Lily&Rose Design Studio

“If you look at these chairs, they are mainly made of air, like sculp­ture. Space passes right through them.” — Harry Bertoia.  Lets have a look at the man behind the iconic Bertoia chair.

Bertoia was an inven­tor of form and an enricher of fur­ni­ture design with his intro­duc­tion of a new mate­r­ial: he turned indus­trial wire rods into a design icon. Bertoia taught metal crafts at Cran­brook and was edu­cated at Detroit Tech­ni­cal High School, the Detroit School of Arts and Crafts and Cran­brook Acad­emy of Art in Bloom­field Hills, Michi­gan. He worked with Charles Eames to develop his sig­na­ture molded ply­wood chairs. Eero Saari­nen com­mis­sioned him to design a metal sculp­tured screen for the Gen­eral Motors Tech­ni­cal Cen­ter in Detroit.

He struck designer gold with his intro­duc­tion of indus­trial wire mesh in his col­lec­tion for Knoll Inter­na­tional in 1952. So much so, his com­mis­sions allowed him to devote him­self fully to his first love: sculp­ture. He even­tu­ally went on to explore how metal can affect and pro­duce sound, cre­at­ing “sound­ing sculp­tures” like large wind chimes. Bertoia received awards from the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Archi­tects in 1973 and the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Let­ters in 1975.  Even today, we are still using his inno­v­a­tive forms in so many types of rooms. Like the Plat­ner and Saari­nen col­lec­tions, these iconic pieces can stand alone or be paired with just about any fur­ni­ture style, cre­at­ing an instantly eclec­tic space.

 

Addi­tional sources: knoll.com, www.harrybertoia.org & La Dolce Vita