The History of The Eames Fiberglass Chair

 One of the first two Eames fiberglass chairs,

photographed by Eames Demetrios

Last year I discussed an aspect of Eames design history with Craig Hodgetts, renowned architect, and partner in the office of Hodgetts + Fung; please see their website, http://www.hplusf.com/ for details about their work.

This team was hired by the Library of Congress in to design the comprehensive 1999 Eames exhibition, which was entitled, THE WORK OF CHARLES AND RAY EAMES: A LEGACY OF INVENTION.

I recommend the Library of Congress website which is dedicated to this exhibition, it is well illustrated with great photographs and can be found here:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/eames/

While working on the exhibit design, Craig started to think about Charles Eames as an individual, and imagined that Charles might have shared Craig's interest in car design and manufacture. In fact, we know that Charles Eames greatly admired the work of Henry Ford.

Craig told me that he started calling the workshops of various fiberglass mold makers who had been around in the 1950s. Eventually he discovered CHARLES A. WILLS who was well known for doing the fiberglass body of the Skorpion Crosley sportscar.   Mr. Wills has since passed away, but the story of the meeting between Craig Hodgetts and Wills is preserved in the book, AN EAMES PRIMER, by Eames Demetrios, from which I quote.  You can buy this book here:  http://eamesgallery.com/cart/detail_prod.php?id=22

It is filled with primary source materials, including extensive oral histories with Eames Office staff.

Starting on page 116 of AN EAMES PRIMER: "...Hodgetts walked into the shop of John Wills, a noted fiberglass manufacturer and boat builder. There, sitting on -- not in -- a trashcan kind of structure was something that looked a lot like an Eames fiberglass shell, and of course, it was one. ... In 1947, John Wills had developed a way to cure fiberglass at room temperature. This was an important development for the material, because it meant that heat and pressure were not necessary to create a fiberglass object (the radio domes that Zenith Plastics made in World War II used a solar cure that was not as reliable as one would hope.) In fact, one of the first products Wills made this way was a prototype for the Skorpion Crosley Car." 

"He (John Wills) recalled how Charles arrived "out of the blue" in a beat up Ford at his workshop in Arcadia, California, in 1948 or 1949.  Charles had with him a craft paper mockup of the armshell and asked Wills to make a fiberglass shell of it.  At that time, fiberglass technology did not permit making a female mold, only a male mold.  In this technique, the paper version would be destroyed in the process of creating the fiberglass shell.  ... The charge:  $25.  Wills made two just in case.  When Charles came back a week or so later, Charles looked at the fiberglass shells very carefully, circling them, sitting in them, taking them in.  When he sat in it, the improvised base was a circular piece of corrugated metal from an agricultural feeder.  When it came time to pay, Wills asked if he wanted both.  Charles replied, "I can't really afford it, maybe some other time."  The one left behind remained there for almost half a century.  After Hodgetts and Fung saw it, Wills donated it to the Henry Ford Museum."

The Henry Ford Museum is the host for The Herman Miller Consortium.  In 1988, Herman Miller, Inc. established the Herman Miller Consortium to share the historical product collection that had been accumulating as part of Herman Miller's corporate archives in Zeeland, Michigan. The consortium collection, now held by thirteen museums all over the country, contained about 750 pieces of furniture, as well as a large quantity of product literature. As the lead institution in the consortium, The Henry Ford maintains the record of the consortium holdings. The Herman Miller consortium online database now provides access to these records.  Their main website is

http://dlxs.lib.wayne.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?c=hmcc

In every way, the Wills fiberglass armshell is identical in shape and dimensions to the Eames arm shell that went into production.  It is the chair that took second place prize in The International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design at the Museum of Modern Art and was exhibited for at the PRIZE DESIGNS show at MOMA in 1950.  That the armshells exhibited at MOMA and the production armshells are identical in all respects to the Wills armshell is very important for collectors and historians to note.  From time to time, careless sellers in the mid-century antique market have marketed so-called prototype Eames fiberglass shells.  There were only two fiberglass prototypes, and neither of them have ever been on the market.

You can see a photograph of the chair at the top of this post, as it appeared in the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS exhibit.  In the background are images from the 1950 MOMA exhibition, which I'll include in my next post.

Charles Eames was committed to photography as part of the design process.  He used photographs of prototypes to help him refine the designs and to make choices between different examples.  Interestingly, with the Eames molded plywood furniture we have several dozens examples of differing plywood prototypes.  With the armshell, we have only the one shape, which was arrived at between 1948 and 1949, and completely resolved in paper mache mock ups, before it was rendered for the first time in fiberglass in the workshop of John A. Wills.

