Artifacts from the Eames Collection: The Last Decade of Eames Furniture

By the late 1960s Charles and Ray Eames had achieved unparalleled renown as designers, and were sought after by global corporations, government agencies, and leading cultural institutions. Now staffed by dozens of employees, the attention of the Eames Office was divided between World’s Fair pavilions, exhibitions, proposals and research projects, emergent technologies, lectures, and films. Despite this multifarious roster of undertakings, the Eameses continued to work away in the field that initially propelled them to fame: furniture design.

The Last Decade of Eames Furniture presents a period of steady refinement and technological adaptation. As Herman Miller’s and Vitra’s business shifted almost exclusively to the contract office market, an emphasis on furniture for workplaces supplanted the residential focus of prior decades. Earlier designs in plywood and fiberglass were re-thought and re-cast using the latest polyurethanes, injection molding techniques, and plastics. Rarely seen archival images and documentation of every furniture design from the final decade of the Eames Office in Charles Eames’s lifetime bring this lesser-known and underappreciated era of their work into focus. 

This exhibition catalog also includes an essay by MillerKnoll corporate archivist, author, and design historian Amy Auscherman, and a curatorial note by Llisa Demetrios, chief curator of the Eames Institute and granddaughter of Charles and Ray Eames.