Lost Furniture Design Classics: Case Furniture by Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames

We know what you’re thinking, lost furniture designs from Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames.

???

Yup.

Two of the most important, influential and best known protagonists of mid-century modern design have a product series that has vanished without trace.

And in our opinion it vanished exactly because Saarinen and Eames are two of the best known protagonists of mid-century modern design.

But let’s start at the beginning….

In 1940 the Museum of Modern Art New York staged their “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” competition, a design competition that has of course gone down in history as the first time the chair design work of Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames was presented to a wider public.

And indeed rewarded, the pair’s seating collection winning the competition’s “Seating for a living room” category. The most famous member of that 1940 family being the “Conversation Chair”, better known today as the from Vitra produced Organic Chair.

Less well known is that Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames also won the category “Other furniture for a living room” with a truly outrageous modular storage unit system.

Consisting of seven storage units and three base units the beauty of the Eames/Saarinen Case Furniture is less that one can freely combine the various components as required, but much more that as the exhibition catalogue states, “These designs by Saarinen and Eames, probably for the first time, exploit the base for itself.”^1.

For not only was it intended that the bases could be used on their own as seating or, and as comically illustrated in the sketches prepared for the competition, as a flower bench, but through the way you combine the storage units and bases you can create the most delightful combinations of seating, storage and work areas of varying heights and lengths. And that in a, more-or-less, infinitely extendible and customisable system.

The only comparable modern equivalent we can think of is Level 34 by Werner Aisslinger for Vitra.

As befits a genuine lost furniture design classic pictures of the Case Furniture by Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames are as rare as a pothole free road in Leipzig, but those that are available in the exhibition catalogue beautifully illustrate just what is possible.

Sadly, owing to “issues” with the rights holders, and unwilling to have the pants sued off us, we are unable to bring you said images… But they are good. If you can find a copy of said catalogue you wont be disappointed!

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All winning entries in the competition were produced and made available for sale at leading American department stores of the day including Bloomingdale’s New York, Barker Brothers Los Angeles and Marshall Field & Company Chicago.

The Eames and Saarinen storage system was produced by the Red Lion Table Company^2. based in Red Lion Pennsylvania.

And has completely vanished from the designer furniture radar. As in completely. Without trace. As if it never existed.

But how could that be, given the prominence of both Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames?

For us the answer lies in the very traditional form language and construction of the system.

It is classic cabinet making.

There is absolutely nothing “modern” in the objects. And as such we suspect that in the euphoria of the post-war rise of the American furniture industry, and for all the commercial value of the industry’s brave new stars as represented by the likes of Eames and Saarinen, “conservative” furniture was overlooked.

Or classed as “unsellable” by self-appointed “trend experts”, and so dismissed to the archives.

Which of course means that the marketing men of the day failed to notice that the innovation in the system is not in the objects themselves, or as with the prize winning chairs the novelty of the construction process, but the way they connect, the relationship between the objects, the modularity, the innumerate possible combinations and for all the fact that the components represent the start of a system that has the potential to not only be extended by further components but which through its intelligent design can be used for generations with older and newer units fitting effortlessly together.

Aside from the fact that good furniture should always be available, what really upsets us about the fact that the system has vanished is that it presents a rarely, if ever, seen facet of both Eero Saarinen’s and Charles Eames’ canon that helps us form a complete picture of how their creativity and understanding of design developed over the decades.

That and the fact the system is simply inspired genius.

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(Just to repeat: Sadly, owing to “issues” with the rights holders, and unwilling to have the pants sued off us, we are unable to bring you said images… But they are good. If you can find a copy of said catalogue you wont be disappointed!)

1. “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1941

2. Arthur Drexler “Charles Eames. Furniture from the Design Collection, The Museum of Modern Art New York” New York, 1973