Showing posts with label Aluminum Group. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aluminum Group. Show all posts
Thursday, July 12, 2012
In the store: Delightful dining
Freshly upholstered in white vinyl and powdercoated in black...this great dining set has just made it onto the floor of the store. The classic Eames Aluminum Group table is 42" in diameter and looks great with the Eames upholstered shell armchairs. This set is getting lots of Likes on our Facebook page.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Office elegance
Herman Miller has been making the ultimate office chair for decades. I recently acquired an Aeron chair, which was designed in 1994 and is destined to be yet another in a long line of Herman Miller classics.
Industrialist J. Irwin Miller made a deal with his home town of Columbus, Indiana. He would set up a foundation that would pay architect fees for new public buildings if the foundation could choose the architects. As a result, the town of 40,000 has buildings by Eero and Eliel Saarinen, I. M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier and others and has been listed by the American Institute of Architects to be the sixth most architecturally significant city in the United States.
When Eero Saarinen designed Miller's home, he asked Ray and Charles Eames to design high-quality seating for outdoor use. They constructed their chairs of cast aluminum with a seat frame that supported a stretched synthetic mesh, and the Aluminum Group was born. Herman Miller began making the Aluminum Group for the office in 1959.
When George Nelson asked Charles Eames to assist in the design of the U. S. pavilion at the Moscow world exhibition in 1959, Eames asked his friend Henry Luce, the chairman of Time-Life, for a favor. Luce gave Eames access to the company's vast archive of images on the condition that he could call in a favor of his own at some time in the future, which he did a year later when he asked for a chair for his ultra-modern new building. The Eameses responded with the Time-Life chair. At the time, it was a revolutionary design, and it hasn't been changed yet.
In 1969 Ray and Charles Eames added plush cushions to the Aluminum Group chair, and the Soft Pad line was created.
In 1994 Herman Miller hired Don Chadwick and Bill Stumph to create a breakthrough design in office seating. The high back and waterfall seat of the Aeron became a symbol of the dot-com era. It is part of the New York MoMA permanent collection and has been named of of "Designs Greatest Hits" by Your Company magazine and a gold medal winner of the "Designs of the Decade" of the Industrial Designers Society of America.
In 2003 German design team Studio 7.5 (made up of Claudia Plikat, Burkhard Schmitz, Nicolai Neubert, Carola Zwick, and Roland Zwick, who prefer to work as a team without titles or hierarchy) created the Mirra chair. Their concept was to make the chair "a shadow of the sitter."
The Celle (say Sell-uh) chair was designed by Jerome Caruso, who has been Sub-Zero's only designer for more than two decades. He called the Celle "The Mt. Everest of fun." He conceived it as hundreds of tiny "cells," each one consisting of a pad with spring-like loops.
Herman Miller asked Yves Béhar to design an affordable chair that would encorporate good design, ergonomics, engineering and respect for the environment. Béhar took his inspiration for the Sayl chair from the Golden Gate Bridge in his home town of San Francisco, California.
Check back tomorrow to see my Aeron...and the new desk I bought to go with it.) It's amazing how one thing always leads to another...
From hermanmiller.com, smartfurniture.com and homedit.com
When designing the Swag Leg chair, George Nelson began with the legs, insisting that they be made of machine-formed metal, be prefinished. And be beautiful. The shell echoes another familiar form. Nelson borrowed (with permission) the patented process for molding plastic that Charles and Ray Eames had developed. But he added a twist. He created separate seat and back shells and then glued them together. The chair was introduced in 1958 and is back in production today.
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| George Nelson Swag Leg chair, 1958 edition20.com |
Industrialist J. Irwin Miller made a deal with his home town of Columbus, Indiana. He would set up a foundation that would pay architect fees for new public buildings if the foundation could choose the architects. As a result, the town of 40,000 has buildings by Eero and Eliel Saarinen, I. M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier and others and has been listed by the American Institute of Architects to be the sixth most architecturally significant city in the United States.
When Eero Saarinen designed Miller's home, he asked Ray and Charles Eames to design high-quality seating for outdoor use. They constructed their chairs of cast aluminum with a seat frame that supported a stretched synthetic mesh, and the Aluminum Group was born. Herman Miller began making the Aluminum Group for the office in 1959.
 |
| Eames Aluminum Group Management chair, 1959 officedesigns.com |
When George Nelson asked Charles Eames to assist in the design of the U. S. pavilion at the Moscow world exhibition in 1959, Eames asked his friend Henry Luce, the chairman of Time-Life, for a favor. Luce gave Eames access to the company's vast archive of images on the condition that he could call in a favor of his own at some time in the future, which he did a year later when he asked for a chair for his ultra-modern new building. The Eameses responded with the Time-Life chair. At the time, it was a revolutionary design, and it hasn't been changed yet.
