In the late 1920s, Saarinen was invited to design a room and its furnishings for an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As part of this commission, he designed a set of flatware. Only one of a total of one hundred flatware designs, Contempora, was actually produced in silver.

These drawings produced in the summer of 1931, clearly relate to the decorative sensibility Saarinen brought to his 1946 design for the Art Center, where the relationships of form, space, building materials, and decorative details create a beautifully integrated, warm and human environment for the exhibition of art.

Design for a Knife is chaarcterizd by the same respect for clean form and spare ornamentation that it embodies in the Art Center's original building.

Source: NEWS July AUgust 1998