Sympathetic Seat

The molded plywood chair that California's Charles Eames helped to design ten years ago is a sort of model T in modern furniture. Some 60,000 of the spindly, plain but surprisingly comfortable chairs have been sold, and today they can be found under the rumps of connoisseurs across the nation. Last week Designer Eames had tooled up a brand-new $175,000 factory, was turning out the first 3,000 models of his 1950 line.

Composed of a single plastic and Fiberglas shell mounted on legs, the new chair is more roomy, stable and luxurious, but just as simple as its predecessor. Pictures of the chair were being reproduced in dozens of newspapers and magazines, and an enthusiastic House Beautiful editor rhapsodically described it as "the sitting sensation of modern design."

A tweedy, pipe-smoking, 43-year-old who still looks rather like a college boy, Eames designs other things besides chairs. He works with three admiring young assistants in a studio littered with kites, machine tools, Indian relics, driftwood and desert plants, all of which help give him ideas for new designs. At one time or another, Eames has tackled everything from movie sets to a molded plywood splint used by the Navy during the war ("A forerunner of the furniture," says Eames, "because it supported the body and was sympathetic to it").

He also designed his own slick steel and glass Pacific Palisades house, where he lives with his artist-wife, boasts that they "have not been to a cocktail party in four years." For recreation, they go camping in the Mojave Desert, and fill their house as well as the workshop with everything from Chinese fans and Indian blankets to tumbleweeds and bits of machinery. Pointing to the jumble, Eames says: "We want to help people enjoy the richness of simple stuff."

Eames is pleased, but still not entirely satisfied with his new chair. It will sell for $28 and he wishes he could design just as good a chair for less. "The objective," he says solemnly, "is the simple thing of getting the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least." He hopes to do the same thing with other furniture and even houses.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.