No. A811F chair (Josef Frank)
Le Corbusier did not design any bentwood chairs himself, but another modernist architect did: the Viennese Josef Frank. A friend of Adolf Loos and a protégé of Hoffmann, Frank refined an earlier Thonet chair that had been designed in the mid-1920s by Adolf Gustav Schneck. Schneck had used a single continuous piece of bentwood to form the back as well as the two arms. Frank used the same configuration but replaced the solid seat with woven cane and added a caned backrest. He also eliminated the leg brace and gave the legs a slight flare, resulting in a poised, delicate stance that recalls a cabriole. The No. A811F is the bentwood chair I had in my university office.3 Despite using nineteenth-century techniques, the well-proportioned, squarish form is markedly modern; it is also a very comfortable chair. The simplicity of the design—only six pieces—rivals the classic café chair. Michael Thonet would have approved.
On Bent Knee
Thonet featured No. A811F on the cover of its 1933 catalogue. By then, tubular steel furniture had run its course.4 The British writer on design John Gloag considered it a “rather bleak phase of functionalism in design.” The novelist Aldous Huxley was more cutting: “Personally I very much dislike the aseptic, hospital style of furnishing. To dine off an operating table, to loll in a dentist’s chair—this is not my idea of domestic bliss.” Even some modernist architects had doubts. “The tubular steel chair is surely rational from technical and constructive points of view,” wrote one. “It is light, suitable for mass production, and so on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human point of view.”
The man who wrote that was the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. He had at first been enthusiastic about tubular steel furniture. As early as 1928, he had bought a set of Breuer’s furniture—including a Wassily Chair—for his own home, and he used Breuer’s cantilever side chairs in a restaurant project. He and his wife, Aino, also an architect, designed a stacking “hybrid chair” that combined a tubular frame with a molded plywood seat. Aalto called it “the world’s first soft wooden chair” because it had the characteristic springiness of a cantilever chair. But in time he became dissatisfied with steel furniture. What disturbed him was the very thing that appealed to the “house is a machine for living” architects—the cold, hard, industrial shininess of the material.
Alvar and Aino Aalto set out to design modern furniture using wood instead of tubular steel. The Aaltos were architects, but they approached the problem like cabinetmakers. Emulating Michael Thonet, they began with the fabrication process. The first challenge was the material: Finnish birch is not as flexible as Moravian beechwood, and it can be bent in only one direction, parallel to the grain. Working with a local master joiner, they experimented with different ways of bending, shaping, gluing, and laminating birchwood. The opportunity to apply this knowledge came in 1929 when the Aaltos won a competition to design a tuberculosis sanatorium near Paimio, Finland. They were responsible for the interior design: hardware, lighting fixtures, wardrobes, as well as assorted furniture: tables, waiting room armchairs, reading room chairs, cafeteria side chairs, outdoor reclining chairs, physicians’ swivel desk chairs, and laboratory stools. The most original designs were two all-wood lounge chairs that used a single piece of thin curved plywood as a seat, supported by a frame made out of bent veneered birch.5 One frame was a cantilever and the other was a closed loop; like the Wassily Chair, both models were supported by runners. All-wood furniture suited a sanatorium, being less noisy when moved compared with tubular steel. Aesthetically, the curving wood frames were less machinelike, and the wide wooden frames made for better armrests.
Paimio lounge chair (Alvar and Aino Aalto)
Most of the Paimio furniture made its way into production. The two lounge chairs, the waiting room armchair, and the reading room chair are still being made today by Artek, a company founded by the Aaltos in 1935. We have an Artek barstool in our kitchen. The stool arrived from Finland in a flat carton, six pieces of birchwood: a circular seat covered in black linoleum, four legs, a circular brace that doubles as a footrest, and sixteen screws. The design—which dates from 1935—is not complicated. The legs are bent pieces of solid birch that are simply screwed to the underside of the seat; the circular footrest of laminated birch is similarly attached to the legs. The fourteen-inch-diameter seat is generous, and the legs splay slightly to create more stability. A stool is a utilitarian sort of seat, but this one has attitude.
