The Modern Interior

for which they were destined. Like Henry Van de Velde and others before
him, Eames created a home and studio for himself and his family. The
house was built from pre-fabricated parts and resembled, from the outside,
a glass ‘shed’ or, alternatively, a simple Japanese house. He filled the
interior with his own furniture designs and numerous personal mementos
which have been linked to Eames’s commitment to the notion of
‘functioning decoration’, an important characteristic of the new, humanized
face of Modernism. 11 The high levels of decoration in the interior of
Eames’s Santa Monica house have been attributed to the intervention of
Charles’s wife Ray. 12 A continuum undoubtedly existed in the couple’s
minds between their domestic spaces and their work environments. 13
They ate breakfast in their home and their other meals at their office, for
example. 14 Eames’s furniture functioned equally effectively within his
pre-fabricated home and in his work area. By extension he offered his
clients – both individual and corporate – the possibility of moving seamlessly
between their domestic and their non-domestic spaces. Although
his chairs were frequently depicted as isolated objects they also acted as
powerful representations of a newly defined model of the modern inter -
ior that recognized little difference between the private and public spheres.
While the mass-produced multiple seating Eames created for airport waiting
spaces – Washington’s Dulles airport and Chicago’s O’Hare airport
among them – established a blueprint for stylish public leisure and travel
spaces internationally from the late 1950s onward, no self-respecting
contemporary house would be complete without an Eames chair, most
probably his 1956 lounge chair and ottoman created originally for film
director Billy Wilder. A stylish interior by Vittoriano Viganò illustrated in
an Italian book on interiors, Forme et colore dell’arredamento modern, of
1967 (overleaf), demonstrates the ease with which Eames’s 1956 lounge
chair, complete with ottoman, could be integrated into modern domestic
spaces at that time. 15 Eames’s designs reflected the ubiquity and iconicity
that Marcel Breuer’s earlier tubular steel chairs had set out to achieve in
a previous era, but with the advances in manufacturing technologies,
the expansion of office spaces and other public sphere interiors, and the
democratization of the modern style, Eames’s achievements were arguably
more significant in the early post-war years.
Charles Eames’s refusal to acknowledge the separation of the spheres
also underpinned the work of the designer Florence Knoll and her involvement
with the Knoll Planning Unit. Her distinctive achievement was
not only to create modern furniture designs both for the home and the 191