“Get a New Perspective on your Product.
“Do it with Steel Wire!”
American Steel and Wire Division of United States Steel
Pittsburgh, PA: American Steel and Wire Division of United States Steel, September 1961. Original advertising offprint printed recto only on glossy paper. 13.5 x 19-inch single-fold advertisement prepared for inclusion in “Industrial Design” and “Design News” for September 1961. Faint crease to lower fold, otherwise a nearly fine, uncirculated example.
13.5 x 19-inch single-fold advertisement offprint prepared by Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, Inc., Pgh for inclusion in “Industrial Design” and “Design News” for September 1961 featuring the dynamic silhouette of the Eames DKR Wire Chair for the Herman Miller Furniture Company.
From the Eames Office: “In the 1950s, Charles and Ray started experimenting in bent and welded wire. Inspired by trays, dress forms, and baskets, the Eames Office developed a number of pieces, including the wire version of the single-shell form.
“The shell design combines transparent lightness with technological sophistication and is available in a variety of bases. The Wire Chair is available without upholstery, with a seat cushion, or with seat and back cushions. Due to its shape, the two-piece cushion is also known as the “Bikini” pad.
“Below is an excerpt about the Eames Upholstered Wire Chair from an April 1958 article in Interiors magazine titled 3 Chairs/3 Records of the Design Process. Charles Eames, in his own words, describes how he and Ray developed the chair:
“It was in the most desperate hours, when there seemed to be no hope of getting the perfect molding for the reinforced polyester chair, that the upholstered wire chair was conceived—and in the meantime it began to look as though the thin molded shell really belong to the jet age. As far as furniture was concerned we were still at the Wright Brothers level.
[The side shell proved more difficult than the arm shell. In fact, the early production side shells cracked along the sides and later had to be redeveloped and made thicker in the areas where they were weakest. It is to this difficulty in developing non-cracking molded plastic side shells that Charles is referring.]
“So we thought we would go to the opposite extreme and do a molded, body-conforming shell depending on many, many connections—but connections that we as an industrial society were prepared to cope with on the production level. If you looked around you found these fantastic things being made of wire—trays, baskets, rat traps, using of a wire fabricating technique perfected over a period of many years. We looked into it and found that it was a good production technique and also a good use of material. Before the molded plastic chair had been solved, the molded wire chair was well under way.
“Meantime the upholstered wire chair brought with it some real attempts in another direction—towards mass production in upholstery—by fellows in our office.
“Don Albinson, who had been a student of mine at Cranbrook and who had worked even on the early model for the photographs we entered in the Organic Furniture Competition, took hold of this problem and developed some really ingenious techniques.
“Again we were at the point where the design and production of even the machinery for making the furniture was being done in our office. Jigs and fixtures for building up the upholstered pads were made and operated in the initial production stage by fellows in our office.”
Charles (1907 – 1978) and Ray Eames (1912 – 1988) created more than a look with their bent plywood chairs or molded fiberglass seating. They had ideas about making a better world, one in which things were designed to fulfill the practical needs of ordinary people and bring greater simplicity and pleasure to our lives.
The Eameses adventurously pursued new ideas and forms with a sense of serious fun. Yet, it was rigorous discipline that allowed them to achieve perfection of form and mastery over materials. As Charles noted about the molded plywood chair, “Yes, it was a flash of inspiration,” he said, “a kind of 30-year flash.” Combining imagination and thought, art and science, Charles and Ray Eames created some of the most influential expressions of 20th century design – furniture that remains stylish, fresh and functional today.
And they didn't stop with furniture. The Eameses also created a highly innovative “case study” house in response to a magazine contest. They made films, including a seven-screen installation at the 1959 Moscow World's Fair, presented in a dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. They designed showrooms, invented toys and generally made the world a more interesting place to be. As the most important exponents of organic design, Charles and Ray Eames demonstrated how good design can improve quality of life and human understanding and knowledge.