The Modern design team, whose distinctive furniture and other objects are on display at LACMA, were aiming to build the foundation for a new, progressive way of life.

Not even a hardened critic can view “The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention,” which opened Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, without a tinge of nostalgia. The Eameses belonged to a world where optimism reigned, America ruled, and a molded plywood chair could embody the progressive idealism of an entire generation.

The show, which originated at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, and traveled to London, St. Louis, Washington and New York before arriving here, is organized with a lightness of touch that does the talented duo justice. It includes many of the iconic pieces of the husband-and-wife team’s oeuvre--from the curved plywood chairs to the aluminum tandem sling seating designed for Dulles International Airport--as well as films, photos, drawings and personal knickknacks that capture the scope of their work and help place it in its historical context. Artfully arranged in the museum’s cozy Keck Gallery, the show’s compact scale makes it easy to digest.

But what makes the show effective is its ability to convey the broader context of the Cold War era--a reality that infects everything from the simple innocence of a child’s toy elephant to the role that the creative individual played in a world divided into two camps--East and West--bent on destroying each other.

The show opens with a collection of furniture designs, set in a mock showroom. And why not? These chairs, tables and storage units were never intended as museum art; they were built for mass consumption. What’s more, the Eameses rose to prominence in a time in American cultural history when big business eagerly embraced the look of Modern design, if not always its underlying values. It seems somehow appropriate, therefore, that the current show is sponsored by Herman Miller, the company that currently distributes many of the Eames designs.

If such a blurring of boundaries between art and promotion may make some of us mildly queasy, the beauty of the results is undeniable. The hard curved seat and gently bowed legs of the plywood chair, seen here dangling lightly from the ceiling, is a wonderful melding of form and function. A 1948 La Chaise, propped up on a pedestal, is even more overtly sensual, its fiberglass form echoing the shape of a reclining female body. What distinguishes all of the furniture is its soothing quality, a combination of a subtle use of material and form with a down-home American practicality.

No object embodies that faith in the wonders of American know-how and mass production more than a big, beautiful 1950 metal mold used to produce another of the Eameses’ furniture designs, the stackable fiberglass chairs. The mold sums up the couple’s central mission: to create a new aesthetic for the middle class. They succeeded to a stunning degree. Many of their objects became fixtures in American homes and institutions. Those same designs have now become sought-after collectors’ items, a testament to their durability and beauty.

The Eameses’ masterpiece, however, was their own Los Angeles home, Case Study House #8, part of a postwar program to create models for mass-produced housing. In the show, the house is first depicted in a large-scale model, which emphasizes its abstraction without giving a sense of the life inside. The simple rectangular forms of the house and studio are set against a steep hill, with a small outdoor courtyard between them. Supported on a light steel frame, the house’s exterior is composed as a grid of glass and colored panels. Later, videos and photographs show an interior filled with personal trinkets and artworks.

The images sum up the couple’s belief that art can enrich everyday life--that life itself, in fact, can become an act of the creative imagination. What they cannot convey is the design’s psychological complexity. Compare the Eameses’ house to, say, Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22, and you can’t help being struck by the difference in the values they express. The flat concrete planes and unbroken expanses of glass in the Koenig house suggest a perfectly ordered universe, an unwavering confidence in the future. The Eames house’s delicate frame, by contrast, rests more gently on the landscape, its thin panels as ephemeral as the shadows of the leaves flickering across its surfaces.

It is that tentativeness that makes the Eameses’ design so captivating to the contemporary sensibility. The sleek order of late Los Angeles Modernist houses like Koenig’s tends toward an almost hedonistic Utopianism, a world where children played quietly with building blocks on living-room floors while parents sipped cocktails in perfect marital bliss. That bubble burst a generation ago, buried under stacks of psychiatric bills. The Eameses’ house seems to capture both the hopeful idealism of that age and its terrifying fragility. It suggests the tentative outline for an idea--a gentle abstraction--rather than a dogmatic Utopian construct.

Over time, however, the scope of the Eameses’ ambition went far beyond the basic aim of bringing high design into every American home. Missionaries of Modernism, they saw themselves as building the foundations for a new, more progressive way of life. The show, for instance, includes a wonderful spiral gallery, its walls lined with images clipped from the Eameses’ 1977 short film, “The Powers of Ten.” As you pass the pictures (the entire film is also on view nearby), they jump in scale from a shot of a couple napping on a picnic blanket to an entire galaxy, before you spin back out and follow the sequence backward, down to the scale of a subatomic particle. “Eventually everything connects,” a nearby sign proclaims, the perfect slogan for a world in total harmony.

But the exhibition begins to hint at a more sinister theme too, one that comes into focus as you approach the end of the show. There, a small, black-and-white photograph depicts Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev firmly shaking hands with Vice President Richard M. Nixon. The scene is the famous Kitchen Debates, which took place at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. On display were the Eameses’ film “Glimpses of the U.S.A.” and modern American furniture and appliances, meant to promote the values of American capitalism.

In that context, architects and artists can be seen as tools (wittingly or not) in a vast propaganda machine. Nowhere was that truer than in Southern California, where suburban homes decorated with the Eameses’ surfboard tables and lounge chairs were built by an economy fueled by the defense industry that once thrived here. The soft, comforting forms of these objects served to reassure us of the durability of a democratic society.

How does the story end? With the victory of capitalism, of course, and the end of the Cold War. But obscured by that victory is the fact that Charles and Ray Eames’ progressive fantasy never came true, that it too collapsed in a great big heap of broken ideals. For the most part, architecture and high design remain a luxury for an educated, privileged elite. What we’re left with is the image of that house--one, solitary building block for a better world, a symbol of both the delicacy of human life and our enduring capacity to dream.

And a few exquisite chairs.

“The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Sept. 10. (323) 857-6000).