The History of Eames Furniture

Eamesdesigns.com

2011-11-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

Hello friends, Eamesdesigns.com, the new website has been officially launched, this "History" site will no longer be updated, please focus your attention on and please visit eamesdesigns.com A Virtual Encyclopedia of All Things Eames

Daniel Ostroff, Producer and editor, Eamesdesigns.com

Here's an interview on the Art 21 blog, in which I explain the ideas that inform the new site.

http://blog.art21.org/2011/10/03/no-preservatives-following-the-eames-legacy-a-discussion-with-daniel-ostroff-part-i/

No Preservatives | Following the Eames Legacy: A Discussion with Daniel Ostroff [Part I]

October 3rd, 2011

by Richard McCoy

Development of Aluminum Chairs, with Ray and Charles at left, circa 1958, photograph from Library of Congress.

While interest in the work of Charles and Ray Eames remains high, this fall it seems to be peaking: there are countless exhibitions, projects, publications, and auctions that will feature their work, or projects inspired by them. At the Indianapolis Museum of Art, I have been working with Tricia Gilson, Ball State University professor and independent researcher, to study the Eames material contained within the Eero Saaranin-designed Miller House and Garden, located in Columbus, Indiana.
Although the Miller House and Garden opened just this year, we’ve already had a lot of scholarly interest in it and its mid-century modern contents. One of the most memorable and knowledgeable visitors we’ve had recently was Daniel Ostroff, who came with some folks from Herman Miller to look at the furnishings in the house.
To expand on the conversations we had with him at the Miller House, I invited Tricia to help interview Dan about his work with the Eameses. This will be a two-part interview, with the second part coming on Tuesday.
Daniel Ostroff is a Los Angeles-based film producer, researcher, curator, and collector. He is also the producer and editor of EamesDesigns.com, a consultant for Herman Miller, and has been sitting on an Equa Chair behind an Action Office System desk for the past 10 years.
Today the exhibition he curated, Collecting Eames: The JF Chen Collection, opens at JF Chen in Los Angeles. The exhibition is part of the Getty’s massive Pacific Standard Time project and consists of 450 pieces, with a corresponding 135 page catalog with a preface by Eames Demetrios and an essay by Dan (available soon on Amazon, or by e-mail here). Also, next month Dan will have an Eames-related book out and another in 2012.

Daniel Ostroff in his favorite place in all of Los Angeles, The JF Chen Storage and Study Area. Photo by Grant Taylor.

Richard McCoy and Tricia Gilson: How did you first start collecting and researching the work of Charles and Ray Eames?
Daniel Ostroff: I am a film producer now, but I was a Hollywood agent before that. In 1987 I opened The Daniel Ostroff Agency in Los Angeles, an agency for screenwriters, directors, and books to film. While I had worked before that as an agent, I had either worked for other companies or with a partner.
With my own office I was faced with the prospect of having to furnish the place. I started with rented furniture, and then an artist friend came to visit. He pointed out that given the business that I was in, rented furniture wouldn’t do, and so I asked him what I should get. He replied with a question: “Why buy furniture that depreciates in value?” He told me about a rare Eames desk for sale in San Diego, and my journey began.

