Deconstructing Product Design

Lounge Chair and Ottoman

Charles Eames and Ray Eames, 1956

1. Encouraged by friend and noted director Billy Wilder to build an “ultra, ultra, ultra comfortable modern lounge chair,” Charles and Ray Eames responded with a design that was at once modern and traditional — an interpretation of the traditional club chair, luxuriously adorned with rosewood veneer and leather upholstery. The chair represented a new kind of matter-of-fact modernism that appealed to both designerati and more general, albeit affluent, audiences. The design exemplifies the Eames’s belief that great design emerges from a mandatory process of evolution, beginning with the simple, graduating to the esoteric, and then graduating back to the simple, a philosophy Charles Eames ...