The Modern Interior

approach could be adopted in both spaces lay in the fact that a generation
of American architect-designers – among them Charles and Ray Eames,
Eero Saarinen (the son of Eliel), George Nelson, Harry Bertoia, Alexander
Girard and Hans and Florence Knoll – became preoccupied with extending
Modernism’s commitment to creating mass-produced furniture items
that could be used equally well at home and in the office. Though the
preoccupations of those designers were primarily aesthetic and technical,
and significantly less political and social than those of their European pre -
decessors, ironically the furniture items and interiors they created fed
into a new form of popular domesticity, as well as into the public spaces
of post-war corporate capitalism, on an unprecedented scale.
Charles Eames was not an interior designer but a Gesamtkunstwerk
architect in the Modernist tradition. He turned towards furniture design
as a means of translating his ideas about materials and manufacturing
technologies into modern forms. Like Le Corbusier before him Eames
looked to factory mass production and other areas outside the home as
starting points for a renewed language of design for the interior. While Le
Corbusier had looked to the sanatorium and the gentleman’s club Eames
found his inspiration in technological developments, in particular plywood
moulding, used by the military in the creation of leg splints, and
cycle-welding, developed by the Chrysler Corporation in 1941 but which
was also adopted by the military. 8 Created with Eero Saarinen, the furniture
designs that Eames exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern
Art’s Organic Design in Home Furnishings exhibition of 1941 were shown
in a range of settings. One installation included a dining table and chairs,
positioned on a patterned rug and accompanied by two credenzas and a
collection of chairs located around a triangular coffee table. The scene
evoked an open plan, multi-functional domestic space. Another installation
at the same exhibition, consisting of two chairs combined with a
low storage cabinet topped by plants and containing books, was more
ambiguous and could have been read either as a domestic scene or as an
office space. That domestic/workspace ambiguity rapidly became a hallmark
of Eames’s designs. Focusing on their technical innovations he
created furniture pieces which offered a level of modern comfort both in
the home and in the workplace. A simple change of upholstery fabric could
transform one of his chairs from a domestic object into a non-domestic
one in an instant. Depending on whether it was upholstered in a textured
cloth or vinyl, a 1954 steel-framed sofa, modelled on a built-in sofa in
the seating alcove of Eames’s own house in Santa Monica, could be read 189