Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen designed a chair in 1940 with a new type of three-dimensional preshaped plywood seat for a competition held by the New York Museum of Modern Art. The chair did not go into production owing to a lack of technical know-how. It was very rare back then for plywood to be successfully pressed into a three-dimensional shape. In the years that followed, Charles and Ray Eames concentrated on developing a process that enabled plywood to be shaped as they wanted.