ABSTRACT
Almost immediately upon its debut on the home furnishings market in 1948, Knoll’s chair no. 70, or “Womb Chair,” as it was quickly dubbed, achieved cult status as a design object (Figure 1.1). Emerging at the beginning of the era of prosperity, the chair enjoyed consistent popularity from the 1940s into the 1960s, ironically becoming a “classic” in a period defined by planned obsolescence and the cult of the new. Arguably Knoll’s signature piece of the first two decades of the postwar period, in recent years the Womb Chair has resurfaced as an icon of mid-century modernism. 1 Its well-known designer, the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen (1910–1961), was a leading protagonist among the group of American practitioners who would become known as the “form givers.” Although he adhered to the tenets of modern architecture as defined by Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, Saarinen sought to expand the vocabulary and range of expression of architectural form, a goal he achieved in such buildings as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis (1947–1965), the David S. Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale University (1956–1959), and the Trans World Airlines Terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport, Idlewild (New York) (1956–1962). Womb Chair (Knoll chair no. 70) with Ottoman, 1946–1948 (Unknown photographer) https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203142721/3f14115e-4a5e-4ae9-80de-b7806af87db7/content/fig1_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
