OBJECT 9

Eames' DCW Chair.

    Charles and Ray Eames were remarkable designers.  This is their DCW (dining chair wood) Chair, one of my favorites.  In production from 1946 – 1953 and reintroduced by Herman Miller in 1994, the DCW is made of 5 molded plywood components linked by rubber shock mounts.  The compound curved seat and back lend a level of comfort unequaled among solid chairs.

   

    The Eames’ had developed various techniques to produce the plywood leg splints (see OBJECT 1 posted previously) and stretchers commissioned by the US Navy in 1942 and these were applied directly to furniture production.  Here’s what Charles Eames had to say about his molded plywood chairs: “One of the things we had committed ourselves to was trying to do a chair with a hard surface that was as comfortable as it could be in relation to the human body and also that would be self-explanatory as you looked at it – no mysteries, so that the techniques of how it was made would be part of the aesthetics.  We felt very strongly about this, because at the time there were so many things made with the opposite idea in mind, that is, to disguise a thing as if it were made in the Gobelin factories in Paris, when in fact it had been manufactured by modern techniques.”

 

    This chair is one of the first successful examples of modern furniture produced for the mass market.   It was selected as "Best Design of the Century" by Time magazine in 1999 and remains one of the best-recognized objects of modernism to this day.  It resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Joseph Froncioni