designers and their n°1 hit  

If I were on your list......
If I were on your list.... I'd prefer to be dead before you named my greatest achievement 😉

I dont agree
While some of the bands you mentioned are, in fact, one hit wonders, many are not. Ask the average person over 30to name 3 Prince songs and I'll bet he can do it. Same goes for a 15 year old and Britney (even I hadnt forgotten: 'Oops I did it again', or 'Toxic')
Its true that some of the designers you listed also have their big hits but that doesnt hold true for all of them. I'd say Lecourbusier's LC4 (chaise) is more iconic than the LC2. I'd say I see more Bertoia side chairs in daily life than I see Diamonds. Sarinen's womb chair is ubiquitous as well.
Other designers may have had their single hits with the furniture end, but have much more name recognition in other areas: Mies' buildings, Saarinen's Arch and buildings.
I'd say another way to look at it is to ask a person on the street what their favorite movie actor is, or favorite sports hero - you'd get a long list from the dedicated fans, but only one or two big titles from the average joes.

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Eames the shell chairs...

Yes, but are you going to be tempted to..
bundle this book idea with a follow-up called "One Hit Wonders of Design?" 🙂

the main issue
of this thread was to evoke a discussion; big names in design; don't they deserve it (their stardom) just because of one 'hit'? are their really that much designers that can reinvent themselves? after a while aren't we all loosing criticisme towards these big names and their designs? is it proper to say that like in music once you have had a hit you keep on selling although the work isn't of that high level anymore. aren't there some big names who does not deserve it? in another thread people are being orgastic about the ox-chair. mmm i can give you 20 examples of almost similar designs made in that era (by vermeeren, mollino, tecno...) but just because the guy had some hits (and the ox was not at that time!) 30yeras later they see that his name is still big and they reissue it (and the marketing says 'the design was too advanced for that period; yeah right!) commnents?

I Suppose..........
It depends on how one defines a design's success..is it commercial, or critical acclaim, or a combination of both ?
Is the opinion of the man in the street as worthy as that of a panel of designers for instance?

gerrit, i've just had my post orgasmic cigarette...Pt. 1
and am now prepared to comment with spent detachment on this issue.
It is a thin, thin line between the highly skilled and the genius, but the line exists.
The highly skilled get steadily increasing respect and remuneration for a substantial and growing body of work. As their body of work expands, they sometimes get embraced by the major buyers of their work and become commercial standards in their fields. These are steadily working, often unsung designers that become the trusted professionals who can deliver in a complex corporate environment under inhibiting creative constraints like market research and focus groups and accounting/financial feasiblity reviews. I actually have a great deal of respect for professionals like these. Negotiating instituional, marketing and financial constraints really separate the men from the boys in any field, even though the negotiation often leads to suboptimal, or "satisficing" solutions, rather than excellence, but less brilliance. To be apart of this group, and stand out, you've got to have a big body of work evidencing your virtuosity of surviving.
The other group are the geniuses. Frankly, geniuses don't need very many great designs to reveal their genius and they don't need to be utterly unprecedented in their work. In fact, geniuses hardly ever do great work that is unprecedented. A defining characteristic of genius is taking precedents and reworking them in ways no one ever thought possible. For genius to be recognized, it requires something for it to do vastly better than. I don't know if Picasso ever did ANYTHING original. He almost always took something very familiar--either an old form like the epic murals on which Guernica was based, or cubisme, which was going around the avant garde like the flu at the time, and just reworks this form so stupendously it just wreaks of genius. But fecund genius like Picasso's is extremely rare IMHO.
More often genius is based on a lesser reservoir, and generates only a few great works. But the works are still definitive.
Michelangelo was fecund genius in painting and sculpture. By comparison, Leonardo had a lesser reservoir--in painting and sculpture that is, but his few great works still merit his inclusion among the best.