I bought that desk for a couple thousand dollars. I also made my first collector’s mistake with it: I didn’t listen to the dealer, who was experienced and knowledgeable. There was some rust on the steel frames, and I insisted that he re-chrome it. I wasn’t happy with the results; it was an early lesson in how you should appreciate antique furniture for its honest signs of age.
Eventually my collection expanded, and at one point, I had fantastic examples of designs by all of the greats, particularly from the period 1946 to 1989. My collection encompassed both post-war modernism, and post-modern designs.
At one point, I had a living room full of great vintage George Nakashima case goods, a rare Eames 3473 Sofa Compact, a Finn Juhl Chieftain Chair, an Achille Castiglioni San Luca Lounge Chair, a Ron Arad Rover Chair, and a Hans Wegner Peacock Chair. Throughout my place were classic Ettore Sottsass designs, too: lighting, case goods, ceramics and enamels.
But the more I collected and the more I learned about design and designers, the more I focused on Eames. Finally, it was only Eames designs that I couldn’t live without.
RM & TG: And today, you’ve produced and continue to edit the fantastic web resource, EamesDesigns.com, which is a “A Virtual Encyclopedia of all things Eames.” What was the impetus behind starting this web project?
DO: I made that site in collaboration with the Eames family (and with support from the Eames Office), who carry on the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames. The family is very active in carefully supervising the ongoing production of authentic Eames designs, but just as importantly they embody and exemplify their grandparent’s best attributes.
Charles and Ray did not believe in the “gifted few” concept. They thought that many of us could do good work, if we care about what we are doing, and are given a chance to try and try again. The Eames family first did this with me when they asked me to write the book Modern Classic: the Eames Plastic Chair. Following on that, they asked me to be their in-house vintage Eames expert, and even though Eames Demetrios very kindly called me a “scholar” when I did that first book, I wasn’t then, but they allowed me to try and learn. For the next five years I answered vintage Eames questions, and I’ve done a fair amount of trying and trying again.

EamesDesigns.com

I actually feel that studying Eames designs is a moral imperative. I got my first clue of this when I read something that the great graphic designer, Milton Glaser, said about Charles and Ray: he said words to the effect of, “Charles and Ray Eames showed us all that a design office could have a moral center.” And as you study what they did, what they designed, and how they went about designing it, and the depth to which they thought about not only the user of the design, but also the men and women who would be producing their designs, you really understand that Milton Glaser was understating the case.
So after answering Vintage Eames questions for five years, the Eames family felt I was ready for a standalone web site, and they paid for its architecture, by the great design studio t-Sign. By this time I no longer thought of myself as a “vintage Eames” person and I did not think a “vintage Eames” site was what the world needed.
So with support from Eames Office I made Eamesdesigns.com, a virtual encyclopedia of all things Eames. I say “all things,” because another thing you learn in Eames scholarship is that, to paraphrase Charles, “The process is always the same.” The design of a film, the design of a toy, the design of a chair, they followed the same process.
There’s another point to this website, it’s not that folks should only study Eames the way they study historical things: it’s that the Eames message is current and ongoing.
RM & TG: So in what way is the study of Eames designs a moral imperative?
DO: Charles and Ray were business people. Towards the end of their lives they liked to refer to themselves as “tradesmen.” People would come to them with problems, and pay them to solve those problems, and also pay them to design products to be manufactured for a profit. But even though they were in business, and they made money performing a service, and they made money designing goods which were sold for a profit and they got royalties, they never did this without thinking about the impact of their work on society as a whole.
They did not make designs without considering what it would be like for the worker on the assembly line. They did not work without considering every possible aspect of the user experience, and not just the user experience for the first few days after you get a product home, but what it’s like to own that product ten years later. They also lived good lives, because they only would work on projects and products that they personally enjoyed—another imperative for them.
The last cars Charles and Ray Eames drove were a Jaguar and a Mercedes. They lived a rich full life, lived in a great house with a really big yard, owned their own business, traveled all over the world, and had many friends. Is that so bad? They had five beautiful grandchildren. But they did not do it at the expense of society as a whole.
Charles and Ray Eames felt that fun is as an important part of life as just about anything is. I think the world would be a better place if business men and women considered whether they really enjoy what they are doing.
Charles and Ray Eames and their manufacturing partners made money giving folks good products that are a good value for the money. We ought to apply the Eames way of thinking to business more, instead of rewarding executives for firing employees. Herman Miller does very well selling Eames designs, and yet they are often ranked as one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.
RM & TG: Why did you decide to put the Eames Encyclopedia online instead of as a book?
DO: When Eames Demetrios asked me why I wanted to do this Eames encyclopedia online, instead of as a book, I told him I wanted it online as an “encyclopedia” for several reasons:

Folks understand that encyclopedias get updated, and this one will and can be continuously updated.
Encyclopedias have many contributors; I hope the world of scholars will participate in this ongoing project.

