Saarinen Pedestal Table

The Saarinen table stands on a single foot. A broad, shallow disc on the floor rises into a narrowing stem that flares again to meet the top, so that the whole base reads as one continuous curve; Knoll says the shape was inspired by a drop of high-viscosity liquid. The base is cast aluminium in a smooth Rilsan finish, in white, black, cream or grey, and the top, round or oval, comes in marble, granite, quartz, slate, veneer or laminate. Underneath there is nothing else: no legs, no stretchers, nothing for a chair or a knee to meet.

That emptiness was the point. Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-born American architect of the TWA Flight Center and the Gateway Arch, complained that the legs beneath ordinary chairs and tables made an ugly, confusing, unrestful world, and in 1956, in a Time magazine cover story, said he meant to clear up 'the slum of legs'. His answer was a family of furniture on single pedestals, chairs, dining, coffee and side tables and a stool, worked out over several years in sketches and quarter-scale models.

Saarinen had become friends with Florence Schust at Cranbrook, and Knoll, the company founded by Hans Knoll and run by Florence after his death in 1955, put his chairs into production. The pedestal pieces went to Knoll too. The company dates the table's design to 1957 and introduced the Pedestal Collection in 1958. The chair made for it, the Tulip, became the better known of the pair, and its name has spread to the whole group.

Knoll has kept the table in production since, and it has become one of the defining shapes of mid-century design, copied widely enough that 'tulip table' now names a type. Knoll's own carry Saarinen's signature and the company's logo, stamped under the base or the top. Saarinen died in 1961; since 2021 Knoll has belonged to MillerKnoll, and the table is still in its catalogue.