The Complete History of the Eames Lounge Chair & Ottoman

The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman is one of the most recognizable objects in modern design. Introduced in 1956 for Herman Miller, it transformed the traditional lounge chair into an enduring icon of mid-century modern design, now housed in institutions like the Museum of Modern Art.

The history of the Eames Lounge Chair begins well before 1956, starting in the industrious, experimental, creative minds of its designers, Charles & Ray Eames.

Table of Contents
What Inspired the Eames Lounge Chair?
Eames Lounge Chair Timeline
Eames Lounge Chair Legacy

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What Inspired the Eames Lounge Chair?

A modernist design ethos and a healthy passion for molded plywood inspired many Eames designs, including the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman.

The chair was envisioned simply as a comfortable chair, with “the warm receptive look of a well-used first baseman’s mitt,” a modern take on a traditional English club chair. It was made with premium materials, but still every design choice was made in service of its primary function: comfort. The Eames Lounge Chair owes a large part of its enduring relevance to just how successful it was at meeting that goal.

1. Modernism

Early-1900s Europe was the birthplace of modernism, an innovative design movement that sought to replace the ornamental flair of traditional styles with something functional and new – something “modern.” From this movement emerged a design ethos that prioritized function over form: Design should fulfill a need as efficiently and effectively as possible, without superfluous artistic flair. Architects like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe pioneered modernism in Europe, establishing influential modern artist collectives like the Bauhaus school in Germany. Modernism would make its way to the United States in the mid-1920s, where Finnish designer Eliel Saarinen designed the Cranbrook Academy of Art, considered an American Bauhaus, in Michigan.

Creative-minded from the start, both Charles and Ray Eames (then Ray Kaiser) leaned towards progressive art forms in their early careers in the 1920s–30s. Charles was expelled from his first architecture program for his interest in Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work was considered too modern for the school, and later, he would become inspired by Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier, whose buildings he sketched while visiting Europe. Meanwhile, Ray studied painting under Hans Hofmann, whose abstract-expressionist work built on ideas developed by Wassily Kandinsky, a modernist painter and teacher at the Bauhaus.

It is no coincidence, then, that the pair met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1940, and the project that brought them together was a contest held by the Museum of Modern Art called the Organic Design in Home Furnishings Contest, “organic” being a modernist design term popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright.

2. Molded Plywood

A signature feature of the Eames Lounge Chair is its three molded plywood shells, which curve around its leather cushions and give the chair its iconic silhouette. Those molded plywood shells were the culmination of decades of industrious experimentation with molded plywood, the material that the Eameses made famous (and vice versa).

When Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen's molded plywood chair prototypes won MoMA’s Organic Designs in Home Furnishings Contest in 1941, bent plywood was already in use for furniture. It was invented by Finnish designers Alvar and Aino Aalto; however, their bent plywood technique differed from Charles' in a significant way: Where the Aaltos’ plywood panels bent in only one direction at a time, Charles' plywood was multidirectional. Charles believed that three-dimensionally molded plywood could be one of the most cost- and effort-efficient materials in modern furniture design, versatile, iterative, and strong yet lightweight.

Though Charles and Saarinen won the MoMA contest, their Organic Chair was not mass producible as intended. Charles and Ray Eames would spend the next few years obsessively honing their molded plywood technique, going so far as to build their own plywood molding device they called Kazam! in the spare bedroom of their small apartment, powered by electricity they siphoned from a nearby utility pole. During World War II, the Eameses designed molded plywood leg splints and aircraft parts for the United States military. The war operation provided the Eameses with the funding they needed to expand their manufacturing capabilities, and by 1945, they had developed molded plywood furniture prototypes that were ready for mass production.

Eames Lounge Chair &
Ottoman Timeline

Charles and Ray Eames — Early Eames

**1940:** Charles & Ray meet at Cranbrook and begin collaborating.

**1941:** Charles, Ray & Eero Saarinen win the MoMA Organic Design in Home Furnishings Contest with their molded plywood Organic Chair.

**1941–1945:** Charles & Ray continue their molded plywood experiments with Kazam! through WWII & formed their Plyformed Wood Company.

**1946:** MoMA exhibits the first Eames molded plywood furniture collection. Herman Miller recruits Charles & Ray Eames & launches their first line of molded plywood furniture products, including lounge chairs.

**1946–1956:** The Eameses expand their catalog at Herman Miller with a wide variety of molded plywood home furniture products.

The Enduring Legacy of the Eames Lounge Chair

Unlike many other Eames furniture designs, which have moved in and out of active production over the years, the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman’s enduring relevance has kept it in continuous production by Herman Miller since its debut in 1956, with only the occasional design tweak here or there to adapt it to our rapidly evolving world. For more than 70 years, the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman has remained a symbol of modernity, adopting new, sustainable material options that ensure it will keep that status for many years to come.

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