Some might find it odd that scholarship is being done on a site presented by a for-profit business, the Eames Office, but actually, that is consistent with the work of the Eames Office when Charles and Ray were alive, and this is just one of many areas of discovery that unfolded for me when studying Eames work.
I’m going to need the help of everyone in the scholarly communities: the museums, universities, collectors, and the knowledgeable dealers, to continue in the high standards of scholarship set by Charles and Ray Eames, with this scholarly site.

Catalog Entry for DAX 1954 on EamesDesigns.com.

RM & TG: Where did you get all of the objects that are photographed on the website?
DO: Just as supportive as the Eames family in this project is the JF Chen family: Joel Chen, Margaret Chen, Bianca and Fiona, who bought a collection of Eames material, grew it, and subsidized my work studying the collection the way that Charles Eames said is the best way to study design: by photographing it. (The photographer for this project was Grant Taylor, who does really great work).
Actually, The JF Chen Eames Collection started out as my personal collection. Eventually it had grown to 175 Eames pieces, and my storage bills were higher than my rent. The Chens bought the collection and grew it to 400-plus pieces. As you mentioned in the introduction, this collection is the basis of the exhibition, Collecting Eames: The JF Chen Collection.

Grant Taylor photographing a RAR 1950 for EamesDesigns.com. Photo by Daniel Ostroff.

RM & TG: Will you describe the J.F. Chen Eames Collection?
DO: The JF Chen Collection is the most extraordinary Eames collection in the world because it shows great examples from every decade of Eames design production, and it is in that chronology that you can find many of the most important messages, including the moral ones.
That collection starts with the Kleinhans Chair of 1939, by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, and includes an amazing high back Relaxation Chair, from the landmark 1941 Organic Design competition at MoMA. The last chair in the timeline is a 1998 La Chaise.
If you go to see this exhibition, you’ll also see an earlier Eames-Saarinen design, an incredibly rare 1939 desk they designed for the Crow Island School, which is on loan to JF Chen for the duration of the exhibition.
The importance of this collection and the Chen family’s contribution to world design history can be seen on EamesDesigns.com, because they generously donated 6000 photos to the site: photos that they paid for as I studied this collection over a period of four years.

RM & TG: In your book, Modern Classic: the Eames Plastic Chair, you write about the Eames’ desire to continue to improve on their designs. From a collector’s perspective, how do the changes in the material of the plastic chair influence notions of connoisseurship?
DO: Let’s take for example one small aspect of an Eames chair, the shock mounts: those rubber elements that are used to attach the chair’s legs to its body. Shock mounts represent on a small scale something that Charles and Ray always did: they always looked to improve upon their past work, to make something better, and their improvements were always in favor of the consumer.
The very first shock mounts were solid rubber, and there was no screw involved (just adhesive). We see that on chairs in the famous Barclay Hotel show of 1945, and then in the MoMA exhibition of spring 1946, New Furniture Designed by Charles Eames. I once owned a rare chair that was exhibited in that MoMA show which had survived with its shock mount intact. It was a miracle that this shock mount didn’t come off!

The underside of a RAR 1950 showing early shock mounts from the JF Collection, copyright Eames Office. Photograph by Grant Taylor.

The next iteration involved a screw, and an external metal plate. The metal plate had to be machined separately and this involved added cost, but it was necessary in order to give the screw a secure hold. In the next step, the Eameses came up with a way to make the metal bit integral to the rubber. And with this final step, they gave a better looking product, and one that would cost less to make. Charles and Ray were always about passing the savings along to their customers.

The underside of a RAR 1950 showing later shock mounts from the JF Collection, copyright Eames Office. Photograph by Grant Taylor.