The key to Aalto’s designs was the bent leg. “In furniture design the basic problem from an historical—and practical—point of view is the connecting element between the vertical and horizontal pieces,” he wrote. “I believe this is absolutely decisive in giving the style its character.” This is apparent in cabriole chairs, Windsor chairs, and bentwood café chairs. Aalto devised an original method of bending solid birch. The wood was kerfed, that is, thin slots were cut into one end. After the piece was soaked in water and briefly steamed, plywood strips coated with glue were slid into the kerfs. Then the piece was bent to the required angle in a mold. Aalto called the L-shaped leg a “bent knee.” It could serve equally well for a chair, a stool, or a table.
Although Aalto designed chairs that are actually more suited to mass production than many of their tubular steel cousins, he abhorred standardization, which he called “industrial violence against individual taste.” What makes his chairs so appealing is that while they are factory-made objects and use standardized components, they don’t look standardized. They are not handcrafted, yet they somehow carry a human imprint. The plywood is generally painted, but solid wood is always coated with clear lacquer so the grain of the pale birch comes through. The shapes have more to do with the world of nature than with abstract geometry. “There are only two things in art,” said Aalto, “humanity or its lack.” That conviction comes through, too.
Alakazam!
Aalto’s bentwood chairs found an international market. In 1933, an assortment of Aalto furniture was displayed as part of an exhibition of Finnish furniture at the fashionable London department store Fortnum & Mason. The leading British journal Architectural Review sponsored the show and published an enthusiastic article on Aino and Alvar Aalto’s chairs, which it called “cheap and seemly furniture which is comfortable, light and easy to move.” The Aalto display included the plywood-and-tubular-steel side chair, several lounge chairs, and a stack of stools. The unpretentious furniture appealed to those with modern tastes and soon led to foreign orders for the newly founded Artek. The Paimio waiting room armchair was marketed in Britain as the Verandah Chair. The appeal of all-wood furniture was not lost on other designers, including Breuer, who designed a series of molded plywood lounge chairs for the British manufacturer Isokon.
Another designer who was influenced by Aalto was the young Eero Saarinen, son of Eliel Saarinen, a celebrated architect and the head of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Born in Finland and brought to America as a boy, Eero was groomed by his father to be an architect. In 1935, after graduating from Yale’s school of architecture, the young Eero spent a year working in Helsinki, where, because Aalto was a family friend, he became familiar with Artek’s innovative wood furniture. Aalto’s influence is evident in a chair that Eero designed immediately after joining his father’s architectural firm. Eliel was designing the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, and Eero was responsible for the armchairs that constituted the auditorium seating. The design is clearly based on Aalto’s Paimio waiting room chair: the seat and back, which are covered by a thin padding and cotton upholstery, are a single piece of molded plywood supported by a rectangular maple frame.
Eero Saarinen worked on the Kleinhans chair with his friend Charlie—Charles Eames. A few years older than Saarinen, Eames had dropped out of architecture school in St. Louis, apprenticed with a local architect, and eventually opened his own office. One of his houses so impressed Eliel Saarinen that he offered the thirty-one-year-old architect a fellowship to Cranbrook
. Architectural commissions in post-Depression America being scarce, Eames accepted. Thanks to his evident abilities and experience, after only a year he was put in charge of Cranbrook’s industrial design department. In his spare time he worked in the Saarinen office.
Reading chair (Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames)
Eames and Eero Saarinen became fast friends—and collaborators. In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art announced an inter-American furniture design competition—“Organic Design in Home Furnishings”—which they entered together. They decided that the logical development of the Kleinhans chair would be a chair made of plywood molded in three dimensions. In a remarkable creative effort, the pair produced a reading chair, a side chair, a high-back armchair, and a lounge chair. All dispensed with supporting frames and used plywood shells in which the seat, back, and arms were made of one continuous material. Saarinen and Eames had intended to leave the plywood shell exposed, but the quality of the finish was poor so they covered the plywood with foam rubber and fabric. The legs were to be metal, but, pressed for time, the designers made them birch. The jury, which included Marcel Breuer and Alvar Aalto, awarded the shell chairs first prize.
