Eames La Chaise

When Charles and Ray Eames designed the La Chaise for a Museum of Modern Art competition in 1948, they may not foresee the design really caught the eyes of the world until 1991 when Vitra started to manufacture the design in serial production.

The original idea was inspired from the works of French American Gaston Lachaise

- the Floating Figure, back in 1927.  The original art work was casted in an edition of 7, now collected by MoMA  NYC (unnumbered), Society Hill Project, Philadelphia (1/7), Ray Stark Collection (2/7), Sheldon Memorial Art gallery (3/7), Lt John B. Putnam Jr Collection, Princeton University (4/7) and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (5/7).

I made this original artwork back in 2006 with a Phase One P45 back on Contax 645 mounted with Vario-Sonnar 45-90 zoom, a year before I designed my own “Spring Chair”.  My spring chair concept was not inspired by the La Chaise chair but from the photographing the chair, where I was inspired by the human body conform to a design which was inspired by a sculpture of human form.  It’s a cycle.  Interestingly and sad enough, Gaston Lachaise did not live to see his inspirational floating figure made into an iconic furniture while both Charles and Ray Eames did not live to see the La Chaise put into production.

I think the photography is an interesting applying art, and I am lucky of being both designer and photographer that I can use a visual imagination apply to an object to be designed, and thanks to the time I live where many industrial material have matured enough for more designs to be available to put into production.

Bangkok, 2012