The Last Decade of Eames Furniture The Last Decade of Eames Furniture

Punctuated by war, student protests, riots, and assassinations, 1968 was a tumultuous year of social and political upheaval across the world. Although the shifts were less charged and less controversial, this significant sense of disruption extended to Herman Miller, the Michigan-based furniture company and longtime partner of the Eames Office. After establishing itself as a preeminent purveyor of modern home furnishings, 1968 saw the company completely reorienting itself to address a new arena of business opportunity: the office. With the introduction of Action Office 2 (AO2), a modular, panel-based system developed by inventor Robert Propst, Herman Miller catapulted fully into the office sales market and spawned the contract furniture industry as we know it today.

The notion of selling large quantities of furniture in contexts outside of the home and instead in environments like offices, schools, and hospitals first occurred to Herman Miller leadership in the mid-1950s. With the postwar housing boom finally softening by mid-decade, demand for products like the Eameses’ molded plywood furniture, Isamu Noguchi’s coffee tables, and George Nelson’s case goods declined. In the years that followed, the company explored a multitude of potential avenues to diversify its business in order to survive: international expansion, interior design services modeled on Florence Knoll’s Planning Unit, a special product division to develop designs in concert with architectural commissions, a specialty Textile & Objects shop, and a research division led by Propst that looked at everything from laser-guided cattle branding to feminine hygiene products. All the while, the company gained traction in the educational market and strengthened its position in institutional sales with the Eameses newly patented stacking and ganging DSS chairs. Sales of Eames chairs were booming, but leadership’s desire to diversify and achieve sustainable growth remained.

Herman Miller’s shift in focus from the home to the office also prompted a shift in their existing design partnerships. The Eameses, Nelson, and Alexander Girard all played monumental roles in establishing the image and identity of the company through the decades after World War II. However, with the development of AO2, functions that had once existed within the sphere of these outside offices—research, design development, product engineering and testing, marketing, communications, even showroom design—moved in-house. While in 1948 George Nelson had declared that the company’s designers “decide what they make” and “were not hamstrung by management’s fear of getting out of step,” twenty years later it was the company’s next generation of leadership setting the agenda.

While with hindsight this may seem shortsighted given the iconic talents in question, by the late 1960s Herman Miller’s roster of mid-century designers had risen to global prominence and fame and their focus extended well beyond furniture design. Ray and Charles’s clients now included IBM, the Smithsonian Institution, and the governments of India and the United States. Their interests, and their office, had expanded to accommodate massive undertakings like the 1964 World’s Fair Pavilion, 1966’s traveling exhibition devoted to Nehru and Indian independence, and a proposal for a National Aquarium in Washington DC (to say nothing of countless other highly complex films, timelines, and exhibitions—each one deeply researched, iterated upon, and executed to the Eameses’ highest degree of quality). Nonetheless, although both the Eameses’ and Herman Miller’s center of gravity had shifted by 1968, the two companies remained loyal and lasting collaborators during what would become the final decade of Charles’s life.

These final years of furniture development at the Eames Office saw Ray and Charles—largely aided by office staff member Dick Donges—revisiting, reassessing, and revising designs that go back to the earliest days of their partnership while studying at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the early 1940s. The work reflects both the shifting context of Herman Miller’s business, as well as technological, material, and manufacturing advances. Because the Eameses were insistent on high-quality products that would last, when their furniture began facing increased wear and tear in high-traffic environments it forced them to reconsider the designs from the ground up—from questions of scale and posture, to the choice of materials, to concerns for the ever-important connections that held everything together.

By the time AO2 launched, both Herman Miller and the Eameses were no strangers to designs for the workplace—the DAT, a tilt/swivel version of the fiberglass chair dates back to 1953—but the company’s need to offer a greater variety of seating to accommodate a greater variety of work, and workers, had become even more pronounced. Part of AO2’s eventual success lay in the fact that it enabled companies to create offices that were better suited to the technology-dependent, white-collar, knowledge-based work that was emergent in the Information Age. A new tier of office inhabitants, dubbed middle-management, exploded with the need to oversee increasingly complex workflows and communications across rapidly expanding, matrixed, global organizations. And because, as an early AO2 brochure points out, “the average office worker spends most of the day seated,” all these middle-managers needed chairs.

Launched concurrently to AO2, the Intermediate Desk Chair was just that: intermediate both in character and price. The design purposely scaled back the sense of luxury inherent to the stately Time-Life Executive Chairs developed earlier in the decade, while still signaling a higher degree of status in their padded leather and aluminum construction in comparison to the upholstered fiberglass chairs. While the chair ultimately proved too expensive to produce and was one of the Eameses’ rare commercial failures, elements of the design did endure. It was the first to incorporate the Universal Base, a more organic and sculptural update to the Contract Base that remains part of Herman Miller’s offer today. Charles also used the chair in his own office until his death.

The year 1968 also saw the commercialization of a design that is arguably the biggest outlier in the canon of Eames furniture (but has, despite its marginal saleability, nonetheless remained in continuous production ever since). Ray and Charles took inspiration for the Eames Chaise from their longtime friend and filmmaker Billy Wilder, who at one time articulated the need for a place to power nap in his office. The hyper-specific piece of furniture the couple ended up devising for this purpose was singular, but also relates to both past and future endeavors. The Chaise’s underlying materiality and suspension construction principles are not dissimilar to the Aluminum Group, while its series of ten, zipper-attached, leather cushions offer a new opulent typology of engineered upholstery.

