Papercutter

los angeles, calif. january 2026

Eero Saarinen’s Tulip Chair !

In 1922 at age 12, Eero Saarinen won his first design contest, illustrating a story entirely with matchsticks for a Swedish newspaper. The prize was 30 Swedish kronor (about $8 at the time).

The Finnish-American architect grew up surrounded by design. His father, Eliel Saarinen, was a well-known architect and his mother, Loja Saarinen, was a talented sculptor and textile maker.

By the time he was a teenager, Eero was designing furniture and fixtures with his father, who was president at the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.

In 1929, Eero left for Paris to study sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the following year enrolled in the Yale architecture program.

In the ’30s, he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the family firm, also returning to teach at Cranbrook, which is where he became friends with Florence Knoll and Charles Eames, who turned into formative collaborators. 

In the late ’50s, Eero designed the Pedestal Collection for Knoll to alleviate the visual clutter he famously hated in American homes caused by a jumble of furniture legs in one room.

"The undercarriage of chairs and tables in a typical interior makes an ugly, confusing, unrestful world," he said. "I wanted to clear up the slum of legs." 

The furniture series, which features a dining chair and an armchair, as well as dining, coffee, and side tables, and stools, trades the standard four legs of chairs and tables for one central tulip-like pedestal, hence the moniker.

Mr Saarinen’s intention to "make the chair all one thing again" extended to materials. He wanted to mold the Tulip chair from one material, but it was technologically impossible at the time. Instead, a reinforced aluminum stem with a fused plastic finish supports the curved fiberglass shell.

Though Mr Saarinen completed the Tulip chair design for Knoll in 1956, with manufacturing beginning the following year, the patent drawing was filed in June 1960.