24 May 2008
The Conversation Chair
Speramus meliora. Resurget cineribus.
- “We hope for better things. It will rise from the ashes.” Motto of the City of Detroit (circa 1805)
Is it kidnapping when someone drives off with you, a knife in your ribs, and then lets you go in exchange for you wallet and keys?
The whole event is still a little ambiguous to me. After all, I asked for the ride with my pal George. Suppose you were hitchhiking back down Woodward Avenue toward the mansion inside Eight Mile, and it is 1974 and your car is broken down in Birmingham, a place that once was home but has become so expensive that a young man cannot afford to live there?
I called the cops from the payphone at Maverick’s Drive In while George tried to borrow enough to buy a couple signature “Billy the Kid” hamburgers and talk about the incident with the cute car-hop waitresses. When I got through, the Birmingham police department already knew about my car- they were brisk, efficient, and knew everything that was happening in their little fiefdom.
That is what made Birmingham a secure place for folks to live, a bulwark against the lawlessness that increased, mile by mile, until you got to the Detroit River. It was secure enough that when the National Guard deployed an armored car on Woodward at the height of the riots in 1967 everyone thought it was surreal, even if dozens were dying downtown.
Maverick’s is gone now, and liquor-by-the-glass is now sold in what they called Piety Hill.
You’ll forgive me a little distraction. It is Memorial Day, which is now observed by thousands of large motorcycles and their large riders who are here to honor the sacrifice of those who have died in the service of their nation.
The roar comes and goes as the pack of gleaming chromium-plated bikes advance eastward on Route 50. It brings back the roar of Woodward Ave, and the memory of life on the boulevard.
Back in the day, the middle class ended at Birmingham, and the real money started at Big Beaver Road. The Car People- the ones who worked on the 14th floor of the GM Headquarters in the New Center area of Detroit lived out there on estates, and played golf at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club, chartered with twelve holes in 1909, just in time for Cranbrook’s roll-out, and finished with the full eighteen holes before the Greek Theater was done.
The Booth Family pursued their vision for the Cranbrook Educational Community with zeal, and with the world going on wheels after the First War, there was plenty of money to be had.
Eliel Saarinen was the Finnish architect who visited the University of Michigan. He was a sort of proto-IKEA designer with an affinity for minimalist elegance. He was invited by George Booth to make Cranbrook his life’s work, and signature piece of public art. As such, Cranbrook took a central position in the history of modern American design and architecture.
Saarinen channeled Frank Lloyd Wright and the Arts and Crafts movement into something quite unique. George Booth was a huge fan of the movement that began in England, and spread wildly in America.
The Buckingham Neighborhood that surrounds my home in the Big Pink Tower reflects it influence. Booth took the ethic in a different and more elite direction. He empowered Saarinen to banish mass-produced goods from his campus, and infuse it with sleek futuristic elegance.
Craftsmanship would result in superior products and thus establish a foundation for an ethically responsible new class of citizens, who would be educated at the Cranbrook School for Boys, and the Kingswood School for Girls. Along the way, the Cranbrook Institute of Art would help to educate their sensibilities, and lavish its influence on the citizenry who would visit the campus.
I was a frequent visitor to Cranbrook, with my folks, and on field trips from school and you can see the sort of influence it had on me. Or perhaps I was one of the exceptions.
Saarinen brought his family with him, and his son Eero spent his formative years working for his father at the Cranbrook Institute. He went on to have a spectacular career in the public architecture of America, which included the General Motors Tech Center in Warren, Michigan that helped to kill off the old city, the Gateway Arch at Saint Louis that celebrated another, and the dramatic air terminal at Dulles International, the most beautiful and infuriating airport in the world.
Dulles was intended to reform human behavior, by delivering the passengers to the airplanes by mobile departure lounges, and is the longest running disaster in airport history. Sometimes the most elegant design goes a step too far.
