Deconstructing Product Design

LCW Chair

Charles Eames and Ray Eames, 1946

1. In what Time magazine declared to be “the chair of the century,” the LCW chair, for “Low Chair Wood,” is the culmination of the Eames’s long and trying search for the ideal application — or as they would say, the purely honest application — for molded plywood. With wood-molding techniques honed developing molded plywood splints, stretchers, and glider shells during World War II, the Eames turned their attention to furniture design post war. After more than five years of failed attempts to form a chair from a monolithic shell, the LCW was born, having emerged from a kind of Petroskian “form follows failure” process, where the final product resulted more from a seemingly unending succession of failed ...