The Saarinen-Eames chairs were not commercially produced, partly because of the outbreak of World War II, and partly because their cost was prohibitive due to the complicated geometry.6 Nevertheless, no one who saw the chairs in the Museum of Modern Art, or in the twelve major department stores across the country where they were also displayed, would ever think of a chair in quite the same way again.
Wartime marked the end of the partnership. Saarinen stayed in Michigan to work with his father, and Eames, now married, moved to Los Angeles. He and his wife, Ray, who had been a student at Cranbrook, continued experimenting with molding plywood. Like Alvar and Aino Aalto, they focused on the fabrication method. They built a homemade molding machine into which cardboard-thin layers of plywood, slathered with glue, were placed. A bladder inflated by a hand-operated car tire pump pressed the plies into a plaster mold, and heating elements bonded the glue. After four to six hours, the mold was opened, and—alakazam—a piece of molded plywood magically emerged. They called their contraption the Kazam! machine.
The Eameses’ first molded plywood product was a leg splint for the U.S. Navy; by the end of the war they had fabricated 150,000 of them. They also worked on molded plywood medical litters and fuselage parts for gliders. This practical experience led to a postwar line of children’s furniture and large children’s toys. But their goal remained an industrially produced chair, as Charles later explained:
The idea was to do a piece of furniture that would be simple and yet comfortable. It would be a chair on which mass production would not have anything but a positive influence; it would have in its appearance the essence of the method that produced it. It would have an inherent rightness about it, and it would be produced by people working in a dignified way. That sounds a little pompous, but at the time it was a perfectly legitimate thing to strive for.
The first prototypes of a molded shell chair were made in 1945. The shells were produced on an improved version of the Kazam! machine; the entire process now took only ten minutes. The seat and the back were two separate pieces of molded plywood—five plies of ash, a total of 5/16 inch thick—supported by a frame of extremely thin steel rods. The plywood was connected to the frame by rubber shock mounts that were electrostatically welded to the wood using an innovative process developed by the Chrysler Corporation. The rubber mounts gave the chair some resilience; there was no padding or upholstery. The molded plywood back and seat seemed to float above the skinny metal frame, giving rise to the nickname “potato-chip chair.” There were two versions, a side chair and a lounge chair; the latter was two inches lower, with a slightly larger seat and a more reclined back. The pragmatic Charles called them DCM and LCM (Dining Chair Metal and Lounge Chair Metal). A second version of the chairs substituted molded plywood for the steel frame.
Dining Chair Metal (Charles and Ray Eames)
The Herman Miller company of Zeeland, Michigan, began manufacturing the Eames chairs in 1946. The chairs were a success—artistically and commercially. They were endorsed by the Museum of Modern Art, and by 1951, the DCM, which was by far the most popular model, was selling at the rate of two thousand a month. A 1952 magazine advertisement in House & Garden announced: “America’s Most Famous Modern Chair Can Now be Yours For $25.” The potato-chip chair has proven a remarkably durable design. When Renzo Piano designed the New York Times Building in 2007, he furnished the cafeteria with DCMs. I’m not sure which is more remarkable: that he picked a sixty-year-old furniture design for the new building, or that the chairs still look fresh and up-to-date.
Because the Eames plywood chair is molded in three dimensions it provides the same comfort as the hand-carved seat of a Windsor chair. At the same time, it is a beautiful object. Charles Eames was once asked if furniture design was an expression of art. “The design is an expression of the purpose,” he answered. “It may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art.” Ray Eames was trained as an artist, and many people saw her hand in the sculptural shapes. Arthur Drexler, then curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, observed: “Ambiguous but not bland, the shape is instantly seen as a whole, with no part of its contour catching the eye. The curve of the seat flares more emphatically and from certain angles gives the chair a curiously animated look.” If Drexler’s last phrase sounds tentative it is because modern design was supposed to be abstract, but what makes the Eames chair so endearing—especially the version with insectlike metal legs—is that it appears as zoomorphic, in its own whimsical way, as a cabriole chair.
