Charles and Ray Eames Vintage Fiberglas La Fonda Chair 1970s

Fiberglass seat shell with full upholstery, 1970s, design Charles & Ray Eames, manufacturer Herman Miller,

Color of the shell Parchment, full upholstery Hopsa brown, white lacquered La Fonda base

Height 73 cm, width 64 cm, depth 50 cm

American couple Charles and Ray Eames are known worldwide for their influential modern design in the fields of architecture, graphics, furniture and product design, all characterized by a playful, clean aesthetic that is both accessible and enduring. Their work parallels the evolution of post-war American design, from the rise of the West Coast to the global expansion of American culture.

Charles Eames was born in 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri. He initially studied architecture at Washington University. However, when he insisted on focusing more on modern designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright, he was asked to leave the university. In 1936, he took up a scholarship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he became head of the new design department. Here he worked with Eero Saarinen on the wooden furniture that won the Museum of Modern Arts’ Organic Design in Home Furnishing competition in 1940. The series included experimentally shaped chairs made of plywood.

Ray (born Kaiser) was born in Sacramento, California in 1912. She studied in New York with painter Hans Hofmann. Together with other of Hofmann’s students, she was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists. This organization publicly opposed galleries that did not want to show non-objective art and thus contributed to the spread of abstract expressionism.

The two met in Cranbrook, married in 1941 and moved to Los Angeles, where they worked on mass-produced and inexpensive furniture designs. During the war, they were commissioned by the US Navy to develop molded plywood leg splints for injured soldiers. Their ongoing work in the furniture industry was strongly influenced by their access to the material resources of the army. After opening another office in Santa Monica, their molded plywood furniture was particularly successful. The first plywood design, the legendary ECW (Eames Chair Wood) model, was originally produced by Evans in 1946 and is still in production today. In order to meet the increasing demand for housing after the war, Charles and Ray Eames developed prefabricated architecture. 149 they designed their own house in California as part of Arts & Architecture Magazine’s Case Study House program. Throughout their career, the two experimented not only with materials such as fiberglass, plastic and metal, but also with different project approaches – from toy ideas to photography and film.
Almost every design from the Eames workshop became a popular collector’s item. Notable designs include La Chaise, which was developed for MoMA’s International Competition for Low-Cost Furnitures (1948); the Molded Fiberglass Chairs (1950); the Eames Storage Unit (1950-52); Lounge Chair & Ottoman (1956); and the Aluminum Group Office Chairs (1958), which are manufactured by both Herman Miller in the U.S. and Vitra in Europe. The couple received various awards during their lifetime and posthumously, including the Museum of Modern Art’s Organic Furniture Competition Award (1940); the Emmy in Graphics for The Fabulous Fifties (1960); the Kaufmann International Design Award (1961); the 25 Year American Institute of Architects Award (1977); the Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry, Harvard (1971); the Queen’s Gold Medal for Architecture (1979); the “Most Influential Designer of the 20th Century” award from WORLDESIGN (1985); Industrial Designers Society of America (1985); and The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, Traveling Exhibition from the Library of Congress (1999).

Charles died in 1978, exactly a decade later to the day Ray died.