History of Eames Molded Plastic Dowel Leg Side Chair

This chair was originally designed in metal as a prototype in MoMA’s 1948 Furniture Design. Charles and Ray Eams changed the material from metal to fiberglass in 1950 and from fiberglass to polypropylene in 1990. The chair is made for comfort by reducing pressure on the backs of thighs. The chair marketed at a shocking four hundred and six eight dollars at Design Within Reach.

My Experience

When I was first handed the image I did not think that designing this chair would cause so many headaches. I have worked in rhino before, but never for designing anything functional. After several youtube videos and tutorials I was able to attempt the seat. I cannot say that I am fully content with my final product, however I did my best at achieving a similar look to the image I was handed. After countless trial and errors I feel that I have learned a lot about designing in Rhino over the past couple of weeks. I am ready for Project Two.

When I first received my chair, I thought it looked deceitfully easy. However, for me it proved to not be so much. It is made out of 1 piece of material, besides the foot pieces at the end of the legs, but the difficult part about it was the curves.Since the chair is very minimal and the only thing that stands out about it is the color and then the curves, when I would get even slightly off from the picture in my eyes it looked very different from the original. I restarted about 3 times because I kept thinking my previous approach was not the best way to make the chair. Honestly, I’m still not happy with the results, but I did my best and learned a lot about Rhino! Oh, and it is a good chair, very comfortable and stable!. It cost around $200 if you’re interested!

Description Reference | http://www.dwr.com/product/profile-chair.do

I was given the Profile Chair to model for Project One!

BEGINNING  |  When I visited the Design Within Reach furniture store to look at my chair in-person, I was surprised how simple its design was!  At first glance, the Profile Chair isn’t very special among the vast variety of chairs the store had in-stock.  Despite its stylish appearance for its own online furniture ad, seeing the chair in-person instead of seeing it virtually changed my approach to modeling.  Once I sat on the Profile Chair, the craftsmanship really shows in its framework!  Thanks to the angles of each wooden piece, the chair literally “profiled” my spine, which sat comfortably in a smooth recline.  Its sturdy base kept my bottom nicely cushioned, which created a feeling of confidence, relaxation and sophistication to boot!  In turn, I fell in love with the framework, color and design!  I was excited to start modeling the Profile Chair!

PROCESS  |  Upon inspecting the Profile Chair, the first thing I noticed was how flush the wooden pieces were in its framework.  I admired how clean and smooth the seams were between each piece that the chair was assembled from.  I also noticed some edges were set by small increments, revealing small linear details in craftsmenship that I had to emulate in my Rhino model.  With that, the most difficult parts of the modeling process included – Sizing/measuring pieces accurately, filleting the chair cushion with a rounded edge, capturing the angles of each pieces, and modeling the underside of the chair.  Otherwise, running through the entire modeling process was enjoyable!  Since this was my first time modeling, the final model is finished but not perfect.  Modeling practice and time-managing were key elements I learned in Project One!

When I saw this chair, I was scared. I didn’t know what I was about to get myself into. And I was right. This chair was extremely difficult to model – I pretty much modeled every line of the seat. Even though this was very time consuming, by the end of it, I became familiar and more experienced with using Rhino. I learned a lot of commands, techniques, and tricks- the most important one being to not pipe lines until the last stage.

Harry Bertoia

Knoll historian Brian Lutz once said, “Bertoia’s paintings were better than his sculptures. And his sculptures were better than his furniture. And his furniture was absolutely brilliant.”

Bertoia also collaborated with Eero Saarinen to design the altar for the MIT Chapel. He spent 25 years of his life experimenting with light, sound and volume through sculptures, paintings and architectural installations.

Today Knoll carries on Harry Bertoia’s legacy of innovation, inspiration and beauty with the Bertoia collection, which has been in continuous production around the world since its introduction. In 2005 Knoll introduced the Asymmetric Lounge, a design from Bertoia’s initial experimentation that never reached production.

Supposedly Emeco founder Wilton Dinges tested the strength of this chair by tossing it out a sixth-story window and it survived with only a few scratches! It was built for the US Navy originally and it is made to last 150 years. The chair is much heavier than expected even though it was designed to be lightweight but weight is compensated by the durability.

The chair is much more difficult to build despite its first perception of straight, parallel lines. The legs of the chair vary in size along its length and the seat itself is a thin piece of metal rather than a solid block as expected so it was tough to model. A lot of controls would not operate properly sometimes so extensive trimming and thinking outside of the box was needed.

At first I was pretty excited in designing the chair because I thought the difficulty was not too hard. While I got my hands into the project, I realized it was pretty difficult. Connecting the seat to the legs, bending the back of the seat, creating the rubber bottoms and creating curvature to the seat consumed most of my time. In the end, I am happy with my result after the endless hours in the lab. The left picture is the Rhino file and the picture on the right is the image I took from Design Within Reach. The top also has an image of the chairs stacked, as seen in the store.