The first shock mount was interesting, but ultimately couldn’t hold up under a lot of use, but when you study Eames designs closely, you learn that there is one consistent thread, that they were designed with easily repairable, easily replaceable parts. The shock mount is a classic example of this practice. Plenty of Eames chairs from the 1940s and 1950s have survived until today with intact shock mounts. Those that need new shock mounts are relatively easy to fix. What other consumer products from 1946 still look so good, work so well, and are so easy to repair?
RM & TG: This is the end of part 1

http://blog.art21.org/2011/10/04/no-preservatives-following-the-eames-legacy-a-discussion-with-daniel-ostroff-part-ii/

No Preservatives | Following the Eames Legacy: A Discussion with Daniel Ostroff [Part II]

October 4th, 2011

by Richard McCoy

Daniel Ostroff inspects the underside of a customized Eames compact sofa at the Miller House and Garden. Photo by Tricia Gilson.

Yesterday, in collaboration with Tricia Gilson, I presented Part I of an interview with Eames expert and film producer, Daniel Ostroff. He is a Los Angeles-based film producer, researcher, curator, and collector. He is also the producer and editor of EamesDesigns.com, a consultant for Herman Miller, and has been sitting on an Equa Chair behind an Action Office System desk for the past 10 years.

This week, the exhibition he curated, Collecting Eames: The JF Chen Collection, opens at JF Chen in Los Angeles. The exhibition is part of the Getty’s massive Pacific Standard Time project and consists of 450 pieces, with a corresponding 135 page catalog with a preface by Eames Demetrios and an essay by Dan (available soon on Amazon, or by e-mail here).

RM & TG: When you visited the IMA’s Miller House & Garden this year, we looked at all of the Eames furniture in the house. Of particular note is that you described the Eames PSC-1 in a girl’s bedroom as a “marriage of chairs,” a “historic Eames chair;” “like a Japanese ceramic with staples in it.” Is this a common practice, for owners to marry different Eames chair components together?

PSC-1 Chair at the Miller House and Gardens (MH2010.41.1). The chair consists of a later base added to an earlier shell. Photo by Tricia Gilson, Copyright Eames Office and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

DO: I can’t say whether or not it is a common practice, but I am delighted when I see pieces that show signs of attention from their original owners. It means that someone valued this piece enough to modify it to suit their needs.
Now, an important distinction should be made between this practice, what the original owners did, and what some dealers do. I think when an antique dealer makes such changes in order to enhance the value of a piece, he is rendering it valueless.

