Harry Bertoia, the sculptor who seats the air

Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) came to furniture through sculpture. An Italian-American sculptor close to the Eames, he joined Knoll in 1950 with a simple idea: what if a chair could be made of air? From that intuition came in 1952 the Diamond Chair, a seat in hand-welded steel mesh, as light to the eye as an aviary. Bertoia himself would say: 'these chairs are mostly made of air, like sculptures.' Furniture as an extension of fine art.