Eero Saarinen, the architect Florence Knoll turned into a catalogue

Born in Finland in 1910 and American by choice, Eero Saarinen grew up between drawing boards and clay: his father Eliel was an architect, his mother Loja a sculptor. He took his architecture degree at Yale in 1934, and in 1940 won first prize in MoMA's Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition together with Charles Eames. What carried those experiments out of the exhibition hall was the production partnership with Florence Knoll: a designer and a manufacturer treating the office and the factory as one continuous project.

The results kept their names for seventy years: the Grasshopper of 1946, the Womb of 1948, the pedestal series of 1956. When an executive floor calls for the Knoll canon, La Mercanti starts the conversation from these silhouettes.