Who are the big names in mid-century modern furniture design?
The big names in mid-century modern furniture design split roughly between the American innovators and the Danish masters, with a few sculptor-engineers blurring the line. Charles and Ray Eames lead the American side, with the molded Lounge Chair 670 (1956) and the fiberglass shell chairs they made for Herman Miller. George Nelson, Herman Miller's design director, gave us the Marshmallow sofa (1956) and the Ball clock (1949), while Eero Saarinen designed the Tulip pedestal group (1957) and the Womb Chair (1948) for Knoll. From Denmark came Hans Wegner, whose Wishbone Chair (1949) is still hand-tied with roughly 120 meters of paper cord, alongside Finn Juhl and Arne Jacobsen, whose Egg and Swan chairs (1958) sculpt foam over a steel shell. Two names matter out of proportion to their catalogs: Harry Bertoia, whose welded-wire Diamond Chair (1952) treats steel like a drawing, and Isamu Noguchi, a sculptor whose 1947 coffee table now sits in museums. Florence Knoll ran the company that manufactured much of this work and designed the crisp sofas and credenzas that furnished corporate America. If you learn only one, learn the Eameses; nearly every molded chair since owes them a debt.
You do not need an original to get the language right. The pieces in our mid-century modern furniture collection carry the same structural honesty those designers worked in, chosen for how they hold a room rather than for a signature on the underside.
