Featuring a range of furniture designs from one of the world’s most important architects.

June 12, 2009 – July 11, 2009
IU Herron School of Art and Design

Reception: June 30, 2009; 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Knoll Design Director will speak at 6:30 pm
RSVP for reception to

DESCRIPTION OF SHOW from original opening in Atlanta

In cooperation with Knoll, the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) presents the first exhibition to examine the complete range of furniture designs of Eero Saarinen. Widely heralded as America’s foremost architect in the 1950s, Eero Saarinen (1910 – 1961) gained his earliest international prominence with his prize winning furniture designs done with Charles Eames for the 1941 Museum of Modern Art Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition. Saarinen’s subsequent cooperation with his life-long friend Florence Knoll resulted in his most noted designs: the Grasshopper Chair, the Womb Chair and derivative 70-Series seating, and the iconic Pedestal Series of tables and chairs.

Designs for Everyday Living presents examples of Saarinen’s early furniture designs, sketches, photographs and descriptions of each of Saarinen’s furniture designs and collections. Knoll has provided archival examples and pieces of Saarinen’s timeless designs from current production.

Eero Saarinen, son of Eliel Saarinen, architect and director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art from its inception in 1925, did his earliest furniture designs while still in high school, creating a strikingly modernist master bedroom suite for the family’s Cranbrook residence. In 1931, after a year of study in Paris following his high school graduation, Saarinen worked with his father on the design of the furniture for the Cranbrook Kingswood School for Girls.

One of the students at Kingswood the next year was Florence Schust, who arrived and announced her desire to study architecture. Such charming self-assurance intrigued Eliel Saarinen and his wife, and Florence Schust virtually became a member of the Saarinen family, traveling with them to Finland and throughout Europe during the summers of her Cranbrook years.

When Florence Schust married Hans Knoll, forming Knoll Associates in 1946, it was a very short time before Eero Saarinen’s furniture designs were being developed and produced by Knoll Associates.

The Museum of Design Atlanta is fortunate to have worked closely with Knoll in the planning of this exhibition. Additional assistance has come from Brian Lutz, author of “Form and Innovation,” an essay on Eero Saarinen’s furniture that is included in Shaping the Future, catalog of the current traveling exhibition celebrating the centennial of Eero Saarinen’s birth. Lutz is also the author of the upcoming monograph, The Furniture of Eero Saarinen, scheduled for publication by Yale University Press in 2008.