Charles and Ray Eames separated the seat and back of the plywood chair in order to simplify the molding process. But a one-piece shell, which Eames and Saarinen had explored earlier, remained the goal. After experimenting with stamped steel and aluminum, which proved too expensive, the Eameses turned to plastic. Polyester resin reinforced with fiberglass cloth had been developed by Owens-Corning in the late 1930s and had come into its own in aircraft production during the war. Some of the earliest nonmilitary fiberglass products were sailing dinghies, and a hydraulic press adapted from the boatbuilding industry was used to manufacture the first Eames chairs. The shell came in three colors—gray, beige, and parchment (later, brighter colors were introduced, as well as fabric and vinyl upholstery). The shell was attached with rubber shock mounts to a variety of bases: wire struts; tubular metal or wood legs; swivel pedestals with casters; even wooden rockers. There were two versions—a side chair and an armchair. In time, the ubiquitous shells were adapted to barstools, stacking classroom chairs, and auditorium and stadium seating.
Plastic shell armchair (Charles and Ray Eames)
The Eames shell chair—the world’s first plastic chair—was even more revolutionary than the potato-chip chair, because it was not simply the result of an innovative manufacturing technique, like bending wood or tubular steel, but also used a new material. A decade later, the British chair designer Robin Day produced a shell chair molded out of polypropylene, the Polyprop Chair.7 While not as elegant as the Eames design, it was considerably less expensive, the modern equivalent of the Thonet café chair—“the price of a bottle of good wine.” The ultimate descendant of the Eames shell chair is the ubiquitous one-piece plastic chair that will be discussed in the final chapter.
The year that the Eames shell chair appeared—1950—Life published an article on Charles Eames that called him “the best-known U.S. designer of modern furniture,” which was true although it ignored Ray’s contribution. “Eames is so interested in making the products of his drawing board available at the lowest cost that the modest retail price of his recent chair ($32.50) bothers him … he guiltily feels that it should sell for less.” Four plastic Eames chairs cost $130 at a time when a chrome kitchen dinette set of four chairs and a table sold for well under a hundred dollars. My parents had one of these sets in the kitche
n when I was growing up in the 1950s: the tabletop was Formica in a cracked-ice pattern, the chairs had shiny tubular steel frames with seats and backs upholstered in marbled vinyl. They were pretty clumsy compared with the graceful Eames chairs.
Charles and Ray Eames designed many more chairs: a wire mesh version of the shell chair; a luxurious, extremely popular lounge chair and ottoman that combined plywood shells with deep leather upholstery; and a line of cast-aluminum office furniture that used thin padded slings as seats and backs. In the 1960s, the Eameses produced a variety of expensive executive office chairs, but it was the plastic chair that remained closest to their goal of a chair that was “simple and yet comfortable” with “an inherent rightness.” Eames had nothing to feel guilty about—he had achieved what many modern chair designers strove for but few attained.
Fewer than twenty-five years separate the Eames plastic shell chair from Marcel Breuer’s first cantilever chair. Both share an iconoclastic approach, using new materials in novel ways. Both chairs are loosely referred to as “modern,” and both are dramatic departures from convention. Breuer’s cantilever chair is actually more radical, since it is a chair on only two legs and incorporates an unprecedented springiness. In that regard, the Eames shell chair is more traditional: a seat supported by four legs. However, appearances can be deceiving. The Breuer chair, although it embodies the image of a machine-made object, is a crafted artifact largely assembled by hand, while the Eames chair is a true industrial product.8 Yet the latter would not exist without the former. Breuer set the agenda—a chair that would be manufactured rather than built, and whose appearance would be the result of how it was made. The Eames shell chair fulfilled this ambitious goal.
The Cesca Chair, the Paimio lounge chair, the potato-chip chair, and the plastic shell chair are true modern classics. They fulfill the ideal of combining new processes and new materials to produce new forms. The forms are not simply aesthetic inventions; they are the result of considerable technical innovation and refinement. There have been many unusually shaped chairs since, but few real rivals, which is probably why all four chairs remain in production today. Like the cabriole chair and the bentwood chair, they represent an enduring kind of perfection, a considered balance between means and ends.
Now I Sit Me Down Page 11