I have my own collection of well-loved, well-used Eames chairs. A couple favorites come to mind: a walnut DCW that I rescued from a dealer before it was refinished; its finish is original and it is engraved overall with a couple decades of what I imagine to be school kids scratching their names into the veneer with pens and pencils.
And then I have a mid 1950s Eames LCM that was originally coated with Eames red aniline dye. But at some point, some owner decided that they needed a chair with antique white paint, and that’s what they put on it, very thickly. I remember from my childhood when “antique white” was in vogue. I think my parents painted my childhood bedroom furniture with antique white, with that streaky black stuff in it.
I think examples like these two are beautiful in and of themselves, but if you have to think something about them, think this: Eames designs look better with age, and also, you can personalize them to your own needs and they still look great.
RM & TG: What do you think the Eameses would have thought of this practice?
DO: They did it themselves. In the Eames House living room there’s a round George Nelson walnut tabletop on an early Eames solid cast aluminum base. In the Eames House kitchen is another Eames cast aluminum base which supports a square piece of plywood that has a TV on top.
Again, this is much different than what many dealers and collectors do now, where they marry various Eames parts to create something that they think is more desirable. I have heard that collectors in Europe are buying Eames shells and bringing them over and putting the shells on reproduction bases. I don’t know what to call those. I guess they are chairs, but they do not have any value in terms of scholarship or connoisseurship.
Charles and Ray Eames made complete designs, they did not do “mix and match” kits. If you bought an Eames design for the most part you got it and you get it now, intact, from the factory. That’s what probably has the most value: intact, all original parts, as it left the factory, Eames design. However, I think it’s just as valid to consider seriously pieces that were well-loved and well-used and sometimes well-repaired by their original owners, just like we treasure Windsor chairs that have two centuries of various over painting.
RM & TG: So they liked their furniture to develop a certain kind of patina?
I don’t think they wanted their furniture to develop a patina, I think they wanted to give their customers products that would provide years of service and performance. However, that sometimes folks would love their Eames designs so much that they would repair them, maybe relates to sock darning. Charles often said that his ambition was to have really well-darned socks. And I think darned socks are like an Eames LTR I have, which developed a bit of a separation in the wire base, and this happened after the user used the table as a step stool for twenty years, and this separation was repaired by its original owner, who worked for ten years at the Eames Office, with a bit of coat hanger wire.
Ray was the same way. The Eames family does fantastic, historic and meaningful exhibits at the Eames Office at 850 W. Pico in Santa Monica. Once they exhibited some of Charles Eames’ shirts and some of Ray Eames’ dresses. On many you could see signs of re-weaving and darning.
Carla Hartman, the Education Director of the Eames Office, tells a wonderful story about Ray. Ray and Charles were at a party, and they rarely attended parties, they mostly worked seven days a week until eleven at night, and that is not an exaggeration. At the party Ray had her back to one woman who whispered to her companion, upon seeing a darned bit on the back of Ray’s cape, “You’d think Mr. Eames would buy his wife a new cape!” There’s a morality in that too, why throw something away that you love and enjoy and can still use, just because there’s a hole in it?

Ray Eames Dress Designs. Photograph from Library of Congress.

RM& TG: Last month Jeff Jamieson spoke about how the look of Donald Judd’s furniture has evolved over time; have you found material that discusses how the Eames thought about their work changing over time?
DO: I have found, over the years, that Charles and Ray expressed themselves very, very well with regard to their designs, and what they were thinking when they designed them. Right now I am working on an anthology of Eames speeches, letters, and interviews. In this project I have found that the Eames’ wisdom is as relevant to today’s problems, as it was to problems in the past. They did not just talk the talk, they walked the walk.
Charles and Ray noted that they thought about how something would look in ten years, in twenty years, in fifty years. Earlier this year I acquired an Eames Soft Pad Chair (EA434), in leather, that was in the Saarinen-designed bank (Irwin Union Bank and Trust) in Columbus, Indiana. I can tell from the markings and the ink stamped model number on the chair, that the bank acquired this chair in 1970. I acquired it in 2011. That means for 41 years, bankers sat on it. Well, that chair looks more beautiful in some ways, than a new Eames soft pad chair does. And that happened because Charles and Ray considered that when they designed it.

Eames Soft Pad Chair acquired from Euro Saarinen-designed bank in Columbus, IN. Photo Daniel Ostroff. Copyright Eames Office.

There are plenty of things that we buy and sell to one another that look worse when we get them home and use them for a week. In many cases Eames products look better when they are used for a little while.
RM & TG: As you note in your book, Modern Classic: the Eames Plastic Chair, over the past 60 years the plastic shells of Eames chairs have changed; would you talk about how or if the suppliers for the shells have had an impact on the appearance of the final product?
DO: I suspect that it was more often that “the Eames” (Alexander Girard referred to Charles and Ray as “The Eames”) had an impact on the suppliers, than that the suppliers had an impact on them.
Starting with the general, think about anything you do in life. If you play tennis with people who are better than you, you get better at your game. And better is probably the wrong word, because as Charles Eames once said, “Genius, baloney, we just work harder.” And that was true, even in their seventies, Charles and Ray would still be at their office at ten-thirty at night, and often barely made it home in time to watch the eleven o’clock news. Charles and Ray Eames would not delegate understanding, so when they worked with a new material or on a new subject, they worked very hard to understand its properties or its qualities very well themselves.

