The chair generated favorable comment at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York in 2012, and was honored the next year by the Red Dot awards, an international competition.

Charles Randolph Pollock was born in Philadelphia on June 20, 1930, and moved with his family to Toledo, Ohio, as a child. As a boy, he made a motor in his basement using odds and ends. The family settled in Detroit, where Mr. Pollock attended Cass Technical High School and won poster contests. At 16, when his family moved again, to Muskegon, Mich., he chose to remain in Detroit, living in a boardinghouse, working on Chrysler’s assembly line and going to school.

After graduation he received a scholarship to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he used wire to fashion his furniture designs. George Nelson, considered a founder of American modernism in design, admired one of his sculptures when he came to lecture. Mr. Pollock went to his office and presented it to him as a gift, telling him he would like to work for him when he graduated.

But first he served in the Army, teaching art classes and working as art director of Infantry magazine. After his discharge, he went back to Mr. Nelson, who hired him. Together they developed the “Swag Leg” collection of chairs, characterized by four elegantly curved metal legs.

Mr. Pollock then approached Florence Knoll, a celebrated designer who studied under Mies van der Rohe. She initially refused to meet with him but relented after an interior design magazine published an article about him. On the day of his interview with her, he brought along a prototype of a lounge chair he was working on and collided with her as she was coming out of the elevator, knocking her down with the chair. She hired him anyway.

He soon talked Mrs. Knoll into paying $20 a month for a studio in a run-down part of Brooklyn, where he worked on the executive chair for five years, making it over and over again, improving it each time. He rigged the basement wiring to steal electricity from a drugstore in the building to help defray the costs.