1961 Playboy photo featuring left to right - George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Risom

Unfettered by dogma, the creators of contemporary American furniture have a flair for combining functionalism with aesthetic enjoyment.

Exuberance, finesse, and high imagination characterize U.S. furniture design today. For the crusading era of modern is over. In the early years of Twentieth Century design, a chair – to its creator, at least – was very much more than something pleasant to look at. An early modern chair was a resoundingly significant expression of the age, a concrete rendition of abstract structural principles, an almost belligerent assemblage of mechanical parts in which every bolt was paraded with all the bravado of Erich von Stroheim’s monocle. Early modern thrived on dogma “Form Follows Function!” “Less is More!” “Structure is Beauty!” that rivaled Milton in Puritan passion; it paid deepest obeisance to the machine and let the softer human sensibilities accommodate themselves as best they could; and it dwelt, along with pre-Bach and post-Bartok, strictly among the intelligentsia.

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