While Mr. Wills has passed away, his family maintains his website, where you can buy copies of his text books on fiberglass fabrication:

http://johnawills.com/

If you have questions regarding vintage Eames designs or Eames design history, you  can reach me at vintage@eamesoffice.com

When I answer questions I draw upon the extensive photographic and primary source records of the period, including oral histories with important members of The Eames Office staff.

I have collected and studied Eames designs since 1987, and in that time, I have handled and at various times owned hundreds of examples.  In my own library I have copies of all of the Herman Miller catalogues, from Gilbert Rohde's days as design director, up to the present.

With regard to the development of the Eames fiberglass chairs, there's a complete photographic record in the book, PRIZE DESIGNS FOR MODERN FURNITURE, published in 1950 by the Museum of Modern Art.  I will include images and passages from that in my next post.

The History of Eames Furniture, continued

Herbert Matter photograph of a drum with which the

durability of Eames molded plywood chairs were tested.

More from the Eliot Noyes article in the September 1946 issue of ARTS & ARCHITECTURE magazine...


"THERE IS NO NEED TO QUALIFY THE STATEMENT. CHARLES EAMES HAS DESIGNED THE MOST IMPORTANT GROUP OF FURNITURE EVER DEVELOPED IN THIS COUNTRY. His achievement is a compound of aesthetic brilliance and technical inventiveness. He has not only produced the finest chairs of modern design, but through borrowing, improvising and inventing techniques, he has for the first time exploited the possibilities of mass production methods for the manufacture of furniture. With one stroke he has underlined the design decadence and the technical obsolescence of Grand Rapids.

When you stop and try to analyze how he approached the problem, it sounds very easy and obvious. Whatever good modern furniture we have had in this country has always been expensive. Eames wanted to produce a good set of designs and "take them out of the carriage trade" by designing them so that they could be manufactured economically in quantity and sold cheaply. This meant that he must be able to use the best ways of doing things that the 20th Century could offer. 

Naturally he wanted his furniture to be as comfortable and useful as possible, because he never forgot that he was making his designs for use. This very direct approach made it comparatively simple. He never worried much (as many designers do) about "what the public wants" or "what the public will accept," because he had a profound belief in the public, and the conviction that if they didn't want or wouldn't accept the furniture which he was designing for their use, the fault lay in his designs, not in the public. 

He knew very well the absurdity of trying to design to an assumed public taste. It is important to realize that the furniture is an expression of this direct approach; each piece is composed as much of the personal ingredients of Charles Eames as of wood and metal. If you examine this furniture you will find sincerity, honesty, conviction, affection, imagination, and humor. You will not grasp how this furniture came into being or what it really means unless you understand this also about Charles Eames.

The collection includes a wide variety of pieces, using wood and metal as basic materials. There are many types of chairs both for indoors and outdoors, for dining and for conversation, for reading or relaxing. There is also a complete system of unit cases which, with the tables of various heights and sizes, fills out the complete set of furniture needed for living rooms, dining rooms, studies, and so forth. Of the whole group, the chairs are without question the most revolutionary designs.

Two of the most striking features of these chairs in a design sense are their articulation and their sculptural quality. With the exception of the Windsor chair and a few classic pieces of modern furniture, it is hard to think of any pieces in which there is such a clear indication of the nature and function of each part. The success with which lightness and elegance have been combined with strength enhances this articulation. 

The marvelously clean details of the connections have made it possible for chair frames to be clearly expressed as distinct elements to which seats and backs are neatly and simply attached. To this revealed structure, Eames has added sensitive seat and back forms which give each chair the quality of a brilliant piece of abstract sculpture. On some, the thin metal members are linear elements of a composition in which the seat and back become subtle forms whose shapes and relationship changes constantly and delightfully as one walks around the chair. The effect is intensified by the use of a broad range of wood textures, colors and metal finishes, which also provide a great variation of mood in the pieces.

Modern furniture has never before had such a range of woods so well finished. One extremely sculptural piece has seat and back of wood impregnated with a dull jet black, and a thin black metal frame making an elegant line through the composition. The mood ranges from the austere and somber through the broadly comfortable to the gay and even humorous. Some chairs have seats and backs covered in leather or calf hide. Others have bright red, yellow, or blue parts which introduce a new cheery note into modern furniture. . . ."

"The method which Eames invented is important not only as an economical way of producing molded forms rapidly and in quantity production; it also gave him the means for easily making many design experiments. Without any great investment in elaborate and expensive tools or jigs, he could try out many different forms, modulating contours, revising thicknesses, and finally arriving at the forms which he wanted.

For Eames is first of all a designer, and his technical innovations were tools for design, as well as methods for manufacture. This achievement in molding was only the first of a number of innovations which Eames has introduced to furniture making. Another is shock mounting. All the pioneer designers of modern furniture have been occupied with trying to make chairs which will move or flex as the sitter adjusts his position. 

