Charles & Ray Eames: Charles & Ray Eames: Plastic Chairs

masterpieces of ergonomic design.

plywood chairs

Pages from Herman Miller trade catalog designed by Charles Eames, 1960s

Furniture with Eames storage units at Herman Miller showroom, 1951
Photo courtesy of Library of Congress

DCM back
Photo courtesy of Wright Auctions

DCW bottom
© Eames Office LLC

Beginning in 1943, the Eameses rented a former garage at 901 Washington Blvd., Venice, Calif., which they shared with the Evans company, a producer of large molded-plywood objects. It was in the garage that the Eameses built the hydroplane fuselage and their first mass-produced furniture. Evans manufactured the furniture from 1946 to 1949, at which point the Michigan firm of Herman Miller obtained the exclusive rights. Some Eames chairs produced in the 1940s carry the labels of both companies, suggesting that Evans was a subcontractor for Herman Miller for a time, as Zenith, another California company, would be.
It is often said that Gilbert Rohde, the chief designer at Herman Miller, invited the Eameses to work for the firm. This is doubtful in that the first Eames pieces produced by Herman Miller date from 1945—1946, and Rohde died in 1944. It is more likely that the company took notice of the Eameses after Charles’ personal exhibition at MOMA in 1946. The partnership soon extended beyond furniture design. Charles Eames would design Miller catalogs and, in 1950, the display at the Herman Miller store in Los Angeles. In 1954 he designed and built a home for Max De Pree, the son of of Herman Miller’s founder Dirk Jan (D. J.) De Pree, in Zeeland, Mich., site of the Herman Miller factory.
In 1957, a Swiss company, Vitra, won the right to manufacture Herman Miller furniture, including pieces designed by the Eameses, for the European market. Protracted negotiations were involved, including copyright discussions, and the Eameses took part. The present owner of Vitra, Rolf Fehlbaum, recalls that with his schoolboy knowledge of English he was sometimes called on to help translate for his father (who did not know English). Today Eames furniture has only two legal producers — Herman Miller in the US and Vitra in Europe.
The Eameses faced complex construction problems in making their molded plywood furniture. A sheet of plywood can take only so much folding. The glue can give way under pressure, and the layers then separate. To circumvent the pressure problem, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen in 1940 had cut an opening in the plywood at the point of greatest pressure, the point where the back transitions into the seat. But the chairs still failed, as we know, and mass production was canceled. Over time, the Eameses came up with other solutions. Finally, however, they had to separate the back from the seat, using separate back and seat plates affixed to the frame. The shape of the frame also took much time and experimentation, but the early prototypes already include the famous three-legged design.
The plywood chairs that Evans and then Herman Miller have been producing since 1946 — the DCM (Dining Chair Metal), LCM (Lounge Chair Metal), DCW and LCW (with plywood bases) — are 
 
 

DCM
© Eames Office LLC

DCW
© Eames Office LLC

They may be the most comfortable chairs in human history. Not only was the form given to the plywood carefully chosen to suit the human body, but the construction allows for flexibility, with the seat and back fixed to the frame, which is itself springy, with pliable rubber strips. The chair compresses to the weight of the sitter and adjusts to the form of the body.
Classical modernist design eschews all lines but those that can be drawn using a ruler and compass. It draws its inspiration from geometrical abstract painting and sculpture. “Organic” modernist design, with its smooth but irregular contours, finds its inspiration in what is called lyrical abstraction. This is the path that Eames followed, especially in the DCM chair and its experimental precursors. This chair consists of a thin frame of steel rods to which is affixed plywood plates of irregular but smooth outline. Contemporaries saw a resemblance to potato chips. Others see the influence of the famous American abstract sculptor Alexander Calder, drawings of whose work Eames included in his architectural renderings and at least one of whose sculptures the couple owned.
The Eames plywood chairs of the 1950s earned worldwide fame and were much copied. Charles and Ray Eames had come up with

an entirely new kind of furniture—the plywood chair on thin legs of steel.

By the second half of the 20th century these were in use in virtually every commercial office and government building, from US corporate headquarters to the mess halls of Soviet children’s summer camps.

LCM
Photo by Hans Hansen © Vitra

plastic chairs

Another famous creation from the Eames office is the one-piece molded fiberglass-plastic shell chair. Plastic, which is less rigid than plywood, can be molded with greater freedom. In the late 1940s, Charles Eames designed two types of shell chair, with and without armrests, and with several types of legs, including legs that allowed the chairs to be stacked. In the 1950s and 1960s, these chairs also inspired designers around the world.
 

DSR Side Chair
Photo courtesy of Vitra

DAR Armchair
Photo courtesy of Vitra

Herman Miller advertisment of Eames plastic chairs
Photo courtesy of Herman Miller

DSS stacking chairs and DAX armchair
© Vitra Design Museum
 

Eames plastic chairs
Photo courtesy of Vitra

Charles Eames at the table
© Eames Office LLC

lounge chair

The last piece of Eames plywood furniture came in 1956. This was lounge chair No. 670, which is made of five flexibly-jointed plywood plates, the construction suggesting an insect’s exoskeleton. 

Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman
Photo by Hans Hansen © Vitra
 

Photo of Eames Lounge Chair for a promotional brochure for Herman Miller
© Eames Office LLC

Charles Eames in the Lounge Chair, 1956
© Eames Office LLC

laChaise Floating Figure
Copy

la сhaise

The most complex of the molded plywood chairs, LaChaise, resembles a sculpture of a woman’s torso. It is always so with chairs and couches: the more comfortable, the more suggestive they are of the human shape. Eames furniture is clearly linked to the work of sculptors who preferred a balance between abstraction and figuration. The resemblance of LaChaise to the abstract sculptures of Barbara Hepworth is even more striking.
While the Eameses knew both Hepworth and Moore, their work actually quoted their fellow countryman, an American of French descent, Gaston Lachaize (died in 1935). The lower outline of LaChaise is quite similar to Lachaize’s “Floating Figure” (1927). One of the molds of this sculpture is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. LaChaise itself was made for MOMA and was entered in the International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design in 1948. It did not win, but the jurors admired the design, deciding, however, that the chair was not in close enough accord with the goals of the contest. The Eameses did take home a prize in that competition with their prototype metal chair.
 

Gaston Lachaize, Floating Figure
Photo courtesy of NGA

La Chaise
Photo courtesy of Vitra

Charles Eames "flirting" with La Chaise he designed and decorated, 1960
Photo by Peter Stackpole

toys

The Eameses also often turned their attention to the creation of children’s playthings. In 1951 they created a colorful system of triangular building blocks, which they called The Toy. It was commercially produced for several seasons. The Eameses’ most successful undertaking along these lines was their House of Cards, which used slotted playing cards. Between 1952 and 1970, four versions of House of Cards were produced.
 
 

The Eameses were in the habit of photographing anything they found interesting: 

shells, stones, feathers, ornaments, examples of typography. 

They used such photographs for the cards of House of Cards. When the cards are put together, the images combine in a random way, not unlike the way in which computers process information. It is no accident that the last version of House of Cards was made in 1970 for the IBM pavilion at the World’s Fair in Osaka.
 
 

House of Cards
Photo courtesy of Wright Auctions

House of Cards

House of Cards