How Charles and Ray Eames’s 1946 LCW Chair Changed Furniture as We Know It
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Photo: George Platt Lynes
It was the end of 1945 and Evans Products Company—a plywood supplier mostly working with aircraft, auto, and rail industries—was hoping to diversify. They’d already collaborated with Charles and Ray Eames, the California-based designer couple, on a molded plywood leg splint. Now that the war was over, they wanted to try something different: furniture. So at the Barclay Hotel in New York City, Evans presented prototypes the pair had been developing, among them, the now-iconic Lounge Chair Wood or the LCW.
Eames Molded Plywood Lounge Chair Wood Base (LCW)
$1195.00, Design Within Reach
Using a homemade machine charmingly dubbed the Kazam! the Eameses had figured out how to use heating elements and a bicycle pump to create molded plywood seats with complex curves. But this was no sustainable means of fabrication—they wanted to mass-produce high-quality, low-cost furniture. Evans, they hoped, could facilitate that.
Bethany Adams Interiors and J.L. Jordan Photography - Modern Tudor
When George Nelson, the design director of Herman Miller, clocked the pieces at the Barclay Hotel, he told the founder and CEO, “I’ve just seen the greatest thing that has ever been done in chairs.” At his urging, the brand began distributing and then manufacturing the designs in 1949, three years after many of them were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, in its first single-subject furniture show: “New Furniture Designed by Charles Eames.”
“That’s an early Ray erasure,” points out Amy Auscherman, the director of Archives and Brand Heritage at MillerKnoll. “She was a sculptor, and when you look at the experimental chairs, it’s her artistic sensibility that really makes them what they are.”
At MoMA the seats were shown in red, blue, and yellow. Herman Miller has recently put that last shade back into production (from $1,195) after the decades-long popularity of the low-lying lounge that has lived with everyone from Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico to KAWS in Brooklyn. It’s beloved by designers, too, like Bethany Adams, who calls the chair, recently used in a Kentucky home, “a piece of sophisticated visual irony. It’s constructed out of thin sheets of plywood, but it’s incredibly comfortable, durable, and, in a home with young children, remarkably un-tippable.” dwr.com
This story appears in AD’s December issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
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