Eames' midcentury furniture to be featured on stamps

If you don't know Charles and Ray Eames, you must know their chairs.The form-fitting seats they designed in a burst of postwar modernism furnished homes, offices and schools for much of the 20th century.Quite comfortably, thank you.Maybe you sat on their molded plywood chair in grade school, stacked blue fiberglass scoop chairs after a meeting or knew a big shot who let you lean back in the ultimate black leather easy chair.Those chairs, an amoebic chaise lounge and more of their creations appear on a pane of 42-cent U.S. postage stamps scheduled for release this week to commemorate Charles Eames' centennial.Though the forms may look more contemporary than what's at the mall or a show house today, they are more than 60 years old. Check the portrait: Charles looks like a '50s sitcom dad, and Ray pins her hair up like a Shaker seamstress. They lived in another era but remain in the vanguard.To truly understand the vision of Charles and Ray Eames, look beyond the chairs and get to know the elephant. The Eames elephant was the size of a hobbyhorse, crafted in 1945 from two sheets of plywood bent into impossibly smooth curves, with big flapping ears and a long trunk, in natural or red.That one piece combines technical virtuosity, a fearless embrace of industrial method and ordinary materials, awe of nature and pure sense of play."They really loved the world and how it looked," Phillip Morrison recalled in 1992. He was a physicist and part of the eclectic Santa Monica, Calif., group around the Eameses. "And they tried to understand why it worked that way and what it meant to people." Charles the architect and Ray the artist shared a child's eye that loved elephants, the circus and the mundane. All softened and personalized the hard edges.Their boxy cabinets and desks, like their experimental house, were grids that came to life with Mondrian blocks of yellow and blue. The fiberglass chairs came in more colors than ice cream. And few can resist tossing a hat onto a Hang-It-All , a welded steel wall rack whose prongs are topped with wooden balls painted in nine colors to hold jackets, caps, bags, whatever."You usually find that what works is better than what looks good. You know the 'looks good' can change," Ray once said, "but what works, works.'' They saw what works best as superb photographers and filmmakers as well. They took in and enjoyed everything they saw.And collected. Their home had an open design and sparse furniture but was piled with tribal rugs and industrial detritus. Their office will reassure anyone who detests an orderly desk.Their very contemporary wire chairs have roots in old dress forms and rat traps. Their skill at bending plywood came from their time making splints for Army medics.They worked in a remarkable time. From the war effort, the world of design got the potential of aluminum and plastics and a sense of national purpose. The Eameses aimed to outfit new homes and offices for a broad public, not the elite. Actors sat in Eames chairs in Hollywood romances and TV series. So did bad guys battling Dick Tracy in the funnies.They promoted issues with films and exhibits for major commercial and public projects, such as a cartoon in 1957 for IBM's new "information machine." Their work was at the center of the geodesic dome at Expo 67 in Montreal and the 1959 American Exhibition in the Soviet Union.They campaigned for better science education, delighting in tops as playthings and physics lessons. Their 1977 film "Power of 10," zooming from cellular structure to the edge of the space, remains a good teaching tool.By the end of their lives (Charles died in 1978 and Ray 10 years later to the day), Americans had retreated from modernism first to earth-toned simplicity, then to faux elegance and high-tech glitz. Only in the past decade have stores and shoppers rediscovered mid-century modern.Today these designers are perfect for a stamp -- an inexpensive, useful product, albeit one in decline, and they give geometry wit and color.Buy one block to frame and a second to send friends and creditors a message -- and some fun.FAST FACTS: The Eames style- U.S. post offices on Tuesday will release 42-cent postage stamps commemorating designers Charles and Ray Eames. A 16-stamp pane is $6.72.- Herman Miller Inc. (hermanmiller.com), the original manufacturer, continues to sell many Eames designs, as does Design Within Reach (dwr.com).- For more products and information, see eamesgallery.com, run by the Eames office in Santa Monica, Calif.E-mail Chris Sherman at csherman(at)sptimes.com(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)