Charles & Ray Eames
The enveloping Lounge Chair, designed in 1956 by the American design duo Charles and Ray Eames, is one of the most successful armchairs since 1900. In 1940, Charles Eames (1907-1978), together with Finnish-born designer Eero Saarinen, won the "Organic Design" competition organised by MoMA in New York: the challenge was to create a piece of furniture in a single block, and Eames presented some curved plywood seats, anticipating a trend that would expand in Europe and Italy in the 1960s. These pieces of furniture are a prelude to the curved plywood chairs and armchairs that Charles made with his wife Ray (1912-1988) in the 1940s, including the DCM chair made for Herman Miller in 1946, with its anatomical backrest and thin metal tube structure: an emblem of the transition from craftsmanship to industrial production.
