This is a book on the model of Marilyn and John Neuhart’s The Story of Eames Furniture (Gestalten, 2010). It shares with that two-volume set an agenda—an emphasis on process and manufacturing—and a large size (14.2 by 11.8 inches) that does neither the reader nor the illustrations great service.
First, the agenda. Lutz, a former Knoll associate, argues in his introduction that Saarinen’s furniture has never attracted the same scholarly interest as his architecture, and he aims to rectify that omission by placing Saarinen’s key pieces (the Grasshopper, the Womb, the 70s Series , and the ineffable “Tulip” chairs—as the Pedestal chairs are often called) in context. The book is lavishly illustrated with sketches, patent applications, and process photographs from the Saarinen archives at Cranbrook, Yale, and Knoll Inc. It usefully reinstates the manufacturers of the early fiberglass and bentwood pieces as essential players in the creative process and correctly refers to the furniture innovations of other modernists, including Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, and Charles Eames as influences. It is large and handsome, though hard to read, given its dimensions. Having the captions run the full width of the text column is also unkind to the nearsighted; blowing up period images that large often makes them grainy, also a problem in the jumbo-size Alexander Girard monograph published by AMMO in 2011.
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