Significant progress was made along these lines by such men as Mies van der Rohe, Aalto, and Breuer. Eames has carried this idea farther. His molded plywood chair parts are flexible in themselves to some extent. This flexing is then increased by the use of rubber shock mounts in connecting all the parts to each other. 

In themselves shock mounts are not new. The mounting of engines on rubber blocks to reduce vibration has long been a standard practice in automobiles and aircraft, but this is the first time that it has been used on chairs. On Eames' pieces, this mount is a thick rubber disc which is used between the various parts where they are joined. 

To make a firm connection between these rubber mounts and the parts of the chair posed still another new problem. Here Eames borrowed a technique which has been highly developed in wartime industries. Instead of attempting to attach the chair back, rubber mount, and wood frame to each other by bolts or by any usual cementing system, a process called Cycleweld was used. In this, a sheet of synthetic resin is placed between parts to be joined. 

A special electronic instrument then transmits heat by radio wave directly to the resin, which "cures" or bonds the parts to each other without injuriously heating the wood. The process requires only a few seconds, and gives a permanent waterproof joint, which is actually stronger than the wood itself. This welding process is versatile in that it can be used to join almost any two materials, and it offers many important advantages. First, it can be used as the adhesive to bond the various laminations of the plywood itself, giving a finished piece in which the plies will never separate, and which may be subjected to extreme conditions of heat and moisture. Second, the speed and precision of the operation makes it an important technique for mass production. Third, when used as in this furniture to attach chair parts to shock mounts, it distributes stresses over the total area of the mount rather than letting the entire load be concentrated at a single point, which is the case where a bolt is used, for example. Finally, it solves for the first time the difficult problem of making a neat and permanent connection between upholstery material and wood, which becomes another cleanly articulated detail on these chairs. Where, on a chair seat, a foam rubber paid is covered by fabric or leather, this covering material is brought to the edge of the plywood just as if it were another ply, and is bonded there without covering up the expressive plywood edge.

This electronic welding has also been used structurally on Eames' benches and tables. On all these pieces, the legs are detachable. This is not a new idea. Table legs have often been made to bolt to the frame of the table top so that they were removable. There were usually difficulties with this system, since any slight variation in the bolt holes gave slight variations in leg angles, and resulted in wobbly tables where perhaps only three out of four legs touched the ground. This was a shortcoming due to insufficient precision. On the Eames pieces, these joints are handled with the same precision that one finds in the aircraft industry, where there can be no approximations in the way a wing fitting attaches to a fuselage. 

The joint between leg and table top is made through exactly mated metal fittings. The critical point occurs in the precision of the attachment of these fittings to the table top and to the leg. By means of the Cycleweld process, this can be done quickly and accurately in a jig which allows no deviations. The fittings on leg and table top are then bolted together with self-locking aircraft bolts.

The precision of this operation is typical of the entire production process; as another aspect of it, standardization of similar parts has been accomplished to the point of complete interchangeability. This has many useful aspects. Similar parts can be stacked or nested for shipping or storage, and when the chairs are assembled by the distributor, any seat and back will fit any frame. This not only simplifies greatly the problems of handling, shipping, and assembly, but actually helps keep the retail cost of the furniture down, since it becomes more compact for shipment and thus reduces the freight cost per chair."

The History of Eames Furniture

Arts & Architecture September 1946

This is the first in a series of blogs quoting from historic, primary source articles from which we can understand the story of Eames furniture. 


Today we have an excerpt from an article by Eliot Noyes, in the September 1946 issue of ARTS & ARCHITECTURE magazine.   Headlining today's post is an image of the Herbert Matter cover of this issue, which is comprised of Eames molded plywood parts.

Eliot Fette Noyes (August 12, 1910 - July 18, 1977) was an American-born, -trained architect and industrial designer, who worked on projects for IBM, most famously the IBM Selectric typewriter and the IBM Aerospace Research Center in Los Angeles, CA.  Noyes was also a pioneer in the development of comprehensive corporate-wide design programs that integrated design strategy and business strategy.  Examples of his clients are IBM, Mobil Oil, Cummins Engine and Westinghouse.

At the time he wrote this article, Noyes was employed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as Director of Industrial Design, a position he held from 1939 to 1946.

"It will be useful to review the circumstances which led Eames into making furniture.  Eames is basically an architect.  His first excursion into furniture design was with Eero Saarinen when they jointly entered the Organic Design Competition conducted by MOMA in 1940-1941, receiving two first prizes.  Their designs proposed for the first time the use of molded plywood forms for chairs to fit the human body.  The jury, in awarding the prizes, decided that these designs were possible to construct, although nobody, including the technical experts present, had any very exact idea of just how it might be done. By the terms of the competition, the winning designs were to be produced and offered for sale.

