X-Base Chair An xpression; An xpansion; An xposition Whereas the English word 'furniture' has its origins in the middle French verb 'fournir', to furnish, the French 'meuble' and German 'Möbel' have their origins in the Latin 'mobile': capable of being moved...
...Stühle zum (Be)Sitzen's brief tour through the (hi)story of chair design in western Europe ends with Harry Thaler's 2011 Pressed Chair through Nils Holger Moormann, a chair that as Harry once told us began as "a small fork made from one piece of wood", became a desire to create a chair in one material, and which through the choice of pressed aluminium not only neatly translates the moulded plywood of, for example, Arne Jacobsen, Aino and Alvar Aalto or Charles and Ray Eames into metal, but reminds that the plastic shell of the RAR that rocks next to the Pressed Chair in Stühle zum (Be)Sitzen began life as pressed steel, before that was deemed too expensive and the, then, novel fibreglass was used...
...Eames furniture ✔ Eames toys ✔ Eames exhibitions ✔ Eames textiles ✔ Eames films ✔ Eames photography ✔ But where is the lighting design in the portfolio of Charles and Ray Eames... And even if they did, where are the other Eames lighting designs, where are the efficient machines for illumination by Charles and Ray Eames...
In these dispatches we once doubted the prevalence of designer furniture in comics, noting and acknowledging the regular appearance of popular furniture designs in other visual media, we, off-handedly, opined, "... Designer furniture in a comic?" Elegantly...
...In an attempt to approach one the Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris asked Charles Eames, Verner Panton, Roger Tallon, Joe Colombo and Fritz Eichler, Qu'est-ce que le design?... featured not only five of the leading international designers of the period but five designers who, on paper, represented five very different understandings of design: Charles Eames, one of the leading proponents of that post-War American interpretation of functionalism; the young Italian radical Joe Colombo with his utopian visions of our domestic spaces and understandings of design as much as a branch of linguistics as 3D forming; Roger Tallon, the Grand Doyen of French design, and for all of technical design for industry; Fritz Eichler, the first Design Director at Braun, a man very much associated with technical design for consumers, and the sober reduction of Germanic gute Form; and Verner Panton with his pop tendencies, holistic compositions and understanding of the role, the near primacy, of colour in design...
With their 1997 exhibition The Work of Charles and Ray Eames the Vitra Design Museum staged one of the first major Charles and Ray Eames retrospectives Twenty years later they return to two of the 20th century's most important creatives with An Eames...
...smow blog: One of the things that has always interested us about Charles Eames is that he appears to have been a journeyman architect, he then went to Cranbrook Academy of Art and subsequently, as it were, revolutionised design and how we view the world... Why was Cranbrook so important for Charles Eames' development...
