The Auditorium of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris impresses with generous dimensions.
Photo: UNESCO

The chair of nations

It is not only the architecture of the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris that is iconic, but also its interior. Pride of place there goes to Eero Saarinen’s “Conference Chair”, which is now set to furnish the building in a new version.

by Anna Moldenhauer | 10/6/2017

The UNESCO Headquarters in Paris is an icon of architecture, and was developed in 1958 as a joint project: Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi, Antonio Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss were all involved, consulting in the process with an architecture committee chaired by Walter Gropius.

The choice for the seating for the huge auditorium fell back then on the “Conference Chair”, the brainchild of industrial designer and architect Eero Saarinen, who created the chair for Knoll International. The soft shape of the upholstered chair is no coincidence, since the design is ultimately based on the “Organic Chair” that Eero Saarinen had designed previously in cooperation with Ray Eames for the 1941 competition “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The decision once again to incorporate the timeless classic into the auditorium of the UNESCO Headquarters after the historic building’s modernization was not a difficult one: 800 individual chairs were produced with a base frame developed specially for the project and the material and colors adapted to the impressive auditorium.