The Eames Lounge Chair and Leg Splint

Today, we feel our way around great physical design. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. 

Can a piece of furniture be famous? The Eames lounge chair certainly is. The two-piece chair and ottoman, loosely inspired by comfy club chairs, consists of several petal-shaped wooden shells clasping plush upholstered cushions. Created by husband-and-wife design team, Charles and Ray Eames, the Eames lounge chair cradles and supports the body. Since debuting on the Today show in 1956, the Eames lounge is a coveted icon of modernist design. It appears in James Bond movies, and many TV scenes with wealthy or snobbish people. It’s the subject of countless knockoffs, and an original is permanently displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The Eames lounge chair

Originally, though, long before becoming a status symbol, the Eames lounge chair was developed with the simple goal of utilitarian comfort delivered through industrial materials and techniques. Charles Eames wanted the chair to have the “warm, receptive look of a well-used baseball mitt,” and early models came with wrinkles intentionally visible in the leather upholstery. To create the cushions’ curved plywood shells, the Eames used practices from aviation modeling. To connect the various pieces and ensure squeak-free weight absorption, the chair uses aluminum hardware engineered in the auto industry. You can always tell a fake Eames lounge chair if it offers adjustable recline, because real Eames are designed to be so universal as to make adjustment unnecessary. 

In fact, while these debts to heavy industry partly explain its cost, the Eames lounge chair started with a much more primal human concern. In the early 1940s, when the Eames design office was just starting out, the U.S. Navy contracted them to create cheap, lightweight leg splints that medics could use during World War II. Existing metal splints were too unwieldy for wartime and didn’t keep injured legs secure during battlefield transport. Modern war needed a modern solution, so the couple experimented with plywood for its light weight, flexibility, and speed of manufacture. Ray sculpted curves mirroring human form, while remaining universal enough to fit soldiers of all shapes and sizes. Charles worked with factories to refine the plywood composition and expedite the production process. Well-placed cut-outs enabled users to tie injured legs securely in place, and the light, nestable forms were easy to transport and use. 

The resulting product, whose body-conforming curves would later shape the Eames lounge chair, was a marvel of wartime inventiveness and physical design. By war’s end, the Eames design had produced about 150,000 leg splints, and its role in the war effort officially acknowledged.

Today the Eames lounge chair commands such crazy prices that it’s hard to believe it originated from a medical, wartime necessity. “What works good is better than what looks good,” Ray Eames famously said, “because what works good lasts.” During World War II, a well-designed leg splint served soldiers, the families they returned to, and all the people and nations those soldiers fought for. That the coveted Eames lounge chair grew from a simple but much needed leg splint reminds us of the real measure of good design. 

I’m Karen Fang, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.

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The 1944  Lounge Chair, Eames Office

The Eames lounge chair and ottoman debut on NBC’s Today show, 1956

Emily Banas, “Eames Leg Splint.” Variance, Issue 17, May 2022. 

Sara Hendren, “All Technology is Assistive.” Wired, October 16, 2014

Iconic Eames Lounge Chair Spottings in Film & TV, Stylo Furniture, May 4, 2021

This episode was first aired on November 4, 2025.