Gerrit, I've just had my post orgasmic cigarette...Pt.2
Based on what I know of Wegner so far, he was a genius. It just stands out. Now I don't claim to know all, or even very much of his work yet. Nor do I have a vast knowledge of others who did work similar to his during the time when he was working. But just because someone else did an Ox chair hardly disqualifies him as a genius. Frankly, based on my definition of genius, I would expect that there were a lot of OX like chairs at that time and that he did his. Likewise, I would expect precursors to most everything he ever did. Genius rarely originates. Genius redefines. Genius is the gift of seeing what greatness is possible in a new form going around, or in an old form that has been done to death. It is even possible that the OX chair by really isn't alot better than some other ox chairs. Not all of what Picasso did was head and shoulders better than his peers, what was remarkable about Picasso was that he could do soooooo many types of painting as good as his peers and some vastly better.
Can designers be considered great when they have only one or two iconic designs. Yes, of course. Would you keep da Vinci's paintings out of the Uffizi or Louvre just because he didn't do alot of paintings? No. Would you disqualify poet John Keats from being considered a first rate poet, because he burned brightly but died young and so didn't develop the depth and breadth of subject matter of longer lived poets. No, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn get him in the first rank. Were they unprecedented? Hardly. They were all takes on common forms.
Oh, and genius gets to be positively awful occassionally, where as highly skilled professionals have to be consistently very good.
Life isn't fair.
But to tell you the truth, we need both types. Genius keeps raising the bar. The highly skilled professionals keep figuring out how to consistently and systematically in that direction. Its a symbiosis that works out pretty well for society, if not for the self-esteem of the highly skilled professionals.

Mixing apples and bananas??
Somehow I got the feeling that I should add something to this discussion. Honestly, I do not know why because I find the question itself not that relevant. I think I understand Gerrit's point but to me the presumption that there is always one or a few pieces that are the most representative of someones work is an oversimplification of a rather complex issue. Because they share the same first name I might take Gerrit Rietveld as an exemple. Is the redblue chair really what Rietveld is all about? Of course not. Is the famous chair the most shown piece of Rietveld, yes...but. For a number of reasons chairs (read "The Chair" by Galen de Cranz) occupy a particular place in our lives, so given the choice between his "cupboard" (at least as relevant for the stijl mouvement as the redblue) the chair will always be chosen first. But not for reasons that are relevant for Rietveld's talent or his influence on the development of the modern mouvement. The Schröder home obviously shows more aspects of the different aspirations of the Stijl mouvement but not everybody can have a Schröder home (although there is a nice paper model on the market). I also suspect that most designers will disagree with "the market" or with the "critics" or art historians, on what was their best product. I asked Castiglioni the same question when he was visiting our office. After having mentioned that it is a stupid question he answered that he could only tell me which product had given him most pleasure and satisfaction and than he pulled a small cordon switch out of his pocket and gave it to me saying: "...this was it!..keep it"
Some designers have worked in circumstances that did not allow them to have such a large body of work. Maarten van Severen is a good exemple. While relaxing after dinner here in Montreal he said: "One of the nice things with public recognition is that I finally can allow myself to put less time in the steel construction workshop that has been my living for the last 15 years" No wonder the 03 was seven years in development...When someone starts at the age of 30 (in 1986) and is taken away by cancer at 48 and 80% of his time is taken by a job that is hardly related to design, of course you end up with a rather small and condensed body of work.

Cont.
I guess part of DcWilson's Michelangelo/Da Vinci exemple makes already that point. Of course it was unlikely that Da Vinci with a rather public gay lifestyle and the working ethics of a butterfly, would be asked to paint the papal chapel...but it does not take anything away from the "last scene", or the mysterious smile of "la Joconda"
Last but not least I resent the influence of the media in the build up of such a list. The most exposed or the product that got the most visibility is not necessary the best. I am represented in the MoMA collection with a product that at the time was seen as relevant. It is certainly not the most successful one, neither is it the one I had most satisfaction of. In fact is was done more or less in one night because we had been presented (by our U.S. distributor) with a model of proposed jug that could not be produced (substantial inside undercuts etc.) and we had no other possibility than to present an alternative before he left the next day....or let the project die. So...I spend the night over sketches and produced in the early hours of the morning a cardboard model.It was presented during the "wrap-up" meeting before sending off the client to Schiphol airport...and approuved. After having selected the product, the museum invited me to submit other products, I never did because, in spite of the honor of reaching that recognition at the tender age of 34, I was disappointed with that particular choice. Personally I think I have done much much better products than that. On top of the unusual speed of conception (the equivalent of a one-night-stand...to keep it in line with DcWilson's smoking habits), the mouldmaker made a mistake in calculating the shrink of the SAN cover...so it does not fit as well as planned...maybe I should not mention this in public, but you learn more about mistakes than about success.
In going down the list I get the impression that the choices are more inspired by exposure than by achievement and that the exemples are chosen with the purpose of proving the point. What about Tapio Wirkalla, Frank L. Wright, Arne Jacobsen and so many others that can not be "pinned down" with one "over-exposed" chair...
(Arne by the way is a good exemple of someone who would be as important and admired as he is now, without the ant-chair)