EC127 Backrest Samples

These chair elements were made as color tests for the backrest of the newly devised EC127 Upholstered Pull-Up Chair that was introduced in 1970. This new design was based on the Eameses’ classic molded plywood DCM chairs, but substituted fiberglass-reinforced plastic for plywood and added an upholstered, injected foam cushion. To refine the chair’s materiality and produce the color tests, the Eameses worked with Century Plastics, a firm co-founded in 1966 by engineers Irving Green and Sol Fingerhut (the company’s label can be seen attached to each of the prototypes). As veterans of Zenith Plastics, the company that helped develop the original fiberglass chairs in the early 1950s, Green and Fingerhut were no strangers to the Eameses and their working methods. Some twenty years later, the EC127 components offered significant refinements from earlier designs: a new plastic formulation rendered individual fiberglass fibers invisible, instead offering a smooth uniform surface; and the chair’s backrest was molded with a convex bump to which the spine of the chair was attached, thus eliminating the need for neoprene shock absorbers to be attached with epoxy after the fact, as on the DCM chair. These color samples demonstrate the three final shell colors: greige, parchment and black.