Designs for Living

However playful as forms, both the wire chair and the Eames chair evolved from the practical objective of achieving maximum performance at minimum cost – the cost minimized by ease of mass production and economy of materials. This objective has yielded in later Eames designs to a preoccupation with visual elegance and sumptuous comfort. Eames’ 1958 leisure chair is a beautiful orchestration of sensuous lines and planes, its sculptured bars of aluminum in duet with the outer lines of the seating pad, the pad’s surface in a steady rhythm of horizontal ribs. And then – as if to reward his legion of admirers for never having noticed that his supremely functional original chair, which looked so contour-obliging, could in fact not be sat in with total comfort for more than twenty minutes – Eames’ next design sank the sitter into a voluptuous luxury that few mortals since Nero have known: a broad, deep lounge chair, its cushions covered in soft, wrinkly leather and filled not with the uniformly pneumatic foam rubber so favored in modern design, but with feathers and down – “to give the feeling of settling in,” says Eames. “And when you get up the cushions do not instantly pop back into place as though you had never been there.” The sense of sheer amplitude is magnified by broadly curved molded frames in luxurious rosewood veneer.

What makes Eames amazing to every other designer is that each new design, so original in conception, has been so fully and naturally resolved that it seems to have been plucked whole from some reservoir of pre-existent ideas, if not from the sky. As a matter of fact, several Eames designs resemble birds, with their blithely molded bodies perched on fragile legs; his latest chair, designed for La Fonda del Sol restaurant in New York, actually sports abstract claws fanning out from its central pedestal. The chair is scheduled to go into mass production shortly.

As befits a genius, Eames is pampered by his manufacturer, the Herman Miller Furniture Company of Zeeland, Michigan. He is under no pressure to produce new designs. Miller is content to wait until inspiration strikes – meanwhile piling up profits from previous models (the original Eames chair is still such a strong seller that Miller maintains a plant solely for its production.) Again as the prerogative of genius, perhaps, Eames avoids the social and professional life of the large and aggressive Los Angeles design community, fiddles around home (a fascinating Santa Monica house made of standard steel building components) or at his studio with his sculptress wife Ray on whatever delectation may come to mind. Other delights beside furniture have sprung from their experiments, including toys, ground-breaking abstract films, and a “sun machine” made of scraps of metal and activated by the sun, which whirs, spins, and buzzes – all to absolutely no purpose. “My dream,” Eames has said, “is to have people working on useless projects. These have the germ of new concepts. Our backlog of undeveloped concepts is becoming very low.”

One designer who has been extremely prolific in reducing that backlog is Eames’ friend and fellow designer for Herman Miller – George Nelson. Nelson has either initiated or perfected many innovations which have profoundly affected the organization of the modern house. In his storage wall – an idea he has continued to explore for new variations since the late 1940s – he devised an ingenious system of shelves and supports that could be assembled to accommodate in one out-of-the-way wall all manner of equipment including bar, television, hi-fi and desk, as well as storage space. He was also one of the originators of the now ubiquitous modular system of furniture, in which seating, cabinets, tables and desks are composed of interchangeable parts, adaptable to any new use or whim. An architect as well as a furniture designer, Nelson has always attempted to integrate furniture with architecture to achieve greater space, utility and harmony; and most of his designs for free-standing pieces, such as sofas and armchairs, like his storage walls and modular systems, are simple geometric shapes, usually with raised “platform” seats, to harmonize with the straight lines of the modern house and to preserve its open expanses.

CONTINUED: Designs for Living

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