Design moment: Diamond Chair, c 1952

The best way to understand this chair designed by Italian-American visionary Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) is through this own words. “When you get right down to it,” he said, “the chairs are studies in space, form and metal, too. If you will look at them you will find they are mostly made of air, just like sculpture. Space passes right through them.”

A trained sculptor, he moved seamlessly into furniture design and, like his friend Charles Eames – and indeed other designers working in this post-war period, when materials were scarce – his first choice of a starter material was steel rods. His influential Diamond chair – which took two years to design and bring to production – uses wire mesh to create a latticework of diamond shapes. The chair appears to float in space.

The Diamond chair is one of five wire chairs he designed for American manufacturer Knoll. They were expensive from the start, in an era when designers were striving to create work that could be mass produced, the wire chairs had to be hand-welded. They are not as unforgiving in comfort terms as they look – an option included a fully upholstered version although obviously it covers up the delicate diamond latticework.

The version of the Diamond chair with a simple – albeit thin – seat pad probably lets the chair be as true to Bertoia’s original vision as possible.