Knoll - Platner nickel chair with armrests and fabric cover

In the 1960s, Warren Platner transformed steel wire into a sculptural furniture collection, creating what is now considered a design icon of the modern era.
In 1966, the Platner Collection captured the “decorative, gentle, graceful” shapes that were beginning to infiltrate the modern vocabulary. The Arm Chair, which can be used as a dining chair or gues chair, is created by welding curved steel rods to circular and semi-circular frames, simultaneously serving as structure and ornament.

“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.”

Warren Platner

Warren Platner studied at Cornell University, graduating in 1941 with a degree in architecture. He went on to work with legendary architects Raymond Loewy, Eero Saarinen, and I. M. Pei before opening his own architecture practice. Platner made notable architectural contributions throughout his career, including the Georg Jensen Design Center and the Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center ― both in New York City. It was his furniture collection for Knoll, however, that earned Platner worldwide renown.

Originally introduced by Knoll in 1966, the Platner Collection is an icon of modern furniture. Platner personally formulated the production techniques for the complicated designs with each chair requiring over a thousand welds and more than one hundred cylindrical steel rods. Knoll also introduced an executive private office collection designed by Platner.

Knoll

Knoll uses modern design to connect people to their work, to their lives, to their world. Since 1938, it has been internationally recognized for creating furniture for work and residential environments.

For more than 80 years Knoll has remained true to the Bauhaus design philosophy that modern furniture should complement the architectural space. At Knoll, modern design has been the guiding principle and this passion has been shared by customers and design professionals around the world. The founders, Hans and Florence Knoll, embraced the creative genius of the time.  Supported schools were Bauhaus School and Cranbrook Academy of Art to create new types of furniture and workplace environments.

Their approach, where craftsmanship joins technology through the use of design, sets the perspective and shapes the values that live today. 80 years of historical collaborations, with pioneering modernists and daring contemporary designers, define not only the past but the future through active, recent and future collaborations with Antenna Design, Don Chadwick, Formway Design, Jehs & Laub, Joseph D'Urso , David Adjaye and OMA.