EC178 Loose Cushion Office Seating Prototype

In the late 1960s, bowing to customer demand for a wider and softer office chair, Herman Miller’s European partners Herman Miller A.G. (later Vitra) began producing a slightly wider and deeper version of the Eameses’ fiberglass arm shell chair. Meanwhile in Venice, California, the Eameses were already at work on a completely revised, expanded version of chair conceived for the contemporary workplace. This is a prototype for that chair’s fiberglass shell. Its dark, outer surface is smooth, while its lighter inner surface is roughly textured and mottled. This indicates that it was made by filling a concave, or so-called”‘female,” mold by hand. Eventually, these shells would be manufactured by using a hydraulic press to press fiberglass between two molds, male and female, so that both sides of the shell came out smooth. But here, the designers were more concerned with visualizing the chair’s overall form than its surfaces. This prototype from the Eames Office at 901 Washington Boulevard would have followed others that were entirely shaped by hand—likely in clay—so that the shape of the shell could be worked out before any molding was involved. This kind of protype series was typical of the Eameses, who generally worked out their designs in three dimensions, and more often than not, at full scale.