Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia was an Italian-American artist, sculptor and contemporary furniture designer. His most famous piece is his Diamond Chair.

Harry Bertoia biography

Harry Bertoia was born in San Lorenzo, Italy, on 10 March 1915. Following a visit to his brother in the USA, he decided to emigrate, too, at the age of 15. He studied art and design at the Cass Technical High School, and explored jewellery design and painting.

In 1936, Bertoia attended the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, later renamed the College for Creative Studies. Shortly afterwards, he won a scholarship to study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he met Walter Gropius as well as Charles and Ray Eames. In 1943, he moved to California, where he worked in the Eames office until 1946.

In the 1950s, Bertoia teamed up with Florence Knoll, a fellow Cranbrook Academy graduate, who had a studio in Pennsylvania. It is here that he made his name by developing his steel-wire chairs – the Bertoia Collection – the Diamond Chair chief among them. Steel wire also formed the basis of his Bertoia 1055 sculpture, designed for Eero Saarinen’s MIT Chapel. From 1953 onwards, Bertoia focused solely on sculpture and goldsmithing.

Diamond Chair

Harry Bertoia developed the Diamond Chair from 1952 to 1953 for Knoll Associates in New York. He was interested in how steel rod could be used to create highly sculptural and fluid, and at the same time functional, forms. His Diamond Chairs, as Bertoia himself put it, are mostly made of air. ‘Space passes right through them.’ Still being manufactured by Knoll today, the sculptural form of the Diamond Chair is emblematic of the pared-down 1950s interior.

Bird Chair

The Bird Lounge Chair, designed by Harry Bertoia in 1952, results from his experiments in wire mesh. The organic form of the seat’s shell represents the culmination in his wire-frame furniture series for Knoll. The Bird Lounge Chair is a high-back variation on the Diamond Chair.

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