Charles and Ray Eames Vintage Fiberglas La Fonda Chair 1970s

About the Item

Eames La Fonda Chair Fiberglass seat shell with full upholstery, 1970s, design Charles & Ray Eames, manufacturer Herman Miller, Color of the shell Parchment, full upholstery Hopsa brown, white lacquered La Fonda base Height 73 cm, width 64 cm, depth 50 cm American couple Charles and Ray Eames are known worldwide for their influential modern design in the fields of architecture, graphics, furniture and product design, all characterized by a playful, clean aesthetic that is both accessible and enduring. Their work parallels the evolution of post-war American design, from the rise of the West Coast to the global expansion of American culture. Charles Eames was born in 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri. He initially studied architecture at Washington University. However, when he insisted on focusing more on modern designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright, he was asked to leave the university. In 1936, he took up a scholarship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he became head of the new design department. Here he worked with Eero Saarinen on the wooden furniture that won the Museum of Modern Arts' Organic Design in Home Furnishing competition in 1940. The series included experimentally shaped chairs made of plywood. Ray (born Kaiser) was born in Sacramento, California in 1912. She studied in New York with painter Hans Hofmann. Together with other of Hofmann's students, she was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists. This organization publicly opposed galleries that did not want to show non-objective art and thus contributed to the spread of abstract expressionism. The two met in Cranbrook, married in 1941 and moved to Los Angeles, where they worked on mass-produced and inexpensive furniture designs. During the war, they were commissioned by the US Navy to develop molded plywood leg splints for injured soldiers. Their ongoing work in the furniture industry was strongly influenced by their access to the material resources of the army. After opening another office in Santa Monica, their molded plywood furniture was particularly successful. The first plywood design, the legendary ECW (Eames Chair Wood) model, was originally produced by Evans in 1946 and is still in production today. In order to meet the increasing demand for housing after the war, Charles and Ray Eames developed prefabricated architecture. 149 they designed their own house in California as part of Arts & Architecture Magazine's Case Study House program. Throughout their career, the two experimented not only with materials such as fiberglass, plastic and metal, but also with different project approaches - from toy ideas to photography and film. Almost every design from the Eames workshop became a popular collector's item. Notable designs include La Chaise, which was developed for MoMA's International Competition for Low-Cost Furnitures (1948); the Molded Fiberglass Chairs (1950); the Eames Storage Unit (1950-52); Lounge Chair & Ottoman (1956); and the Aluminum Group Office Chairs (1958), which are manufactured by both Herman Miller in the U.S. and Vitra in Europe. The couple received various awards during their lifetime and posthumously, including the Museum of Modern Art's Organic Furniture Competition Award (1940); the Emmy in Graphics for The Fabulous Fifties (1960); the Kaufmann International Design Award (1961); the 25 Year American Institute of Architects Award (1977); the Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry, Harvard (1971); the Queen's Gold Medal for Architecture (1979); the "Most Influential Designer of the 20th Century" award from WORLDESIGN (1985); Industrial Designers Society of America (1985); and The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, Traveling Exhibition from the Library of Congress (1999). Charles died in 1978, exactly a decade later to the day Ray died.

Creator:
Charles and Ray Eames (Designer)
Design:
La Fonda ArmchairLa Fonda Series
Dimensions:
Height: 28.75 in (73 cm)Width: 24.41 in (62 cm)Depth: 25.2 in (64 cm)Seat Height: 16.93 in (43 cm)
Style:
Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Fabric,Fiberglass,Metal
Place of Origin:
United States
Period:
1970-1979
Date of Manufacture:
1970s
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use.
Seller Location:
Münster, DE
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU9172239845962

Shop All Charles and Ray Eames

Charles and Ray Eames

Charles Eames and Ray Eames were the embodiment of the inventiveness, energy and optimism at the heart of mid-century modern American design, and have been recognized as the most influential designers of the 20th century.

As furniture designers, filmmakers, artists, textile and graphic designers and even toy and puzzle makers, the Eameses were a visionary and effective force for the notion that design should be an agent of positive change. They are the happy, ever-curious, ever-adventurous faces of modernism.

Charles (1907–78) studied architecture and industrial design. Ray (née Beatrice Alexandra Kaiser, 1912–88) was an artist, who studied under the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann. They met in 1940 at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in suburban Detroit (the legendary institution where Charles also met his frequent collaborator Eero Saarinen and the artist and designer Harry Bertoia) and married the next year.

His technical skills and her artistic flair were wonderfully complementary. They moved to Los Angeles in 1941, where Charles worked on set design for MGM. In the evenings at their apartment, they experimented with molded plywood using a handmade heat-and-pressurization device they called the “Kazam!” machine. The next year, they won a contract from the U.S. Navy for lightweight plywood leg splints for wounded servicemen — they are coveted collectibles today; more so those that Ray used to make sculptures.

The Navy contract allowed Charles to open a professional studio, and the attention-grabbing plywood furniture the firm produced prompted George Nelson, the director of design of the furniture-maker Herman Miller Inc., to enlist Charles and (by association, if not by contract) Ray in 1946. Some of the first Eames items to emerge from Herman Miller are now classics: the LCW, or Lounge Chair Wood, and the DCM, or Dining Chair Metal, supported by tubular steel.

Materials

Metal

We adore the La Fonda design! These chairs were commissioned by Alexander Girard for a Mexican restaurant in the Time Life Building in New York that opened in 1961. To keep with the tradition, we reupholstered the chairs in the same Alexander Girard Checker...

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