Ray Eames), each with a different body shape, to take turns sitting in
the evolving prototypes to rate their comfort and durability.
The Saarinen/Eames chair garnered top prize, while Cranbrook’s
Harry Weese and Benjamin Baldwin received prizes for their lighting
fixtures and patio furniture. Although Rapson’s curved rocking chair
didn’t win, his design served as a prototype for his successful Rapid
Rocker, which became part of the Knoll line in 1945. The Cranbrook
entries highlighted “philosophical shifts,” observes Woodring, going
well beyond demonstrating the students’ considerable skills to pro-
pose a fundamentally new approach to proportion and shape in
furniture and revealing, he says, “the correlation between sculpture
and design.”
Perhaps most importantly, Cranbrook’s entries foreshadowed
the role that industrial techniques and materials would play in
modern design production. Although the Conversation chair won
first place, its designers were still unable to find a way to mold
the plywood on an industrial scale; they came to realize that if a
designer wanted factory made furniture, he also had to develop
the method for manufacturing it.
With its emphasis on close collaboration, Cranbrook also had a
profound impact on the private lives of both instructors and students.
Eames’s relationship with Ray Kaiser intensified, and he divorced
his first wife to marry her in 1941. Harry Bertoia made the couple’s
wedding rings. Born in Italy, Bertoia came to the U.S. as a teen and
studied at the art school of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts
before arriving at Cranbrook in 1937. In return for a full scholarship,
Top left Fabric designer Jack Lenor Larsen as a student in 1954
he oversaw the silver and metalworking studio, where, Woodring
in the weaving studio. observes, he developed his “improvisational design language.” By
Top right Loja Saarinen, seated at loom, with Maja Andersson
his second year, he headed the metalworking department and, like
Wirde, Swedish weaver and head of the Academy of Art textiles Eames and Saarinen, he met his wife, the daughter of the Detroit
department.
Institute of Arts’s director, at Cranbrook.
Above Come as a Song Title Party in 1945. From left, Lily
By the 1950s, Cranbrook had begun to change. George Booth
Swann Saarinen, Wally Mitchell, (in white suit) and Jill Mitchell had died in 1949 and Eliel Saarinen a year later. Charles and Ray
(to Wally’s right)
Eames embarked on one of modernism’s most famous partnerships
and Eero Saarinen left to pursue his own projects, which included
designing the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the General Motors Technical
Center and the TWA Terminal at Kennedy International Airport.
Influenced by his earlier experiments with the Conversation chair,
he also created two of modernism’s most enduring icons, the Womb
50 www.modernismmagazine.com
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