project

The man who masterminded the renewal of Finnish architecture at the beginning of the 20th century and, after he moved to the USA in the 1920s, the father of a generation of American designers (his son Eero and his students at Cranbrook:Charles Eames, Florence Knoll, Harry Bertoia), Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950) is a key figure in the culture of modern living. This tea service with samovar was created for the Contemporary industrial art exhibition for which Saarinen had designed a ladies room as the ideal interior in which each component was designed as part of a unified whole: the furniture, fabrics, carpets, and even the dress were functional variations on the geometrical shapes of the square, the rectangle and the circle. Among all those objects, many of which are still dominated by the decorative element that was such a feature of Saarinens first period, the Service stands out for the decidedly Modernist nature which was to become a hallmark of his work: the sphere and the cylinder as geometrical yet graceful shapes are ideal forms of Industrial Art, in which the decorative element is diminished until it disappears and transforms into functional decoration. It is interesting to note that the prototypes of the Sugar Bowl and the Milk Jug were made by the young Harry Bertoia, who was then just starting out as a silversmith. Stefano Casciani