“INNOVATE AS A LAST RESORT” – RAY AND CHARLES EAMES
Look around you. Chances are that at least one piece of furniture you see was based on a design by Charles and Ray Eames.
In fact, many of the objects we take for granted today – the plastic shell chair, the one-legged contract table, or the sleek, polyester-padded aluminum chair – were conceived in the Venice, California studio of this legendary couple more than 50 years ago.
This ability to create an item that, without any modification would continue to appeal to the broad public for more than five decades – and to do it over and over again – is a staggering feat in the fickle world of modern design. Their secret was simple: they tested all of their products in their own home before releasing them into production.
You can see most of these icons in the Holešovice showroom of Vitra, the furniture maker that has held the exclusive European rights to make Eames’s designs since 1953. The display area is chock-full of original Eames furniture, including their first creation, a plywood legsplint, molded to fit Charles’s own leg, which they designed during World War II for the U.S. Navy.
Most of us will recognize the 1956 Lounge Chair and Ottoman, designed as a birthday present for Charles’ best friend, Hollywood producer Billy Wilder. Masculine yet voluptuously padded with leather, no manager’s office in the 1960s and ‘70s was complete without one of these modern interpretations of a traditional club armchair, and they are still coveted by their owners today. Experts in the field say this is the defining mark of quality in furniture. A cheap piece will start to deteriorate after a few years – the chrome will peel off, the screws will work loose. But while decades may mellow an Eames piece, they will not ravage it.
Another old standard is the sturdy and lightweight DSR Plastic Side Chair. Its flexible plastic shell, perched on a genial spider web of metal trusses, has been a fixture of American cafeterias ever since it was launched in 1950. Nearby is the retro 1948 La Chaise lounge, with its undulating fiberglass shell and body-hugging curves. Even though the Eamses were adherents of the formfollows- function school, this elegant queen of the boudoir proves that beauty was also a main ingredient of their design mix.
All of the pieces are still made using the same manufacturing processes the designers specified in the 1950s and ‘60s. This in itself is a minor miracle of design. It is partly due to the fact that, in terms of materials and technology, Charles and Ray Eames were far ahead of their time. For example, they were the ones who invented and perfected the – now universal – process of plywood molding.
Moreover, Charles and Ray Eames didn’t sketch their prototypes – they built them on a scale of one to one. They understood that what may look perfectly feasible on paper may not be possible to produce in real life. To an outsider, the Eameses method of design might have seemed rather haphazard. In an interview for the Charles and Ray Eames Video Oral History Project, Philip Morrison, the book editor of Scientific American magazine and a long-time friend of the couple, recalled the Eameses technique thusly, “I remember many occasions … where they would be working together on something …
They were both regarding it in the same way and trying to make . . . mold it, put it in place… like fitting a brick in the wall [or] adding a piece of paint to a painting.”