Of course, Eero performed along the whole spectrum of architecture and art, just as his father taught him. As a young man his father commissioned him to create decorative pieces for many Cranbrook buildings, including furniture for the famed Saarinen House, as well as chairs, tables, sofas, beds and lamps for Cranbrook's Kingswood School for Girls.
While at Cranbrook, the younger Saarinen eventually came to know and work with legendary designers Charles and Ray Eames, among a host of others attracted by the creativity and of Cranbrook’s Golden Age.
Charles and Ray Eames are among the most important American designers of this century, and their furniture designs were spectacular enough that Mom and Dad purchased them in the original, darn the cost, swept away by the sleek style that summed up the optimism of post-war America.
Charles was an early devotee of Frank Lloyd Wright, and was thrown out of Washington University for espousing the Master’s modernist philosophy. He later started his own architectural office, but was offered a fellowship to Cranbrook in 1930, a poor year for new construction and young architects. The elder Saarinen eventually made him head of Cranbrook’s Design Department.
His second wife, Ray Kaiser, was a Californian and a painter. She migrated to New York to study with Hans Hoffman before succumbing to the call of the Cranbrook artistic community.
She was working with Eero and Charles to design something special for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1941 Organic Furniture Competition.
The trio submitted designs under Charles and Eero's names, and composed of plywood molded into complex curves. They won, of course, with a design called “the Conversation Armchair.”
It had a plywood shell, foam rubber cushioning, custom upholstery and four tapering angled wood dowel legs. It was the first time a molded plywood shell was shaped into three-dimensional curves. One of them sits in the living room in the house by the Bay, home to more than a generation of conversation now.
The designs that came from Cranbrook became the iconic symbol of what was to come, even if the War made everyone put aside their dreams of the future for the Duration.
Charles and Ray married in 1941, and left California for LA. The war years brought commissions from the Navy for creatively fashioned splints, lightweight stretchers and glider shells. Plywood technology made great leaps during the war, largely because of the restriction of iron and steel and strategic materials for weapons production.
Howard Hughes’ contribution to plywood was the Spruce Goose, the gigantic HK-1 seaplane designed to carry hundreds of troops over the patrolling U-boats and fashioned almost entirely from wood. Engineers created the Duramold Process which utilized a thin series of wood laminations, grains laid perpendicular to each other, which were laminated with plastic glue and heat-shaped.
The requirements of wartime production created entirely new possibilities in lightweight material construction that precisely intersected with the Eames’ vision of the future.
The Eames 1945 DCM Chair, with metal legs and a plywood back and seat, was ready for the GI’s who were coming home and ready to start lives deferred. I think there are two DCM’s in the basement crawl space at Mom’s house, and the Saarenin-Eames conversation chair in the living room.
The rubber washers that connected the swooping plywood to the metal frame came unglued years ago under the squirming buttocks of the three Socotra children, but the smooth futuristic curves of the mahogany plywood is still graceful, and the minimalist spider legs of stainless steel are elegant.
The 1948 Eiffel Tower Chair took another medal, and the Eames legacy in furniture was assured. They went on to create chairs, storage units, tables and folding screens, most of which were manufactured by Herman Miller in Michigan, which is still in business despite the downturn. It is not in Detroit, of course, but in Zeeland in West Michigan where the earnest Dutch continue to labor with zeal.
That is what Mom was going to talk about at the meeting of the Bay City historical society, and why she thought it was important.
Instead, the President rambled on for two hours about the by-laws, and the Eames chairs got short shrift. As I said a could days ago, she was miffed, and that is not her style.
She had done her research on the chairs in the living room, even brought one of the DCM’s up from the crawl space.
It is funny. The Library of Congress downtown just opened an exhibition on the Eames’ legacy in design. It has been touring Europe for a while, under the ''The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention,''
They say the exhibition reflects renewed interest among auction houses, galleries and museums in Eames and in 20th-century furniture in general.
Not to mention the Bay Historical Society and the Conversation Chair in my Mom’s living room.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com