An enduring story about the development of design provides a window into Ray’s unique contributions. Along with consulting closely on the sculptural form, she meticulously worked on the color for the finish of the frame which was inspired by a Japanese eggplant. As Donges elaborated in a later oral history, he collaborated as closely with Ray as Charles during his tenure in the office. While getting the right color of finish could be cast off as marginal, Donges asserted that Ray’s detail-oriented inputs were in fact “monumental.” In his view, “Ray really complemented Charles,” and all the things to which she attended added an ineffable quality to everything they undertook—“You wouldn’t notice if it was there, but if it wasn’t there you would notice it.”

Luxurious upholstery elements of the Chaise, with its double needle top stitching and “best aucht” Scottish leather, signaled what was next in the evolution of Eames furniture. After over two years of development, the Soft Pad Group was released in 1969 and would prove to be the Eameses most enduring and successful approach to more comfortable seating for the office. The design again picked up on core elements of the Aluminum Group as a starting point, but as its name notes, incorporated soft, upholstered padding to the seat. The group was also a return to the systems-based approach to seating that used standardized parts and easily allowed for different configurations. After a successful launch, the line would be further expanded in the early 1970s to include a reclining lounge chair and ottoman.

Customer feedback from Herman Miller clients that were using the Eames Lounge Chair and Aluminum Group in offices prompted a revisiting of the chairs’ overall structure for quality’s sake, as well as the proportions and posture. According to Donges, the side members, back braces, and seat spreaders of the Aluminum Group were re-engineered to be stronger and more durable. Former Herman Miller Vice President of Design Robert Blaich worked closely with the Eameses and later noted, “Although Charles eschewed innovation for its own sake, his obsession with building on previous design elements and prior technical accomplishments to achieve a new level of refinement very often led, in fact, to design innovations. He preferred to define these incremental improvements as quests for quality.”

While most designs from the mid-century had been discontinued by the decade’s end, the Eameses’ metal-legged plywood dining chair (or DCM) had taken on new life within the institutional market as a library chair. In the course of revisiting the design for the same quality concerns facing the rest of the line, the chair’s back legs were lengthened three-quarters of an inch for a more upright and ergonomic reading posture. This work eventually led to the development of the EC127, a padded, upholstered, plastic update of the vaunted original. Taking advantage of material and manufacturing advances at Herman Miller and their suppliers, the chair’s design not only offered greater comfort and durability, but more significantly solved for the longstanding problem of broken shock mounts. Instead of a glued connection, the reinforced fiberglass allowed for a new shock-absorbing rubber and metal mount embedded within the shell form. Released in 1970, the chair also proved popular in workplaces, and remained in production well into the next decade.

Work on the EC127 extended into similar designs for two-piece secretarial and operational chairs. With names that suggested their intended workplace designation, these designs supplemented Herman Miller’s expansive growth and also bolstered their entry into the healthcare market. Two years after the release of AO2, Herman Miller became a publicly traded company to fund the tooling and launch of Co/Struc, a materials movement and management system of portable, modular, and easily cleanable fixtures for hospitals. With this foray, entirely new categories of seating needs emerged, many of which (like laboratory settings) were met by the new more highly adjustable and moveable designs.

The final significant seating group developed by the Eames Office saw Ray and Charles return to some of their earliest forms. The Loose Cushion Armchair offered at once a larger-scale, more comfortable iteration of the molded fiberglass chair, but is also notably redolent of the armchairs that were developed with Eero Saarinen for the Museum of Modern Art’s Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition of 1941 (especially so in the case of an early prototype with a hole at the base of the back). Once again, the Eames Office took advantage of the cast-in-place foam molding technology Herman Miller had adopted to develop new furniture designs by Don Chadwick and Ray Wilkes. The foam injection molding process allowed for variations in thickness and critical comfort points between the reinforced fiberglass shell and upholstered seat. The result was a form that then MoMA curator Arthur Drexler noted as “precise and voluptuous.”

As work on The World of Franklin and Jefferson exhibition ballooned and consumed much of the office’s resources and mindshare as the decade progressed, a handful of furniture projects remained in orbit. When asked in 1977 why the office hadn’t done any new furniture since 1972, Charles responded, “That’s largely our own fault. Whenever we have done anything, [Herman Miller] have done it. We’re working on some things now that the Vitra plant in Basel wants to do very much.” After the success of developing the Panton chair and Vitramat, Herman Miller entrusted their European partners, namely Rolf Fehlbaum, to engage with Ray and Charles to create designs that would satisfy both the European and North American markets. As of June 1978, two months before Charles’s untimely passing, the “things” in question were a skeletal outdoor chair and an update to the ES108 sofa that would further continue the soft pad vocabulary. After Charles’s death, Fehlbaum continued working with Ray, Donges, and the office’s remaining staff on what would eventually be commercialized as the Eames Sofa in 1984. Made from teak, leather, and cast aluminum, the final design from the Eames Office is still in production today and remains a fitting, comfortable conclusion to one of the 20th century’s most iconic furniture design legacies.

In the same 1977 interview, Charles offers a fitting description of the office’s long-standing approach to furniture design—and one that certainly characterizes the office’s final decade of operation. “I myself have always thought of innovation as a kind of negative goal” he states, “and if we had a sign up over the door I would say, ‘Only Innovate as a Last Resort.’” The output of the Eames Office in its last decade of collaboration with Herman Miller and Vitra remains a testament to this belief and displays a true effort in, as Charles put it, “making designs better—more useful, more comfortable, and more lasting.”