Charles & Ray Eames

Charles and Ray Eames worked as a married team out of a studio in Venice, California, and treated furniture the way an engineer treats a bridge. They wanted a good chair to reach as many people as possible, so they spent years bending plywood and moulding fibreglass until the shapes felt inevitable.

Their Lounge Chair from 1956 is the piece most people picture, but the moulded plastic side chairs did the quieter work of putting honest design into ordinary rooms. Vitra still makes the European editions to the original measurements.