The Diamond Chair, Functional Art

The jewel in Harry Bertoia’s singular furniture collection.

“You go through these emotions – joy, suffering, happiness, sorrow – and if you happen to have a bit of metal in your hands, you just shape it,” said Harry Bertoia of his creative process. Fashioned in 1952, the sculptural mesh armchair he made for Knoll Inc. has been in production for almost 70 years, an iconic piece of functional art. Italian-born Arri Bertoia was a prodigious artist who moved to the United States at 15 to pursue his craft. In Detroit, young Arri became Harry, learnt English and drew his way into a scholarship at Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, where his stellar cohort included Eero Saarinen, Florence Schust (later Knoll) and Charles Eames. Bertoia took to metalwork and was focused on jewellery when World War II impacted the supply of materials. Intrigued by the Eames’s organic plywood furniture experimentation, he went to work with the couple and learnt how to weld. It was after Bertoia left the Eames workshop, frustrated that his role in developing their moulded furniture had not been acknowledged, that those welding lessons would really pay off. When the ergonomic Diamond chair, which Bertoia described as “mainly made of air, like sculpture”, was launched by his college pal Florence Knoll’s furniture company, it was an instant hit. With high praise and remuneration under his belt, Bertoia left furniture design behind and spent the next 25 years exploring light and sound through paintings, sculpture and architectural installations. Bertoia’s daughter Celia, head of the Harry Bertoia Foundation, says a Diamond chair was the favourite seat in her childhood home. “My father explained that the Side chair [he designed] would be for a 30-minute meal or dashing off some quick bill payments but the Diamond chair was for an evening with friends and lively discussions.” Today, Knoll continues to make the Diamond chair to order (from $2618; dedece.com). Constructed by hand and machine, it remains an object poised between furniture and sculpture.