Irv Green and Sol Fingerhut at Zenith Plastics in California. Image Courtesy and Copyright Eames Office.

On EamesDesigns.com there are marvelous interviews with Sol Fingerhut and Irv Green, two men who Charles and Ray impressed into service to make the first industrially-produced plastic furniture.
It would be better for people to actually go read the interviews, but I’ll quickly summarize it: World War II was over, and those two men were looking for clients. During the war they had done some work with plastics, and had worked for Corning. In the interviews they vividly describe how Charles Eames alternately grilled them about their knowledge of working with plastic, and sold them on the idea that plastic furniture as a good idea. As the relationship developed, Sol and Irv tell stories of working until midnight every night, with Charles and Ray stirring the “soup” so to speak, as Charles and Ray invented new colors for plastic, with names like Elephant Hide Grey and Sea Foam Green.
These were not cutesy names, any more than the names of their designs like DCM and DCW are cutesy names. The names that Charles and Ray gave their colors are quite descriptive and practical. Meeting Charles and Ray was the best thing that ever happened to Sol and Irv, and I understand that even after Charles died, Sol and Irv were very attentive and appreciative of Ray. I’m sure this was true of other manufacturers, although I have only begun to scratch the surface of this research. There is so much scholarship yet to be done in regard to the Eameses and manufacturers.
If people need to know some topics that need researching, drop me an e-mail or get in touch with me through the website.
RM & TG: It’s very interesting to consider how the Eameses would have adapted their practice to the “Green Movement.” Do you think the Eameses would have seen a contradiction between the Modern sense of “Good Design” and the Green Movement?
DO: With regard to good design and Charles and Ray Eames I will simply share with you one of my favorite quotes from Charles. That we have this quote is courtesy of the visionary CEO of Herman Miller, Hugh DePree, who cited this in his delightful book, Business as Unusual: The People and Principles at Herman Miller:

Once, in discussing the design of Herman Miller’s New York showroom, the words “good design” were used. Charles Eames said, “Don’t give us that good design crap. You never hear us talk about that. The real questions are: Does it solve a problem? Is it serviceable? How is it going to look in ten years?

This relates to green design. Let’s not forget something else that can be “green,” a product that is timeless, a product that doesn’t wear out, a product that has easily replaceable and easily repairable parts. How is a plastic spoon, made from soy milk and corn “green”? We use it once, we feel good because the plastic is made of “sustainable soy plastic” or some such, and then we throw it away? I think it’s maybe more “green” to make something that never goes out of style and always works.
I was delighted the other day to see in the Apple Store in Santa Monica, Eames airport tandem seating. You know how great Apple design is, but I think that if you go in that store you’ll agree with me, that the Eames seating, which hasn’t changed since it was first designed and introduced in 1961, is the best looking stuff in the store. And it’s practical and comfortable.
Fundamental to Charles and Ray’s design of that tandem seating is the fact that the seat and back cushions are interchangeable. It’s one of the greatest Eames designs ever and we take it for granted because we see it in hundreds of airports all over the world.
There are many things I love about airport tandem seating, but here are two. Charles and Ray thought about these two constraints, among others: that the tandem seating be sturdy enough that a weary adult businessman or woman could flop themselves down on it, with a heavy briefcase, and be supported. But light enough and “slide-y” enough, that at the end of the evening, a janitor could easily move it for mopping. And secondly, those interchangeable pads: Imagine you are in charge of resources for an airport. Because the back and seat pads are interchangeable, you only have to order “replacement pads.” You don’t have to send some clerk on your staff around to tell you how many “backs” you need and how many “bottoms.” The pads will last for twenty years or more before they need replacing, and when twenty or thirty years are up, the aluminum and steel frames still look awesome and work great.

