Video from 1956 of Eames Lounge chair introduction
Growing up, my best friend's parents had an Eames Lounge in their family room and I always loved it. Unlike most iconic modern furniture, it's actually super-comfortable. I was checking our their pricing online (too rich for my blood, sadly) and came across this terrific 1956 video of Charles and Ray Eames first introducing the chair on the Arlene Francis "Home" Show. From Wikipedia:
The backrest and headrest are screwed together by a pair of aluminum supports. This unit is suspended on the seat via two connection points in the armrests. The armrests are screwed to shock mounts on the interior of the backrest shell, allowing the backrest and headrest to flex when the chair is in use. This is part of the chair's unusual design, as well as one of its biggest flaws. The rubber washers are solidly glued to the plywood shells, but have been known to tear free when excessive weight is applied, or when the rubber becomes old and brittle.
Other creative uses of materials include the seat cushions - which eschew standard stapled or nailed upholstery. Instead the cushions are sewn with a zipper around the outer edge that connects them to a stiff plastic backing. The backing affixes to the plywood shells with a series of hidden clips and rings. This design, along with the hidden shock mounts in the armrest allow the outside veneer of the chair to be unmarred by screws or bolts. The chair has a low seat which is permanently fixed at a recline. The seat of the chair swivels on a cast aluminum base, with glides that are threaded so that the chair may remain level.
...When it was first made Ray Eames remarked in a letter to Charles that the chair looked "comfortable and un-designy" (sic). Charles's vision was for a chair with "the warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman's mitt.
Previously:
- Eames' solar powered "Do Nothing Machine" from 1958 - Boing Boing
- Charles and Ray Eames stamps - Boing Boing
- Eames molded plywood leg splints - Boing Boing
- Eames Elephant film - Boing Boing
- Eames Demetrios presents "Discover Kymamerica" - Boing Boing
- Clown from Barnum & Bailey circus reclining on Eames lounge chair ...
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So these are what's known as Steampunk chairs? Where do they plug the hose in?
@david pescovitz
If you think of it as an heirloom piece, it's a bargain. I have a friend whose dad passed his Eames on to him. And my teenage nephew has already asked for mine when I kick off--which, with a little bit of luck, won't be for another 30 or 40 years.
Greedy little bugger.
Ah yes, 1956. Where the ever modest and gallant Charles Eames keeps trying to give credit to his partner Ray, and the host keeps shooing her into the background.
"She's behind the man, as I said ahahaha..." Sheesh.
I love their work, and my neighbors growing up (architects) had one of these beauties which I parked myself in at every opportunity.
I always loved the Eames' short film "Powers of Ten." I first saw it many years ago at the Wash, DC, Air and Space Museum, and now you can see it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY
#2 Grimci fall on your knees and bless the child 'cos he knows what is really relevant in his future,and I am confident that he will have the benefit of your loving guidance and whimsy
I must say its very refreshing to see Mr. Eames not hog all of the credit. Particularly when we look back on such cases as Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, turned out most of Le Corbusiers furniture was designed by her. Yet he still gets most of the credit today.
Now *that's* what I'm talking about! Classier than the Lasair lounger by far. What we need is a new, open source lounger design that includes the classic elements of style and comfort in the Eames design. They cost $3700. We should be able to bypass that by a good open source design, set up small factories in Shanghai, and have $500 chairs that are just as comfortable, but speak to modern concepts of comfort and elegance.
I was lucky enough to be the child of an Office Furniture family. At one point my father was an executive for a high end office furniture company based in Fort Wayne Indiana. When I was a teenager I would go visit the plant and unfortunately after a few years it went bankrupt due to complications with unions and the nasty economy at the time.
Well, upstairs on the top floor of this empty teenage wonderland of a warehouse. There were stacks upon stacks of disassembled Rosewood Eames Lounge chairs that had been sitting there due to the Endangered Wood act that prevented the production of furniture in rare woods. (Including Brazilian Rosewood at the time.) Considering that most of inventory was going to be liquidated I asked if I could bring the pieces of one the chairs home and build it myself.
So, many years later I look at the chair I have right next to me and cherish it as not only a part of history, but a great tale to tell as well. It started my interest in furniture as a functional element of interior design and the search for other stories like mine.
Wow, Arlene was pretty and she had brains. Compare her prodigeous multisylable vocabulary with todays breed of chucklehead bimbos that present just about everything on network tv.
The rubber washers are solidly glued to the plywood shells, but have been known to tear free when excessive weight is applied, or when the rubber becomes old and brittle.
Wikipedia is correct here. I have some ~40 year old Eames chairs and the washers are failing one by one. I have found that short heavy carriage bolts and fresh handmade washers fix the issue and ready the chairs for their next ~40 years.
It's a bloody chair. Why on earth would I buy one when it costs more than my first car?
@9 That depends entirely on how how time you plan to spend in it.
