Mid-Century Icons: Charles and Ray Eames' Molded Plywood Screen

Written by Mark Jennings Tuesday, 21 June 2011 07:36

During the Mid-Century, designers measuring themselves against the needs of a modern society, the necessity of a flexible space being one of them. Using screens was one very effective, albeit not new, way to modulate the space in a room according to the needs of its fruitors.

During the Mid-Century, designers measuring themselves against the needs of a modern society, the necessity of a flexible space being one of them. Using screens was one very effective, albeit not new, way to modulate the space in a room according to the needs of its fruitors.

Within all the mid-century designers, Charles and Ray Eames were particularly busy experimenting new production processes to obtain affordable furniture and objects for the modern home owners. Their approach allowed them to design revolutionary products.

Like many of their products, also the Eames Molded Plywood Folding Screen for Herman Miller was based on this design philosophy. Taking inspiration from the Alvar Aalto's Screen 100 -conceived in the 30s- the Eameses designed, in 1946, an updated version of it fixing its main imperfection. The Screen 100 was, in fact, made of thin flat strips of wood connected by canvas 'hinges' that made it not stable. To solve the problem, they increased the strips' width to 22.5cm using U-shaped pieces of moulded plywood and linking them with full-lenght canvas hinges running through all the screen.

In fact, while experimenting with plywood, they realized how some U-shaped cross sections of it were stable enough to stand alone. They decided to put them together to obtain a screen that would look like wooden waves -same effect of the Aalto's Screen 100- and complement their molded plywood furniture pieces at the same time. These two solutions gave to the screen more stability and flexibility. The screen could be folded, shipped, carried and stored much more easily.

Unfortunately, even if they designed it to be mass-produced, the process of inserting the canvas hinges involved a lot of hand work and dramatically increased the production costs, making the screen too expensive and far from the Eameses goal to provide good design at a fair price.

The production of the Eames screen ceased in 1955, but thanks to the introduction of new materials and manufacturing techniques , it has now been reintroduced without compromising the original design. The Eameses Screen is the perfect example of the Charles and Ray design beliefs: a piece of practical design that allows room for personal statement.