The online streaming service, Mubi, is showing a documentary about the American modernist designers, Charles and Ray Eames.
Mr and Mrs Eames are probably the most significant American designers of the 20C. Charles trained as an architect and Ray as a painter. they applied those sensibilities to all of their design projects in furniture, exhibition, architecture and film…Based in California, they provided an antidote to the relatively austere, East-Coast school of US design, that derived from the European and Bauhaus pioneers.
In its original form, the modernist focus on materials and functionality had stripped away all decoration as unnecessary frivolity…C+RE understood, especially in the context of California, that it was exactly those feelings of fun, frivolity and joy that would made their products widely appealing. In the end, their combination of joy and logic, expressed through materials, was unbeatable…
Their stand-out work includes…
The Eames House (case-study house no8) designed and built in 1947 from standard parts…
The US Army moulded plywood leg-splint
The furniture (for Evans, Herman Miller and Knoll)
The exhibitions (as an expression of the mind-palace)
The films (Powers of 10 etc)
Charles Eames said in the end, everything connects…And it does! They showed this in their multimedia and multi-channel exhibition displays
They proposed a form of design was about making things better (ergonomic, effective and efficient), with less (economy), and for more people (mass production). That provided the scientific, economic and ethical justification for their efforts to combine art and life, and to thereby build a better world.
These were exactly the progressive values identified by Walter Benjamin in the Author as Producer.
In the film, one of their former colleagues describes how many designers are content to manipulate objects; but that Charles was happiest manipulating ideas and expressing them as objects. That’s philosophy as a practical activity, expressed through material objects…brilliant.
My own connection with Charles and Ray Eames began at Junior school…the school was a bit useless and many staff had lost heart. I didn’t understand, but in Friday’s we had a film show because the staff had gone to the pub at lunch time. Those Friday afternoon filmsm including all the work of the Eames Office, changed my life.
The film critic and director, Paul Schrader, has suggested that the multi-screen and multi-channel , multi-media presentations designed by the Eames Office were instrumental in speeding up the image culture of the 1960s…I’ve posted about speed and image, here
https://csmbagcdcorelanguages.myblog.arts.ac.uk/category/context/
There’s lots more (42 posts) about speed and images on my personal blog too…
https://paulrennie.rennart.co.uk/search/speed
Supplemental O1
One of the things I noticed in all the photographs of Charles and Ray Eames is of how stylish they were. Charles sported that Californian country-club look that I liked, with bow ties. It’s amazing to think that all the work they did was in the days of cutting-out and sticking down. Charles must have used ink pens when he started…and chose the bow tie to pair style and practicality…the bow-tie was the tie-of-choice for anyone working technically and carefully with hand-and-eye – surgeons and architects especially.
Charles and Ray Eames understood that, in the end, creative people are designing themselves and living a life as an expression of design. It’s not surprising that this kind of ontological understanding of design should express itself through work, life and style.
As Charles once said, in the end everything connects…