The Fibreglass Shell Chair - An Important Moment In Furniture Design
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There are few chairs as immediately recognisable as the Eames shell chair. Its shape is so familiar now that it is easy to forget how radical it was when Charles and Ray Eames first began experimenting with it in the late 1940s.
The Eameses were fascinated by the idea of producing a chair from a single continuous shell, something comfortable, affordable and suitable for mass production.
Their early experiments used moulded plywood and even stamped metal, but neither quite achieved what they were looking for. Fibreglass offered a solution.
Originally developed for industrial and military applications, glass reinforced plastic was still an unusual material for domestic furniture. Working with manufacturers in California, Charles and Ray developed a process that allowed the seat and back to be moulded as one sculptural form. The material was light, strong and relatively inexpensive to manufacture, but it also had a character of its own. In the earlier chairs especially, you can see the fibres suspended within the resin, giving the surface a slightly irregular, almost textile quality.
The first fibreglass shell chairs went into production in 1950 through Herman Miller in the United States. Rather than designing a single chair, the Eameses created a system. The same shell could be combined with different bases - dining height, rocking, stacking or lounge versions - allowing one basic form to work in homes, offices, schools and public spaces.
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It was a very Eames approach to design - practical and industrial, but playful too.
We currently have two Eames fibreglass armchairs in the shop. What I particularly like about the early fibreglass versions is that the material is so visible. They do not try to disguise how they were made. The swirls and strands within the shell are part of the object, and no two feel completely identical.
The story of the shell chair did not end with fibreglass. Over subsequent decades the design continued to evolve as manufacturing techniques and attitudes towards materials changed.
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We also have a set of five grey DSS stacking chairs by Charles and Ray Eames for Vitra in store. These have moulded plastic shells rather than fibreglass, giving them a cleaner and more uniform surface, but they retain exactly the same beautifully resolved form and modular thinking behind the original design. The DSS - Dining Height, Side Chair, Stacking Base - is perhaps one of the clearest examples of the Eameses’ belief that good design should be useful. The chairs can be linked together or stacked, which made them particularly suited to schools, halls, meeting spaces and other public interiors. |
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More than seventy five years after the first shell was produced, the design still feels remarkably contemporary. Perhaps that is because Charles and Ray Eames were never really designing an ‘icon’. They were trying to solve a problem - how to make a comfortable, well designed chair using the possibilities of modern manufacturing.
The fact that the result also happened to become one of the defining pieces of twentieth century furniture design almost feels secondary.
- Caroline
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