Now I Sit Me Down (17 page)

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.