Aluminium had been used for furniture before the Second World War, but was perceived as brittle, inflexible and expensive. However, the war increased production in the USA by 600 percent, and after 1945 aluminium gained popularity.

The Aluminium Group marked a shift away from the shell forms of the Eameses' earlier plywood chairs towards a slimmer, more linear profile. The design arose from a request by Alexander Girard, who could not find suitable chairs for a house he had designed with Eero Saarinen. The Eameses developed a special ultrasonically-welded, padded sling that wrapped around cylindrical elements at the top and bottom, and which was held in place by the skeletal metal frame at the sides of the chair. The sand-cast aluminium frame was the most complex and challenging Eames chair to manufacture. The designers had envisaged the chair for indoor or outdoor domestic use, but it was too expensive for that market and ended up in offices. Chairs with swivel bases like this one were introduced in the mid-1960s.