Modern love

It was the mid-1950s, a time of big ideas and soaring spirits.

Disneyland opened. The Soviets launched Sputnik l. The Hula Hoop was invented.

And on March 14, 1956, a chair debuted on NBC's "Home" show, offi cially ushering in a revolutionary era of modern furniture design.

It was a leather lounge chair and ottoman designed for the Herman Miller company by the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames, introduced with unparalleled fanfare (for a chair): The crescendo of violins, the parting of curtains, the glare of TV lights.

Most viewers had never seen anything like it. The shape was abstract, like sculpture. The lines were clean and simple, and there was curved molded wood on the sides. The leather was as supple as a baseball mitt.

Yet for all the hoopla, the Eameses could hardly have known that a half-century later their chair and the so-called midcentury modern design movement it's come to symbolize would not only endure, but enjoy a revival that is actually gaining momentum.

The chair will be the focus of a traveling exhibition that opens in May at New York's Museum of Arts & Design, called "The Eames Lounge Chair: An Icon of Modern Design." Also in May, the Shelburne Museum of Vermont is presenting "Homey and Hip", an exhibit of furniture designed for Knoll that includes work by Eames contemporaries -- Isamu Noguchi, Harry Bertoia, and Eero Saarinen, and other influential designers of the period.

''Here we are, lo and behold 50 years later, and we're selling [Eames chairs] more than ever," says Marg Mojzak, director of Herman Miller for the Home. ''Our sales are going up on a 50-year-old product. Isn't that cool?" And sales continue to grow for other icons of midcentury furniture at the company, Mojzak says, especially the perennial favorites of design afficionados. Those pieces include the glass kidney-shaped coffee table by sculptor Isamu Noguchi; the ''slat bench" by architect George Nelson; and the Eameses' molded plywood chairs.)

But the revival of midcentury modern furniture is being seen well beyond Herman Miller, and beyond these few famous icons. ''The amazing thing is it's still considered cutting edge," says Nonie Gadsden, assistant curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

It's evident in the retail world, where the American modernist aesthetic -- epitomized by clean, sleek lines, and unembellished styling -- has all but eclipsed the overstuffed shabby chic look of not so very long ago. At the forefront are retailers such as Sedia in Boston's South End and Design Within Reach.

A love affair with the midcentury look has trickled down to more mainstream mass marketers, too, such as Crate & Barrel and West Elm, which is offering what appears to be a knock-off of Nelson's slat bench. And online merchants such as highbrowfurniture.com, specializing in classic modern design, including re-editions of old pieces, are seeing booming business. Sales are increasing 25 to 30 percent a year, says owner Stan Guffey.

It's also contributed to the popularity of places selling vintage modern furniture, such as Reside and Abodeon in Cambridge, and Machine Age in Boston, which sport furniture that really is your grandmother's blond wood corner table or nubby George Nelson settee. They are a boon for baby boomers nostalgic for furniture they remember from when they were kids and young people with artsy, eclectic tastes, such as Katherine Mansell-Moullin, 31, of Boston who was trolling for finds recently at Reside because she is ''sick of buying the mass-produced look."

There's also a growing number of serious collectors of midcentury furniture in the Boston area (ironic, since Boston -- land of wing chairs and Colonial tastes -- didn't much care for modernist furniture the first time around.) Nowadays, ''a really great Nakashima table . . . can go for up to $100,000," says Jane Prentiss of Skinner auctioneers in Boston.

Why have the Eames chair and its ilk taken hold so strongly?

The chair ''signified a whole era," says David McFadden, chief curator of the Museum of Arts & Design. ''It is a distillation of many of the ideas that were intriguing modern designers."

It epitomized an attitude as much as an aesthetic, says Deborah K. Dietsch, author of ''Classic Modern: Midcentury at Home" (Archetype Press, 2000). With its pared-down lines, untraditional designs, and practicality, it represented everything the heady 1950s stood for -- postwar optimism, freedom from constraint, creativity unleashed.

A confluence of forces sparked this explosive design style. There were new materials to work with -- vinyl, acrylics, styrofoam -- developed for military use during the war. (The Eameses worked for the Navy, creating splints for wounded soldiers from molded plywood, which they later modified for furniture.) Soldiers were coming home from war, triggering a housing boom and an appetite for affordable furniture.

Also, ''design began to be influenced by the space race," Jane Prentiss says. ''Clocks were called 'Sputnik.' Fabric for curtains had little missiles on it. Color combinations were coming from Scandinavia."

No longer was sophisticated design the exclusive domain of the artistic, ''a symbol of enlightment, like the New Yorker," says Celeste Adams of the Grand Rapids Art Museum, which organized the Eames chair exhibition. Now, design was democratic. ''It stood for a classless society," McFadden says.

A half-century later, this style of furniture seems to have found a new relevance. ''It still retains the [allure] of being avant garde," says Dale Anderson of Abodeon. ''That's one reason it won't go away."

It appeals to 30-somethings like Mansell-Moullin because it has ''soul. It helps you create a personal style."

It also appeals to 60-somethings, such as Lewis Shepard, 60, of Worcester, who is downsizing and plans to furnish his new condo in midcentury modern. ''We felt it would look better in a modern condo than what we had, which is from the Arts and Crafts period," he says. ''We're at the stage when less is more."

Then there are the midcentury addicted. Jerry Lainoff, 53, a Somerville artist, is at the forefront of this population. Twenty-six years ago, when the midcentury design period was barely over, he prudently -- and cheaply -- began buying representative pieces of key designers, drawn to them because he thought they echoed themes in his painting. He found a handmade Nakashima console 20 years ago for $350, after answering a newspaper ad. ''Now it's worth maybe $15,000 or $20,000," he says.

He picked up a Noguchi rocking stool -- now extremely rare -- at a shop in the South End. He found plywood Eames side chairs at a school in Lawrence; they were a dime a dozen back in the 1950s, when schools gobbled them up for libraries and offices. He paid $70 for a Nelson cabinet at a Hadassah thrift shop in New Jersey.

His home is a veritable museum of midcentury icons -- Eames modular storage units, a Saarinen grasshopper chair, a George Nelson bubble lamp and starburst clock eternally stuck at 4 p.m. He even has -- and uses -- rotary telephones and a 1959 radio. The dining room features an Alvar Aalto table matched with a set of Eames molded plywood chairs.

''They're not that comfortable," he confessed. ''But they're extremely sculptural."