Miniatures Organic Armchair
Eero Saarinen, 1940
The »Organic Armchair« was a submission for the Museum of Modern Art‘s 1940 design competition for »Organic Design in Home Furnishings«. Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, who that year worked together for the first time, won first prize with their »Organic Armchair«. One of the conditions for competition entries was that the object was suitable for industrial production.
In 1941, the Eames developed a method for threedimensional molding of manufacture the award-winning chair. The 3-D seat, made possible by means of incisions made in the veneer and cutting pieces out of it, was covered in foam rubber and upholstered in fabric. As a result of the war-time economy and the initially high manufacturing costs, despite the original competition brief the prototypes did not go into series production.
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Miniatures Collection
For over two decades, the Vitra Design Museum has been making miniature replicas of milestones in furniture design from its collection. The Miniatures Collection encapsulates the entire history of industrial furniture design – moving from Historicism and Art Nouveau to the Bauhaus and New Objectivity, from Radical Design and Postmodernism all the way up to the present day. Exactly one sixth the size of the historical originals, the chairs are all true to scale and precisely recreate the smallest…
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