• — not member yet ?Ray And Charles EamesCharles Eames Lounge ChairVitra LoungeEames Lounge ChairsPoltrona Charles EamesDesign LoungestoelenDesign BasedChair DesignDesign StyleForward1. The Eames Lounge and Ottoman was released in 1956. It was the first chair that the Eames designed for a high-end market. It also became part of the permanent collection at the MoMA.Side Chair (model DCW) Charles Eames, Ray Eames(American, 1907–1978) 1946. Molded and bent birch plywood and rubber shockmounts, 29 1/2 x 19 x 21 1/2" (74.9 x 48.3 x 54.6 cm) See this work in MoMA’s Online Collection The DCW Chair was one of the first in a series of plywood chairs designed by husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames. They worked collaboratively in the design of chairs, tables, and other pieces of furniture that combined mass production with style, functionality, and comfort. The Eameses experimented with emerging technology, incorporating processes such as steam-bending plywood into their designs.
Strong, light, durable, and organic in appearance, plywood has allowed 20th-century designers flexibility in shaping modern forms. “Plywood,” explained Popular Science magazine in 1948, “is a layercake of lumber and glue.” It is created when three or more thin layers of wood, called veneers, are assembled with their grains perpendicular to each other and then are bound together with glue, under pressure and usually with heat. Unlike natural wood, the resulting material does not shrink, swell, or split when exposed to moisture. The Eameses first experimented with plywood in 1940, but their early designs did not allow for complex curves that could be comfortable without upholstery. They spent the next five years experimenting until they found a way to both bend and mold plywood, creating compound curves that were optimal for the human body. A material made of thin layers of wood that have been heated, glued, and pressed together by a machine. The production of large amounts of standardized products through the use of machine-assembly production methods and equipment.
The origins of plywood extend back to ancient Egypt and China. Earliest examples include dove-tail joints found in mummies’ tombs. Ply in the Sky! Plywood is less expensive than solid wood and so light that it has been used to build airplane parts. In 1942 the United States Navy commissioned the Eameses to develop a molded plywood leg splint for injured soldiers. Throughout the remainder of the war the Eameses continued to design for the military, focusing on plywood aircraft parts. AUDIO: MoMA Brown Bag Lunch Lecture: The Magic of Plywood AUDIO: Curator Barry Bergdoll on the Eames’ Case Study House No. 8 Charles and Ray Eames’ interests and curiosities went far beyond their Southern California design office. They traveled the world documenting people, places, and things, amassing more than 800,000 photographs. Inspired by the beauty of everyday objects, they photographed diverse subjects from details of furniture shapes to butterflies and natural forms.
Share a collection of your own. Explore some of these images in the Eames archive. Use them as an inspiration for your own collection of beauty in the everyday. Take pictures of beautiful everyday objects and upload them to Flickr with the tag “MoMA Everyday Beauty.” In his book An Eames Primer, Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles Eames, identifies a core component of the Eames design process as what Charles Eames called the “guest/host relationship: “Charles felt that that this was one of the most basic, even primal, human relationships. He also believed that this relationship was important in design. He often suggested that a major question about the modern city is, if we are all guests ‘then who are the hosts?’ Consider what you think the Eames meant by “the guest/host relationship”? How does your understanding of this idea relate to everyday life in the place where you live? Who/what are the guests? Who/what are the hosts? How can designers influence this relationship?
Write a 1- to 2-page essay in response.Charles and Ray Eames, who pioneered modern chair design in the 1940s and '50s, were responsible for some of the most innovative chairs of the 20th century. Their chairs were fabricated from wood, fiberglass, plastic, and metal mesh. Eames chairs have been widely imitated, but originals are highly sought-after by collectors because they are considered breakthroughs in both design and technology. In 1940, Charles Eames met Ray Kaiser at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, which was also home to architect and Eames collaborator Eero Saarinen and furniture designer Harry Bertoia. The couple married a year later and moved to Los Angeles to continue their work in molded plywood. By 1945, the couple had figured out how to create compound curves in molded plywood. One of their first pieces was a birch child’s chair and stool manufactured by the Molded Plywood Division of Evans Products — production was limited to just 5,000 pieces. Evans also produced about 1,000 LCW chairs (which stands for Lounge Chair Wood) before the Eameses began a long collaboration with the Herman Miller Furniture Company, which produced and distributed a number of chairs for them, including the DCM (Dining Chair Metal), in which two pieces of plywood are secured to a solid-rod chromed frame with rubber shock mounts.
In 1951, Herman Miller was selling 2,000 of these chairs a month (examples with wooden legs were less popular, making them more collectible today). Molded fiberglass chairs in a variety of bright colors — with or without arms, with or without a rocking base — came next. Serious Eames connoisseurs look for chairs from this period, 1950-1953, with a "Miller-Zenith" label on their undersides. The ones with wooden bases (DAW, PAW) are less common and thus more sought-after than the ones with metal legs (DAR, LAX, LAR, RAR). Around the same time, the couple designed chairs made from sturdy wire mesh, with covers available in leather, vinyl, and fabric by designer Alexander Girard. These were the chairs that the Eameses produced for the mass consumer. By 1956, well-heeled customers could order a Lounge Chair and Ottoman, whose molded rosewood plywood form embraced rich leather upholstery. The chair is still available today from Herman Miller in cherry and walnut. In 1958, the couple launched a chair collection called the Aluminum Group, which included a desk chair and a lounge chair — the armless models of the latter are most prized today.
In 1960, Eames designed several chairs and a trio of stools for the new Time-Life Building in New York. One was an Executive Desk Chair, the other an Intermediate Desk Chair, which was a smaller version of the Executive that did not sell as well, making it the more prized of the two today. Steven Cabella's personal homage to Charles and Ray Eames. This site is as clean and visually appealing as the Eame… [read review or visit site] Work of Charles and Ray EamesThis Library of Congress microsite is an overview of the postwar modern design work of Charles (1907-78) and Ray (1… Herman Miller Consortium CollectionThis website showcases several hundred pieces of furniture, held by thirteen museums, that were designed for Herman… ModernismThis archived overview produced by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts offers thumbnail sketches of the design moveme… Buffalo Architecture and HistoryChuck LaChiusa's wonderful guide to the architecture and history of Buffalo, NY, also happens to host an impressive…