Staff Member Jim Sommers Sitting in Eames Tandem Sling Seating, circa 1962. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

RM & TG: It’s almost as if many of the ideas that the Eameses were pursuing are as relevant today as they were just after the end of World War II.
DO: To answer this question, I’d like to reference the Eames Solar Toy of 1959, which is often misunderstood and misnamed the “Do Nothing Machine.” In the book I am working on now it becomes clear that Charles and Ray Eames had generous and wise hearts. When asked by Alcoa to make a “toy” out of aluminum, they demurred. They didn’t think the world needed an “aluminum toy” just for fun and advertising.
Many designers participated in the Alcoa Forecast Program, and various things were produced in aluminum, including some furniture and storage systems. When pressed by Alcoa, Charles and Ray did think that there was something the world needed. It occurred to them, in 1959, a “Mad Men” ish world of big gas guzzling cars and martini guzzling ad men, that the world needed reminding that our resources are not infinite, and they made a toy that showed the virtues of a renewable energy source: the sun.
About as far from a “Do nothing” device as there ever was, Charles and Ray showed us, in a delightful manner, that the sun can power our devices. Here’s to much more real scholarship to come, about a very relevant design duo, who the world needs now more than ever.

Alcoa Solar Toy advertisement. Charles and Ray wanted to make the world aware of a sustainable, renewable, powerful, cheap, and clean source of energy. Copyright Eames Office.

Daniel Ostroff

Editor

Eamesdesigns.com

The real history of Eames furniture and all things Eames

2010-12-08T03:51:00.000-08:00

Coming soon, the Eames Office is launching a major new website, rich with content and images, encyclopedic in its depth of information and scope, delightful in visuals.

We're keeping in mind something Charles Eames said when he was working on the Solar Do Nothing Machine:

“And this, I would say, would be a good test for any design. Does it make somebody aware of something that it is important for him to be aware of? And does it do it in a manner that is delightful (which is the opposite of pedantic)? In fact, this could be a good starting point for somebody wanting to make a design: to think first about what he wanted to make people aware of, and then to move toward the most effective and pleasing way of bringing this about.”

We will feature hundreds of illustrations, like this, with detailed and accurate historical data, years of production, design features, dimensions, and more.

This is the earliest rolling base from the Eames Office.

For its history, for the dates or production, for views from every angle of this and all the Eames designs, stay tuned for an important announcement.

2010-10-25T22:28:00.000-07:00

2010-10-23T14:55:00.000-07:00

2010-09-23T00:25:00.000-07:00

The first Eames fiberglass chair

2010-06-28T22:35:00.000-07:00

Photograph by Craig Hodgetts
from his website http://www.hplusf.com/

Hand made by John A. Wills for Charles Eames, based on a paper mache model which Charles brought to Wills. Wills made only two, see my previous entry for the whole story:
http://www.thehistoryofeamesfurniture.com/2010/05/real-story-of-eames-fiberglass-chair.html

This one is now in the permanent collection of The Henry Ford Museum.

http://www.hfmgv.org/museum/index.aspx

Found in 1999 by Craig Hodgetts, designer of the landmark Library of Congress exhibition

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

THE WORK OF CHARLES AND RAY EAMES: A LEGACY OF INVENTION, and here's the Library of Congress blurb on that exhibition:

"Charles Eames (1907-78) and Ray Eames (1912-88) gave shape to America's twentieth century. Their lives and work represented the nation's defining social movements: the West Coast's coming-of-age, the economy's shift from making goods to the producing information, and the global expansion of American culture. The Eameses embraced the era's visionary concept of modern design as an agent of social change, elevating it to a national agenda. Their evolution from furniture designers to cultural ambassadors demonstrated their boundless talents and the overlap of their interests with those of their country. In a rare era of shared objectives, the Eameses partnered with the federal government and the country's top businesses to lead the charge to modernize postwar America."

This 1949 chair, on the original metal container on which it was found in Wills' California studio, was first put on public display in the Library of Congress exhibition.

The History of The Eames Fiberglass Chair

2010-05-23T15:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-12T21:04:00.000-07:00

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.