Intelligent design | 29 October 2015

Peter Mandelson, in his moment of pomp, had his portrait taken by Lord Snowdon. He is sitting on a fine modern chair. Mandy would no doubt have been aware of the ancient historic associations, through bishoprics and universities, that chairs have with power. Since it is a chair much admired by architects, Mandy also looks quite cool, although these things are relative.

The chair and its footstool are known as Eames Lounge 670 and Eames Ottoman 671, and they were first manufactured in 1956 by Herman Miller of Zeeland, Michigan. Curved plywood shells are veneered with Brazilian rosewood, upholstered with shallow black leather-studded cushions and supported, at a meaningful tilt (suggestive of relaxed authority), on a stellar metal support.

It is a conceptual and manufacturing masterpiece and has become the most famous chair ever. Its designers were Charles (1907–1978) and Ray Eames (1912–1988). In any setting, the presence of an Eames chair suggests an impressive level of designery taste. This Mandy wanted to appropriate at the dawn of his millennium. Hundreds of cheap knock-offs are available: sure evidence that the Eames mystique has leaked out of the design stratosphere.

A new exhibition at the Barbican is a comprehensive retrospective with a gorgeous range of objects and ephemera illustrating the Eames’s astonishingly rich and productive life. Its fine and spare installation by 6a Architects makes the very best of a forbidding space.

In the same way that Jackson Pollock became the Great American Painter, the Eameses became the Great American Designers, fulfilling a national appetite for home-grown heroes in the face of a wave of European imports. Charles was born in St Louis, worked in a steel mill and wore butch wash’n’wear plaid shirts. Later, with growing cosmopolitanism came more sophisticated bow ties: he was alert to self-image.