DesignerItalian-American
Harry Bertoia
2 active items
Harry Bertoia was born on March 10, 1915, in San Lorenzo, Udine, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northern Italy. At age fifteen he emigrated to Detroit to live with his older brother, and by the late 1930s he had enrolled at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he studied metalwork and jewelry design. He proved so gifted that the school appointed him to run its metal workshop, a post he held from 1939 to 1943.
At Cranbrook, Bertoia formed a close friendship with Charles and Ray Eames. In 1946 he joined them in California to help develop techniques for laminating and bending plywood, contributing substantially to what became the Eames furniture line, though he received no formal credit. Dissatisfied with that arrangement, he accepted an offer from Florence Knoll to join Knoll Associates in New York in 1950. The partnership changed furniture history.
In 1952 Knoll introduced Bertoia's wire furniture collection. The Diamond Chair, constructed from a welded lattice of steel rods bent into a continuous shell, became one of the most reproduced objects in twentieth-century design. The collection also included the Side Chair, the Bird Chair with its wide-spanning seat, and a barstool using the same mesh wire frame language. Bertoia famously said of the chairs: "If you look at them, they are mainly made of air, like sculpture."
From the mid-1950s onward, Bertoia devoted increasing energy to monumental sculpture and architectural commissions. He designed a steel-screen altarpiece for the MIT Chapel in 1955, a copper and bronze fountain for the Philadelphia Civic Center in 1967, and a large relief, View of Earth from Space, for Dulles International Airport in 1963. His final major creative territory was the Sonambient series, sound sculptures made from clusters of metal rods that emit tonal vibrations when touched. He recorded several albums of the sounds they produced, released under the Sonambient label through the 1970s.
Bertoia received the Gold Medal from the Architectural League of New York in 1955 and the Fine Arts Medal from the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1963. He died on November 6, 1978, in Barto, Pennsylvania.
At auction, Bertoia's wire furniture appears frequently at Nordic and European houses. Sets of Side Chairs and vintage Bird Chairs attract consistent collector interest, with prices for multiple-piece lots ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands of euros depending on condition, upholstery originality, and provenance. His Sonambient sculptures command significantly higher sums at international auction, occasionally exceeding six figures, reflecting his dual standing as both a canonical designer and a serious sculptor.