The History of the Eames Office Chair

Charles and Ray Eames remain amongst the greatest designers of the modern era. True polymaths, they created groundbreaking films, buildings and textiles. In furniture, they produced iconic designs that combined sleek aesthetics, major technical achievements and, above all else, comfort. Many designers have since taken their iconic work as inspiration, spinning all sorts of stylish, innovative and comfortable chairs. Amongst the Eameses' most famous designs was the Aluminium Group, commonly known these days as Eames office chairs.

The Eames office chair has its roots in Columbia, Indiana in the 1950s. The noted architects Eero Saarinen and Alexander Girard were designing the home of industrialist J. Irwin Miller: a house which has since been declared a National Historic Landmark. The house was to be the epitome of modern design and its interior uncluttered, but homely. Girard was a long time collaborator of the Eameses and asked them to design high-quality seating that could be used both inside and outside the house.

Charles and Ray Eames’ chair was to be a revolution. They constructed the seat frame from cast aluminium, making it lightweight but strong. The Eames chair could be moved about with ease and wouldn’t be easily damaged. The frame was designed to support a stretched synthetic mesh. The material was secure, but fitted loosely enough that it could conform to the body of anyone sitting in it. This mesh was not a standard cover for the seat, but an integral, load bearing part of the chair’s design. This form of seat suspension was a major technical breakthrough, throwing out the rulebook that had existed since the Ancient Greeks which said chairs should be a solid shell.

The chair went into mass production in 1958 as the Aluminium Group and has been on sale ever since. There have been some notable changes over the years. Though designed for both indoor and outdoor use, nowadays the chairs are used almost exclusively indoors and have become associated with corporate environments such as offices, boardrooms and the like: hence the unofficial title “the Eames Office Chair”. To accommodate this change of environment, the original synthetic mesh was removed. It was designed for outdoor use and its removal allowed a wider variety of fabrics and upholstery to be fitted. New fittings have included different, more modern forms of mesh, fabric upholstery and, perhaps most famously, black padded leather.

Nowadays, the Eames’s legacy lives on in a range of chairs inspired by the Eames office chair. These new designs borrow many of the chair’s key features while continuing the process of innovation that the original designers so valued. In describing his design philosophy, Charles Eames used the parable of a banana leaf; used as a simple dish in southern India, the banana leaf was gradually made more and more ornate, until some finally returned to just using the simple leaf.

"I'm not prepared to say that the banana leaf that one eats off of is the same as the other eats off of, but it's that process that has happened within the man that changes the banana leaf"

This philosophy of returning to and recognising the elegance of simplicity can be seen in the designs the Eames have inspired.