My family had one of these when I was a kid. In fact, it may still be somewhere in the house. It's a pretty damn comfy chair. Ours got clawed up pretty bad in spots by our cats, though.
I enjoy these as much as anyone else, the LCW is most likely my favorite chair of all time, but despite that, these things have their place. It bothers be so much when a nice loftspace pops up on Core77 or similar design-oriented blog, and all of the modernist buildings are filled with Eames and Panton chairs. They actually hire interior designers to decorate these homes, whose jobs it is to have superior taste and design sense, yet all they ever do is pop open the Herman Miller Classics catalog, plop in a couple Eames and throw in a Panton chair for good measure.
There are a bucketload of talented designers out there that have work that speaks far more to the space than throwing in a Saarinen Tulip set, just because. Too bad you need to buy 30$ Glossy Magazines from Italy to see industrial designers, architects and interior decorators who actually have a creative sense above pleasing readers of Home Sense, who laugh when they see Mom's dining set in a brand new 2.2m$ house in Nice in the pages.
That said, I'm sure I'll have an Eames LCW in a couple years. I just swooped up two Saarinen Tulip chairs (albeit ruthless knockoffs) and plan on continuing my modern design collection. I've been dreaming of a Matthew Hilton set for a while now...
What's amazing about these chairs is how influential their design aesthetic has been. That's why the originals are collector's items. Variants and derivatives have been around almost as long as the original. A good recent example is the Ekornes Stressless recliner series. They're spiritual kin to the Eames chairs: California cool ~= Norwegian cool.
JJasper: Why don't you get on that? Us designers would love it if you could make that happen. thx.
Knockoffs, or 'quality reproductions' abound, though quality varies. A quick persual of teh Google shows quite a few.
I think there are actually a lot of comfortable modern chairs, but the Eames' certainly put a lot of effort into ergonomics. Despite being all wood, their plywood lounge chair is also very comfortable to sit in, though not as womblike as the LC1.
Here ya go jjasper
http://www.recollections.com.au/listing_details/Replica%20Chairs/Replica%20Eames/2
AUD$795.00 is about $500 US
Were all presenters in the 1950s this obnoxious?
This site:
http://www.inmod.com/eames-lounge-chair-and-ottoman.html
has some of the better knock-offs that I've found. They actually have 3 different versions of that lounge and compare all three to the Herman Miller original(as you'll see if you check out the link).
Eames Lounge is a beauty for sure!
Check out this blog that is counting down the top 10 chairs of all time...Eames Lounge is one of them - number 9 I think...
http://blog.nelsonbridge.com
What I think is interesting, is their accents and how they articulate words in the video. You would never hear anyone talking like that these days.
Being an architect, I enjoy the story about the construction of their own home. They purchased materials for one design, then changed their mind and built a different design using the original materials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eames_House
I've designed and built furniture too, and a chair is the hardest to get right. The Wassily chair may look cool, but it's not comfortable at all.
Palm Springs, the Mid-Century Modernist capital of at least the US, is also currently competing to be the foreclosure capital. Everybody is selling (or trying to sell) their Eames', Nelson's and Saarinen's. You can get originals for a fraction of what they were a couple of years ago.
It is sort of swell that how a chair design can go so far from history. Look at how we are today and how it has influenced us.
Albert
Albert,
Your URL can go on your Profile page, thanks.
I see a lot of Steve Jobs here.
I've sat in chairs like that. It's a constant struggle to not slide out of them. How did those come to be regarded as good design?
@18 Unfortunately that link for the ~$500 knockoff can only be shipped to Australia. Anyone know where I can purchase the same item for a similar price in the US?
robcat, I find it impossible to believe that you "slid out" of the Eames lounge. It's in a reclining position naturally, like a bucket seat.
I too am from an office furniture family and inherited my grandfather's Eames lounge when he passed away. It's a big, comfy old thing and currently resides in my beachhouse rental unit (sandboxinn.com) where I brag about the pool table, the bidet and the genuine Eames lounge. ("Unconventional lodging for unconventional travelers," indeed!)
The leather got pretty messed up over the years -- I tried to use a leather repair kit at first, but no joy.
Black duct tape works just fine.
I love the music in the assembly video!
My parents had two large Eames molded plywood chairs and a matching round coffee table when I was growing up in the '60s. Then we moved from a house in Michigan to an apartment in New Jersey, and there wasn't enough room for all our furniture (we also had two gorgeous Arne Jacobsen swan chairs), so the Eameses went into the apartment building's storage room. Where they were promptly stolen.
Sigh. I could have paid off my college loans with that ensemble.
Or, you know, furnished my own apartment. Eames molded plywood chairs stand up pretty well to cats without looking like a grad student-furnished apartment.
Another knockoff from montreal :
http://www.mmdh.ca/mmdhhome.html
Chair is 649 CAD
I've heard about it in a decoration mag, but I'm plannign to visit the warehouse on my next trip to Montreal...