We continue our series on mid-century modern design with a profile of Ray and Charles Eames, the duo who championed a functional and democratic approach to design.
Their iterative, materials-focused approach saw designers harness mass production techniques in an attempt to create what would be enshrined in their motto as “the best for the most for the least” – including the world’s first molded plastic chair, the Shell chair.
The Eames were not interested in innovation for innovation’s sake, but as a means of solving problems and making solutions available to everyone.
As Ray Eames herself would say, “what works is better than what looks good. Good looks may change, but what works, works.”
This perhaps explains how his Eames Office studio achieved a remarkable impact with a comparatively modest output. As architect Peter Smithson commented to Architectural Design magazine in 1966, it was with “just a few chairs and a house” that Charles and Ray Eames were able to profoundly impact the design landscape.
Charles Eames and Bernice Alexandra “Ray” Kaiser met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1940.
Charles was already an architect who joined an industrial design fellowship recommended by architect Eliel Saarinen, and Ray was an abstract painter who joined academia looking to expand his artistic practice.
The two married in 1941 and moved to Los Angeles to establish their Eames Office studio, initially working out of their apartment in the Westwood neighborhood.
Early work explored molded plywood designs
The Eames’ early work focused on experimenting with molded plywood. This was started by a chair they designed with Finnish architect Eero Saarinen while at Cranbrook, which won first prize in the 1940 Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Plywood bent along a single curve had long had applications in furniture, but the Eameses were attracted to the possibility of shaping it in three dimensions in order to better contour the shapes of the human body.
The Eames wrote in 1953 how “the problem of designing anything is, in a sense, the problem of designing a tool,” and for their furniture, their tools were the patented “Eames process” and a homemade device they called the Kazaam ! Machine.
Named for the fact that it works “like magic,” Kazaam! The machine worked by gluing several sheets of thin veneer with thermosetting resin around a mold, originally inflatable balloons.
Although the 1940 competition design was not considered mass-producible, in 1945, the Eames developed a line of furniture known as the Plywood Group, most significantly the Lounge Chair Wood or LCW.
This low chair featured a sloping, curved seat and a small curved back connected with rubber shock mounts, designed to be comfortable even without the addition of padding.
Along the way, these experiments led to what would become other products – the Eames Elephant, for example, was designed in 1945 as part of a group of animal banks for children, and today is reproduced in plastic.
These same plywood molding techniques were also used, as Ray said, “to aid in the war effort without hurting anyone,” creating wooden splints and prototyping a stretcher for military use.
Despite the Plywood Group’s successes, the need for low-cost furniture that could be mass-produced after the end of World War II meant that there was still a problem for the Eameses to solve.
In 1948, they proposed a fully molded chair in their entry in the International Low-Cost Furniture Design Competition, also sponsored by MoMA.
The aim was to take the Plywood Group’s organic shapes even further, creating a singular, curved shape that comprised the seat, back and – for certain models – the arms, and could be mass-produced to a consistently high quality and tailored to fit the needs of the Plywood Group. a variety of different bases.
Fiberglass used for both furniture and architecture
True to their tradition, the Eames did not want to develop a new material but rather apply an existing one, and World War II led to the development of glass fiber-reinforced polyester resin, originally used in aircraft radomes and cockpit covers.
The Eames’ input suggested the use of stamped steel, but subsequent iterations saw them source the fiberglass material through a boat manufacturer, leading to the Fiberglass Chair, the first mass-produced plastic chair. of the world.
Available with and without arms, the Fiberglass Chair was light, robust and easy to clean. Color was a particularly important factor, and initially there were three neutral tones available: grey, elephant skin gray and parchment, which were soon to be joined by a wide variety of colors.
In fact, the Eameses first used this fiberglass resin in their architectural work, purchasing it from army surplus stores to create screens for their own home, Case Study House 8, also known as the Eames House, in Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles.
The house was commissioned by John Entenza, owner and editor of Art & Architecture magazine, who in the 1940s started the Case Study House program.
This program tasked the leading architects of the time with creating efficient and cheap housing prototypes that could respond to the real estate boom that followed the end of the Second World War – a brief very much in line with the spirit of the Eames.
Charles collaborated again with Eero Saarinen on the initial design of Case Study House 8 in 1945, which used off-the-shelf materials and components ordered from catalogs.
A shortage of steel, however, meant that the materials were unavailable for several years, by which time Charles and Ray had redesigned the house to sit more harmoniously on their meadow.
“The house would make no demands on itself and would serve as a backdrop to work life, with nature as a buffer,” the Eams described.
The finished house was a simple steel-framed rectilinear box, with a Mondrian-like gridded facade with opaque white and colored panels and large windows.
Inside, the double-height living area was filled with the Eames’ own furniture prototypes, as well as works by designers they admired and folk art they collected on their travels.
For Entenza himself, the Eames and Saarinen would design Case Study House 9, also known as Entenza House, in a similar style.
Eames’ Case Study Houses were precursors to high-tech architecture
Although few of the Eames’ architectural designs made it past the drawing board, the use of standardized materials in the Case Study Houses proved to be extremely influential and a precursor to the high-tech style of architecture that would become popular in the United Kingdom a decade later.
The Eames were also interested in photography and film as a way of communicating their work, and the studio would create around 200 films.
Some demonstrated their products, like Fiberglass Chairs – something about how they look the way they do, and others were more educational, like Powers of Ten, a short film depicting the scale of the universe in factors of ten – from space sidereal to a molecule in a man’s hand.
After Charles’ death in 1978, Ray would continue to run the office and lay the foundation for his legacy until his own death 10 years later (to this day) in 1988.
Main illustration by Vesa S.
Mid-Century Modern
This article is part of Dezeen’s mid-century modern design series, which looks at the enduring presence of mid-century modern design, profiles its most iconic architects and designers, and explores how the style is developing in the 21st century .
This series was created in partnership with Made – a UK furniture retailer that aims to bring ambitious design at affordable prices, with the aim of making every home as original as the people who live in it. Elevate everyday life with collections made to last, available to shop now at made.com.
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