It was the end of 1945 and Evans Products Company—a plywood supplier mostly working with aircraft, auto, and rail industries—was hoping to diversify. They’d already collaborated with Charles and Ray Eames, the California based designer couple, on a molded plywood leg splint. Now that the war was over, they wanted to try something different: furniture. So at the Barclay Hotel in New York City, Evans presented prototypes the pair had been developing, among them, the now iconic Lounge Chair Wood or the LCW.
Using a homemade machine charmingly dubbed the Kazam! the Eameses had figured out how to use heating elements and a bicycle pump to create molded plywood seats with complex curves. But this was no sustainable means of fabrication—they wanted to mass-produce high-quality, low-cost furniture. Evans, they hoped,…
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Architectural Digest (Digital) - 1 Issue, December 2024