The next step, therefore, was to search out the means for producing actual pieces from these drawings.  It was at this point that great gaps in established processes of furniture manufacture began to appear.  Since no furniture plant could be found which had ever considered the use of molded plywood, exploration started in other industries, and a firm was found which undertook the job. A basic reason for the wood shell idea was the belief that it would be very easy and very cheap to stamp or press them out in quantity.  In actuality, it turned out that there was no economical way of doing this, and no chance to experiment.

Despite the difficulties, a small number of plywood shells for several types of chairs were actually made, but at great expense.  This was in no way a solution in terms of mass production as intended.  Each shape required an expensive mold, and the plywood shells which emerged were often imperfect so that some had to be rejected;  on others the wood surface had to be covered with fabric. It was not only that really advanced technical problems like molding plywood that the difficulties appeared, however.  Various designs called for upholstery fabric to be applied to the plywood shell without hiding the joint and without getting involved in such clumsy details as the use of upholstery tacks.  As Eames said, he assumed that for such details there must be at least ten simple standard techniques which the furniture industry must have developed years ago, and which could be found on page 793 of some Furniture Makers' handbook of Standard Practice.

As the effort to manufacture the furniture progressed, it became painfully apparent that the industry not only had no ready solution for such details, but couldn't work one out satisfactorily and was not very much concerned about trying.  There had always been ways of avoiding such embarrassing issues.  Furthermore, as the whole question of joints, connections, and meetings of different materials came up, it became clear how extremely little thought had gone into these important elements of furniture design.  Preoccupied with minor adjustments of exterior appearance and "styling," manufacturers were using essentially the same joints and structures that had been standard for centuries.  If you doubt this, go to a department store and look at the underside of some tables and chairs built in 1946.   You will see what clumsy antiquarian techniques are hidden under the slick surfaces.  Structural ineptitude has been all too easy to cover up.

The result of the competition effort was that a new conception had been established, a few expensive pieces had been made and some excellent ideas set in motion.  The effort to find a way of producing such furniture cheaply and in quantity had failed for the time being.  What had been accomplished was not a hundredth part of what Eames has achieved between that time and the present.

It was at this point that Eames moved to the west coast and started to work for a movie company.  Convinced that the problems of the furniture program were actually solvable, he decided to experiment.  Furtively and at night, to avoid the landlord's wrath, Charles Eames and his wife, Ray Eames, began smuggling structural lumber into their hillside apartment.  From their nocturnal hammering and sawing, and the puffing of the bicycle pump, Eames found that he could make very clean-surfaced three dimensional forms using thin sheets of wood veneer laid up in thicknesses the variation of which he also could control.

By this time the United States was at war, and Eames turned his attention to developing traction splints by his new system.  This was an interesting problem, and related to the chairs as a problem of making a three dimension form to fit the human body.  The traction splint which he developed was light, strong, easily stacked for shipping, and simple to apply under field conditions.  Thousands of them were used by the Navy.

As his skill increased, he began making other items for wartime use, including molded leading edge sections for training planes and parts for army gliders.  In this way, learning as he worked, and inventing as he went along, he developed the tools which made his molds possible, and he evolved his own techniques for doing economically what had been impossible before.  In the making of furniture from the competition designs, the factory had used precision tools, but had produced results which were far from precise.  Now, as Eames puts it, he had devised a way of doing precision work without precision tools.  

The difference, he explained, was like this:  If you have an ordinary tumbler and wish to close the open top, one way is to make a very accurate measurement of the interior size of the opening, and to machine a part which will exactly fit it, thus sealing the opening.  This would be somewhat expensive, and there still might be leaks.  Another way to do the same job is to hold your hand over the tumbler's mouth.  Eames' process for making molded plywood has this basically simple approach."

Some captions from the same article:

"THE BONDING RESINS EMPLOYED ARE THE SAME AS THOSE USED IN ARMY AIRCRAFT MOLDED WOOD STRUCTURES WHICH ARE SUBJECT TO A RIGID THREE HOUR BOIL TEST."

"THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF SHOCK MOUNTS USED ARE TESTED THROUGH HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF VIBRATIONS."

Very few designers create the machinery on which their designs are produced.  Charles + Ray Eames developed the techniques and machinery for the mass production of their designs because it was the only way they could achieve their objective of producing affordable, useful and beautiful furniture for the public at large. When asked "What do you feel is the primary condition for the practice of design and its propagation?" Charles Eames replied simply, "Recognition of the need."

The technology they developed in the 1940s is still in use today.