AROUND HOME : Saarinen’s Pedestal Chair

SWOOPING, SENSUOUS curves were a specialty of American architect Eero Saarinen (1910-1961), whose TWA Building at New York’s J.F.K. Airport vaguely resembles a bird flapping its wings. Like many a great architect, Saarinen was also interested in designing furniture: “I think of architecture as the total of man’s man-made physical surroundings,” he wrote. “I believe very strongly that the whole field of design is all one thing.”

So it comes as no surprise that the graceful, sculptural pedestal chair (1957)--his most famous piece of furniture--bears a family resemblance to TWA, which dates from about the same time. Saarinen had planned to make the chair entirely out of plastic, but, finding that the base was too weak, made it from cast aluminum painted the same color as the plastic seat--showing the effort he’d go to attain a big, simple form. As he later wrote: “The undercarriage of chairs and tables in a typical interior makes an ugly, confusing, unrestful world. I wanted to clear up the slum of legs. I wanted to make the chair all one thing.” (Again, that kind of thinking appeared in his architecture, when he provided Dulles Airport, outside Washington, with an enormous overhang because “too many measly marquees rat up a facade.”)

Though the pedestal chair is more comfortable than most 20th-Century chairs, that fact alone doesn’t explain its incredible mass appeal. While well-heeled clients buy the expensive original pedestal chairs from Knoll International, the masses can find dinette suite knockoffs. The chair’s popularity comes, perhaps, from its appearance pushing all the right ‘50s nostalgia buttons while remaining stylish, unlike contemporaneous but now-kitschy kidney-shaped coffee tables and jet-fighter tail fins. Indeed, no chair better evokes that heady, innocent era, between World War II and the Vietnam War, which Time and Life magazines’ founder Henry Luce had prematurely called typical of “the American century.”

The pedestal chair by Eero Saarinen can be seen at KnollStudio Showroom, Suite 482, at the Pacific Design Center, in Los Angeles. KnollSource dealers include: Contract Purchasing in Los Angeles; Office Matrix in Santa Fe Springs; Office Furniture Specialists in San Diego and Long Beach, and En Touch in Rancho Cucamonga. Pedestal chair prices start at $704 list price in fabric and $1,249 in leather. The armless chair ranges from $607 to $1,152.