studies in Europe returned to the U.S. and taught for a brief period at Cranbrook Academy. Cranbrook had been founded in 1927 by publisher George C. Booth and Eliel Saarinen, the latter of whom became Director in 1932. Two of its graduates were Charles Eames and Florence Knoll Bassett (then Schust). Saarinen and Eames collaborated on various projects, culminating in a range of furniture that won first prize at an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940 entitled, "Organic Design in Home Furnishings." After 1946, Eames went to work for Herman Miller, and Saarinen became associated with Knoll Associates. A number of Saarinen's chairs for Knoll were to become landmarks in the history of 20th century design.
A request from Florence Knoll Bassett to create "a chair she could curl up in," led to Saarinen's 1948 design of the Womb Chair and Ottoman. In the decade that followed, Saarinen created a range of office chairs for Knoll, as well as his classic Pedestal Table and Tulip Chair. Saarinen's stated objective with the Pedestal Collection was to clear up the "slum of legs" in domestic interiors. Like his furniture, Saarinen's architecture is characterized by expressive sculptural forms. Among his masterworks are the TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport, New York; Dulles International Airport, Washington, D.C.; and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri.
For those of you wondering what the fuss is all about, here's a brief history of Knoll: Hans Knoll founded his eponymous company in New York in 1938, just one year after immigrating from Germany. He must already have had big dreams, for he posted a sign saying "Factory No. 1" outside the single second-story room he rented on East 72nd Street. Hans's father was the pioneering German manufacturer of modern furniture, Walter. Establishing the H.G. Knoll Furniture Company was Hans's declaration of independence.
Hans Knoll, born and raised in Stuttgart, had been educated in England and Switzerland during an era of aesthetic and social revolution. An admirer of the Bauhaus, he was familiar with its giants of design and architecture, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Stuttgart, one of the breeding grounds for the crop of new ideas generated in during the 1920s, hosted many exhibitions of the Deutscher Werkbund, a government organization that promoted German design and architecture. Such were the influences on young Hans Knoll. By the time he crossed the Atlantic at age 24, he had formulated the credo that would distinguish his company: Modern architects need modern furniture for their modern buildings.
Many of those modern architects had left Germany before Knoll. In 1933, the Nazis had shut down the Bauhaus, a hothouse of ideas that nurtured some of the 20th century's greatest architects, designers, and artists. Mies Van der Rohe, Breuer, and Gropius, among others, fled to the United States, transplanting the philosophies of architecture that have evolved into American design culture as we know it. In 1932, the year before the Nazis sparked the exodus of many of Germany's great young designers, George W. Booth established the Academy of Art at Cranbrook, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He selected Eliel Saarinen, a Finnish èmigrè and noted modern architect, as president. Cranbrook, as the academy came to be known, had much in common with the Bauhaus. Both were schools and residential communities for practicing artists, founded on the utopian ideal that aesthetic values would tame the chaos of industrial society. Each was committed to an underlying competence in craft and craftsmanship. Cranbrook's faculty and graduates, like those of the Bauhaus, had a major impact on 20th century art, design and architecture, and many later became associated with the Knoll company.
America's isolation from the modern movement began to dissipate in 1940 when two young American instructors from Cranbrook - Eero Saarinen, Eliel's son, and Charles Eames-won an international competition for furniture design conducted by New York's Museum of Modern Art. Since it was unprecedented for Americans to achieve honors in the field of furniture design, Eames and Saarinen and their furniture prototypes began to change the perception that only Europe produced superior designers. When the postwar building boom erupted in an explosion of homes and office buildings, it was the architects of the Bauhaus who were selected to design corporate America. In the second half of the 20th century the faculty and graduates of both the Bauhaus and Cranbrook helped set the standard for contemporary architecture and design around the world.
During the early 1940s, Knoll had begun to think about developing a base for manufacturing outside New York City. An excellent business manager, he began investigating eastern Pennsylvania because of its concentrated population of German-Americans and Pennsylvania Dutch. The community had a tradition of meticulous craftsmanship and a potential supply of healthy young laborers returning from the war who no longer wanted to farm. Knoll made his first major investment: a former planing mill in Pennsburg, near Quakertown.
During the war, Knoll had met and hired Florence Schust, a young space planner and designer who later helped Knoll achieve his vision of modern furniture and interiors for modern buildings. As a student at Cranbrook, Schust, had became friends with the Saarinen family and spent summers with them at their home in Hvitrask, Finland. She also toured Europe, visiting the great architectural sites. She later studied at the Architectural Association in London at the suggestion of the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, and spent two years there under the influence of Le Corbusier.
At the outbreak of the war, Schust returned to the U.S., apprenticing with Gropius and Breuer until she entered the Armour Institute (subsequently the Illinois Institute of Technology) to complete her degree. There, Mies van der Rohe, the head of the school of architecture, had a profound effect on her design approach. Schust moved to New York after graduation and worked in several architectural offices where, as the only female, she was assigned the few interiors projects that came along.
When Schust joined Knoll's company, she considered herself an interior designer with "opinions" about furniture-not, strictly speaking, a furniture designer. The two had a difficult time finding work involving contemporary design; when they did, production proved problematic because materials were limited by wartime shortages. Nevertheless, they persisted.
Knoll and Schust married in 1946. They also formalized their business partnership, which became Knoll Associates Inc. Florence's keen eye for design, Hans's knowledge of furniture manufacturing and marketing, and their limitless energy proved to be a winning combination. Florence played a critical role in the company's development. She championed the Bauhaus approach to furniture design: to offer objects that reflected design excellence, technological innovation and mass production. Together, the Knolls searched out and nurtured talented designers. They believed strongly that designers should be credited by name and paid royalties for their designs. Knoll continues that tradition today.
After the death of Hans Knoll in 1955, Florence Knoll took over as president and continued to exert her influence on all aspects of design, while leaving business matters to others. In 1958, she married Harry Hood Bassett, and began dividing her time between New York and Florida. In 1965, she resigned from the company, withdrawing from the industry completely but leaving the company in the hands of those she had trained and inspired.