Upon hearing that our first assignment was to model a chair, I freaked. I had experience modeling beforehand but the idea of modeling a chair seemed daunting. Simplicity at its finest is the Series 7 Chair, which was designed by the famous achitect Arne Jacobsen. It is made with a single piece of plywood bent in only 3 ways. Which at first, sounds easy but when you use bend over 200 times in Rhino, just to get the correct curvature, you start to think twice about how precise and articulate designers get to bring life into their creations. I am inspired to design products that love all children, of all species, for all time. The picture above is my attempt to recreate the Series 7 Chair and beside it is a picture of the chair at Design Within Reach. One last note, these are made by hand, just thought you should know that because that’s just awesome. 

Initially I was flabbergasted by the price of the Piana chair since its ordinariness, in terms of design and materials used, didn’t seem to fit the bill for this item. However, working on copying its design, and later learning more about the person who designed it, I gained more appreciation for this luxury good.

The Piana chair was designed by the lauded designer/architect Sir David Chipperfield. The main feature of this item is its foldability through a device that turns the three axis’ of the chair —a device which is sleekly hidden within the body of the chair. He describes his design as having a “visual expression that is indicative in its simplicity of the function and role of the item itself.” This statement elegantly encompasses what the design achieves in terms of looks and function, a simplicity that’s evident when stacking a group of these chairs, either folded, or open and combined to form a pyramid —as seen in some of David Chipperfield’s gallery exhibits. The chair is constructed using a combination of Fiberglass-reinforced polypropylene with anti-slip matte finish; polypropylene feet in colors to match chair.

My assigned the chair called STUA. At first I was very nervous about this class because I have no experience in modeling. Through the exercises in the training manual, I found myself gradually become able to model complicated items. However, the chair is the most complicated item I have ever modeled.

The biggest challenging for me in the assignment was to create the curved surfaces (seat and the back of the chair). At first I was using control points to bend the surface but later on I found out it was not working because the surfaces were no longer smooth at all. Then I saw a way to solve this problem in training manual, which is to use Patch.  In addition, making the little screws that connect the frame and the back of the chair was also quite challenging, but I am glad that I found a way out.

My assigned chair was the beautiful Saarinen Tulip Armless Chair.

The name reference the shape of the molded fiberglass though I’m also reminded of the mod styles of fiberglass egg chairs from the 50’s on. This chair prolific enough to be mentioned on Wikipedia under the mid-century modern article.

Design Within Reach’s description of this piece states: Eero Saarinen called himself a “form giver,” and everything he designed – from the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to his Womb™ Chair to his Pedestal Table – had a strong sculptural quality. “The underside of typical tables and chairs makes a confusing, unrestful world,” said Saarinen. In a 1956 cover story in Timemagazine, he announced that he was designing a collection to “clear up the slum of legs in the U.S. home.” Later that year, he completed his Pedestal Table and Tulip Chair Collection (1956) with its cast aluminum base inspired by a drop of high-viscosity liquid. The seat swivels for easy entrance to or exit from a table. Each chair is stamped with the KnollStudio logo and Eero Saarinen’s signature. This is the authentic Tulip Collection produced by Knoll. Made in Italy.

When I went to Design Within Reach to take a look at this chair, I was surprised at how lightweight the chair was. After finding out that it’s made from a single piece of injection-molded polycarbonate, it’s weight is no surprise. This chair is transparent but not to the extent that it is barely visible.

It is a baroque-style chair, related to the Louis Ghost Chair. The designer of the Victoria Ghost Chair says he designed this chair to be “well balanced.” It is intended for indoor and outdoor usage in commercial or residential settings.

Victoria Ghost chair render

Chairs are uniquely singular in their use. The chair is used to sit on. That’s it.

And yet after having spent many many hours designing, refining, and completing the modeling of this chair I most certainly have the utmost respect for designers of chairs, and chairs themselves. Whenever I design or model something I always focus on how it is going to be used? How is this going to work in the space its intended for?

Here is the chair in its actual form vs the model I created:

Created Using Rhino 5

Taken at the DWR storefront in Costa Mesa

The designer of this chair La Clasica is the founder and principal design of Stua (solo tengo un amor). The furniture design company is based in San Sebastian, Spain (a place I treasured before I knew there were good chair designers there). His name is Jesus Gasca, born in 1939, he trained as an engineer before transitioning into design.The main aspect of my engineering training I have implemented into this project is the drawings themselves:

Scaled drawings generated using Rhino an completed using Adobe Illustrator

Thanks so much for reading.

Cheers!

GEORGE NAKASHIMASTRAIGHT-BACKED CHAIR

For this project, I modeled the Nakashima straight- backed small, wooden dining chair using Rhinoceros 3D. The photo was taken at Design Within Reach in Costa Mesa, California. Below are my renderings.
	The Nakashima Straight-Backed Chair (1946) was designed by George Nakashima, a designer who believed in functionality of designed objects. He designed the chair for Knoll and maintained structural lines throughout to create a simple and traditional appearance. The material is solid walnut.