Charles & Ray Eames

The enveloping Lounge Chair, designed in 1956 by the American design duo Charles and Ray Eames, is one of the most successful armchairs since 1900. In 1940, Charles Eames (1907-1978), together with Finnish designer Eero Saarinen, won the "Organic Design" competition organised by MoMA in New York: the challenge was to create a piece of furniture in a single block, and Eames presented some curved plywood seats, anticipating a trend that would expand in Europe and Italy in the '60s. These pieces of furniture were a prelude to the curved plywood chairs and armchairs that Charles would make with his wife Ray (1912-1988) in the '40s, which included the DCM chair made for Herman Miller in 1946: with its anatomical backrest and thin metal tube structure, it remains a symbol of the transition from craftsmanship to industrial production.

Designer items

Meet the designers

Gio Ponti

Piero Fornasetti

Fratelli Castiglioni

Joe Colombo

Nanda Vigo

Ettore Sottsass

Marco Zanuso

Luigi Caccia Dominioni

Ico Parisi

Charles & Ray Eames

Gae Aulenti

Pietro Chiesa

Vico Magistretti

Giotto Stoppino

Tobia Scarpa

Carlo Nason

Marcello Cuneo

Vittorio Dassi

Paolo Buffa

Max Ingrand

Gastone Rinaldi

Pia Guidetti Crippa

Gaetano Pesce

Richard Sapper

Ingo Maurer

Gabriella Crespi

Paul McCobb

Paul Tuttle

Nendo

Alvaro Siza

Carl Jacob Jucker

Ernesto Basile

Sergio Mazza

Osvaldo Borsani

Oscar Torlasco

Le Corbusier

Willy Rizzo

Gaetano Sciolari

Carlo De Carli

Angelo Lelli

Gino Sarfatti

Marcel Breuer

Carlo Scarpa

Massimo & Lella Vignelli

Claudio Salocchi

Toni Zuccheri

Aldo Tura

Verner Panton

Giancarlo Piretti

Gianfranco Frattini

Guglielmo Ulrich

Franco Albini

Philippe Starck

Angelo Mangiarotti

Enzo Mari

Tito Agnoli

Kazuide Takahama

Eero Saarinen

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Carlo Ratti

Alessandro Mendini

Mario Bellini

Cleto Munari

Carlo Mollino

Bruno Munari

Hans J. Wegner

Studio BBPR

Giovanni Michelucci

Norman Foster