EAMES, CHARLES 1907-1978

ARCHITECT AND DESIGNER OF FAMOUS FORM-FITTING CHAIRS

"Extraordinarily Comfortable,"

Although he worked with a variety of fabrics, machinery, and buildings, Charles Eames was best known for the series of chairs that still bear his name. In the 1950s his extraordinarily comfortable chairs, built low and responsive to the body, were snapped up by consumers wanting the new American Modern furniture but wanting comfort, too.

Flunked Architecture

Born in Saint Louis to a Civil War veteran, Eames won a scholarship to study architecture at Washington University but flunked out, partly because he spent too much time working in one of the city's large architectural firms and partly because the traditional teachers at his university disapproved of Frank Lloyd Wright, one of Eames's idols. In 1929 Eames went to Europe, where he learned about the work of the great German Bauhaus architects. He opened an architectural office back in Saint Louis in 1930.

Cranbrook Academy of Art

In the late 1930s Eames was offered a fellowship to study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Working with the director's son, Eero Saarinen, he entered a molded-plywood chair in the Organic Design Competition conducted in 1940-1941 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The chair, which for the first time used bare plywood shaped to fit the contours of the human body, won first prize in the international competition and established the two designers as leading innovators. Later Eames's chairs were fashioned of tubular steel, wire mesh, and molded plastic. His simple and functional chairs and tables were considered revolutionary because they were made almost wholly by machines. The chairs were unusually comfortable primarily due to rubber shock mounts that joined backs and seats to the chair frame—an innovation Eames had learned from engine design.

Other Talents

Later in life Eames became a documentary filmmaker, winning awards from the Edinburgh International Film Festival (1954 and 1957), the San Francisco International Film Festival (1958), and the American Film Festival (1959). But his name is still synonymous with his chairs. Three of those chairs appear on a list called "The 100 Best Designed Products," compiled in 1959 by the world's leading designers and released by the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology.