kazam!
The house, whose quality is widely recognized, is also notable for its Eames-designed and built furnishings.
But, as mentioned, the Eameses’ first years in Los Angeles were lived in the apartment of a Neutra house. They used the livingroom there as a workshop to shape plywood, using
They called the machine, onomatopoetically, Kazam! With it, they fashioned prototypes of furniture, splints and radio consoles and, further exploring the possibilities of the new material, for abstract sculptures. One such piece hung over the fireplace in the home of Eliot Noyes, with whom the Eamseses maintained a friendship long after the Museum of Modern Art competition that had brought them together in 1940—1941.
Meanwhile, Noyes continued as head of the museum’s Department of Industrial Design, with MOMA regularly hosting design exhibitions and the Eameses taking part. New work by Charles and Ray Eames was featured in MOMA’s “Design for Use” exhibition in 1944. In 1946 MOMA put on an exhibition titled “New Furniture Designed by Charles Eames,” which makes clear that his name was already well-known. In September 1946, in the wake of the MOMA show, Arts & Architecture published a long article about the Eameses, which also included collages by Herbert Matter. In 1946, too, Ray Eames won first prize in MOMA’s “Competition for Printed Fabrics,” and in 1948 the Eameses were prizewinners in MOMA’s “International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design.”
Several other major articles about the Eameses appeared in Architectural Forum and Life magazines in 1950. Architectural Forum featured their home, and Life carried a photo story by renowned photographer Peter Stackpole featuring the Eameses, the interiors of their home and the workshop they were renting in Venice, Calif. In the period 1950—1955, MOMA curator Edgar Kaufmann Jr. organized a series of annual “Good Design” exhibition-competitions. This was a joint project of MOMA and the Chicago Merchandise Mart. Selected objects were first shown in Chicago, then pared down by a jury, with the short-listed items sent on for display in Manhattan at MOMA. Charles and Ray Eames acted as consultants on the project and themselves laid out the first of the “Good Design” shows.
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