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| Eames Time-Life chair, 1960 homedit.com |
In 1969 Ray and Charles Eames added plush cushions to the Aluminum Group chair, and the Soft Pad line was created.
 |
| Eames Soft Pad Management chair, 1969 uncrate.com |
In 1994 Herman Miller hired Don Chadwick and Bill Stumph to create a breakthrough design in office seating. The high back and waterfall seat of the Aeron became a symbol of the dot-com era. It is part of the New York MoMA permanent collection and has been named of of "Designs Greatest Hits" by Your Company magazine and a gold medal winner of the "Designs of the Decade" of the Industrial Designers Society of America.
 |
| Aeron chair, 1994 hermanmiller.com |
In 2003 German design team Studio 7.5 (made up of Claudia Plikat, Burkhard Schmitz, Nicolai Neubert, Carola Zwick, and Roland Zwick, who prefer to work as a team without titles or hierarchy) created the Mirra chair. Their concept was to make the chair "a shadow of the sitter."
 |
| Mirra chair, 2003 josesandoval.com |
The Celle (say Sell-uh) chair was designed by Jerome Caruso, who has been Sub-Zero's only designer for more than two decades. He called the Celle "The Mt. Everest of fun." He conceived it as hundreds of tiny "cells," each one consisting of a pad with spring-like loops.
 |
| Celle chair, 2005 argosytradingfurniture.com |
Herman Miller asked Yves Béhar to design an affordable chair that would encorporate good design, ergonomics, engineering and respect for the environment. Béhar took his inspiration for the Sayl chair from the Golden Gate Bridge in his home town of San Francisco, California.
 |
| Sayl chair, 2009 hermanmiller.com |
Check back tomorrow to see my Aeron...and the new desk I bought to go with it.) It's amazing how one thing always leads to another...
From hermanmiller.com, smartfurniture.com and homedit.com
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Charles and Ray Eames
Back in St Louis, Charles opened an architectural office which went out of business during the Depression. He set up another practice in 1935 and was asked to design a house for friends of Catherine. He sought the advice of the architect Eliel Saarinen who offered him a fellowship to study architecture and design at Cranbrook Academy. There, Charles deepened his friendship with Eliel and his son Eero, with whom he won the 1940 Museum of Modern Art Organic Furniture Competition. He also found new collaborators there--notably Harry Bertoia and, later, Ray Kaiser.
Bernice Alexandra Kaiser (1912-1988), nicknamed Ray, enrolled at Cranbrook in 1940, where she met Charles Eames. Four months after meeting him, she left Cranbrook. He filed for divorce, and he and Ray married in 1941.
At home in Los Angeles, Charles found work at MGM, and Ray created covers for California Art & Architecture magazine. At night, they conducted plywood experiments in their spare bedroom. In 1942 they started a collaborative effort with Harry Bertoia and Gregory Ain, producing sculpture, chairs, screens, tables and even toys. George Nelson, head of design at Herman Miller, convinced others at the company to put some of these pieces into production. All Eames plywood designs combined an elegant organic aesthetic with a love of materials and technical ingenuity.
These qualities were also apparent in the showroom they designed for Herman Miller in 1949 and the Case Study Houses, a low cost housing project sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, which included the Eames House, a steel structure with sliding walls and windows. Designed for inexpensive, speedy construction, it took five men 16 hours to raise the steel shell and one man three days to build the roof deck. The house and its contents epitomized Charles and Ray's approach to design and their "good life" concept of celebrating the beauty of everyday objects.
After plywood, the Eames Office focused on equally zealous experiments with other materials by creating furniture in fiberglass, plastic, aluminum and, for the 1956 Lounge Chair, leather and a very opulent plywood.
Their collaboration with Herman Miller continued and extended to Vitra, its European partner. The Eames Office also began a long-lasting relationship with IBM for which they made films and designed exhibitions. Throughout the 1950s, their furniture was exhibited in the Good Design shows with which MoMA sought to raise the public's awareness of design.
Charles died August 21, 1978. Ray then worked hard to complete any unfinished projects but, having done so, did not seek new ones. She devoted the rest of her life to communicating their ideas through talks and writing. Ray Eames died on August 21, 1988, ten years to the day after Charles.
From designmuseum.org
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| My favorite photo of Ray and Charles Eames esotericsurvey.blogspot.com |
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| Molded plywood lounge chair, 1950s 1stdibs.com |
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| Sofa, 1950s 1stdibs.com |
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| Surfboard coffee tables, 1950s 1stdibs.com |
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| Time Life chair, 1950s 1stdibs.com |
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| Rosewood lounge, 1956 1stdibs.com |
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| Fiberglass shell armchair, 1957 1stdibs.com |
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| Aluminum Group side chair, 1958 1stdibs.com |
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| Eames house eamesfoundation.org |
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