Warren Platner 1705Y Easy Ottoman, Gray Leather and Nickel, Knoll, 1966

Custom gray leather (original); original nickel finish. Ottoman retains original clear acrylic feet. The masterful upholstery in the soft leather accentuates the sensual, organic quality of the form and serves as a great counterpoint to the metal structure. Lovely cool gray leather supported by warm nickel frame. The Easy chair and ottoman are not currently available for order from Knoll in leather.

With his experience in the firm of Eero Saarinen and Associates, it is not surprising that the mantel for the second generation of pedestal and wire furniture fell on the creative shoulders of Warren Platner. Reflecting a dramatic shift in cultural values, modernism became more expressive in the 1960s. Platner felt there was an opportunity to merge the competing aesthetics of the time.

“I began to think about what I thought furniture, specifically a chair, really might be, starting with the philosophy that it isn’t going to be aggressively technological, or aggressively handicraft…I, as a designer, felt there was room for the kind of decorative, gentle, graceful kind of design that appeared in period style like Louis XV, but it could have a more rational base instead of being applied decoration…I thought why separate support from the object. Just make it all one thing. Starts at the floor and comes up and envelops me, supports me…What I wanted to achieve was a chair that, number one, was complementary to the person sitting in it, or to the person in the space between the wall and the chair — what the chair did for the person in respect to the scale of the person and the space.” The Platner Collection captured the “decorative, gentle, graceful” shapes that were beginning to infiltrate the modern vocabulary at the time. Each piece requires the welding of hundreds of curved steel rods to circular frames, serving as structure (support) and ornament. Platner submitted his design 1962 but it took more than four years to configure and manage production (1966).