An American architect and interior designer, Born Joseph Warren Platner in Baltimore, Maryland in 1919. Platner studied architecture at Cornell University and, following graduation in 1941, worked in the offices of legendary designers Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. He created a furniture collection that has proved to be an enduring icon of 1960's Modernism and designed several prominent interiors in New York, including offices for the Ford Foundation building and the original Windows on the World restaurant. He also created lighting fixtures, floor and window coverings, furniture and architectural ornaments for clients, completed many other noteworthy projects, including the interior design of Water Tower Place, the vertical shopping mall that opened in Chicago in 1976, and the 1986 renovation of the Pan Am Building lobby for its new owner, MetLife. 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. He died, aged 86, in 2006.