What Charles And Ray Eames Might Have Done With Modern Materials

Matthew Strong recreates an Eames sofa using carbon fiber. What else might the legendary designers have done with today's materials?

The Eames fiberglass shell chair has been made in the same way for almost 60 years. A mold covered in glue is dipped into a machine, which constantly spins around, resulting in a skeleton of a million fiberglass threads. This skeleton is then coated in paint, and pressed between two 30,000-pound presses until it has a glossy, almost candy-like shell.

It's a beautiful manufacturing process to watch, but because of the way the Eames Molded Shell Chair is finished, you never actually see the design of the skeleton underneath. The Carbon Fiber Eames Sofa, from architect and designer Matthew Strong, is an attempt to reveal that gorgeous inner structure. Woven together with threads of threads of ultra-strong, reinforced polymer, the Sofa shows off the Eames skeleton by stripping away the skin.
Although the Eameses never designed a sofa in the style of theirfiberglass shell armchairs, they did design prototypes sometime in the 1950s, which are still on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Because of the amount of fiberglass needed to make the Eames Sofa sturdy enough to hold multiple sitters, Herman Miller ultimately decided not to manufacture the product. The finished sofa was just too heavy.
But if the Eames had access to modern materials, such as carbon fiber, the Eames Sofa may well have become a reality. Which is what makes Matthew Strong's sculptural carbon fiber skeleton of the Eames Sofa such a fascinating project in its own right: looking at it is like peering into an alternate timeline of Eames-era design.

Searching for an Eamesian Mood: MOC by Karine Simonot and Stéphanie Maigret

I'm loving these spaces by Karine Simonot and Stéphanie Maigret of MOC (Maison, Objets et Chantiers). Some bold colour accents, some fabulous Eames chairs and some amazing architecture for an eye-catching backdrop.

Eames Spotting: Boltz

This gentlemen looks very comfortable in his Eames 670 chair while he watches the tv that sits on a steel BOLTZ stand. Now we should note that there’s very little steel used in the Eames chair. The base and the back braces are solid aluminum.

Eames Spotting: Herman Miller

How "Powers Of 10" Inspired The iPad's Most Beautiful New App

Earth: A Primer is like a geology textbook for the Diamond Age: an iPad app in the style of Neil Ardley and David Macaulay's The Way Things Work that explains and simulates the ways in which lava, wind, temperature, and water shape our planet. It even has a built-in simulator that lets a reader play god, channelling millennia worth of unfathomable geological forces through their fingertips as they carve out canyons, grow volcanos, smash continents together, and more.
Designed by programmer Chaim Gingold, is so effortlessly beautiful that as I messed around with it, I thought it was bound to show up in an official Apple ad one day or another. That's how perfectly it realizes the promise of a truly interactive textbook. Yet Earth: A Primer did not start as a book at all. It started as a galaxy-spanning game—someone else'sgalaxy-spanning game.
The path to Earth: A Primer begins with Will Wright, a legendary game designer responsible for EA's classic SimCity games. Wright, hot off of his creations of the first Sims game, was looking for a new idea for a game in 2002. After watching Charles and Ray Eames's classic short film, Powers of 10, Wright had an epiphany: what if you modeled life in a video game the same way, simulating single-celled organisms in the primordial ooze and then expanding the scale, layer by layer, until you were modeling an entire galactic civilization?

see the demo at: https://vimeo.com/116179264

"Art and Architecture 1945-1954". Ten years, ten boxes, 118 issues, 6,156 pages!

The first part (1945-1954) of Taschen facsimile edition of John Entenza’sgroundbreaking magazine, which launched the Case Study House Program; in ten boxes, each containing one year’s worth of magazines

From the end of World War II until the mid-1960s, exciting things were happening in American architecture: emerging talents were focusing on innovative projects that integrated low-cost materials and modern design. This trend was most notably embodied in the famous Case Study House Program, which was championed by the era’s leading American journal, Arts & Architecture. Focusing not only on architecture but also design, art, music, politics, and social issues, A&A was an ambitious and groundbreaking publication, largely thanks to the inspiration of John Entenza, who ran the magazine for over two decades until David Travers became publisher in 1962. The era’s greatest architects were featured in A&A, including Neutra, Schindler, Saarinen, Ellwood, Lautner, Eames, and Koenig; and two of today’s most wildly successful architects, Frank Gehry and Richard Meier, had their debuts in its pages. A&A was instrumental in putting American architecture—and in particular California Modernism—on the map. Other key contributors to the magazine include photographers Julius Shulmanand Ezra Stoller, writers Esther McCoy and Peter Yates, and cover designersHerbert Matter and Alvin Lustig, among many luminaries of modernism.
This collection comes with ten boxes, each containing a complete year’s worth ofArts & Architecture magazines from 1945–1954. That’s 6,156 pages in 118 issues reproduced in their entirety—beginning with Entenza’s January 1945 announcement of the Case Study House Program. Also included is a supplement booklet with an original essay by former A&A publisher David Travers, available in English, German, French, and Spanish; plus a master index and tables of contents for the magazine from 1945-1967. Arts & Architecture 1945–1954 will be followed by a second set, 1955–1967, bringing together all the existing issues of the modern era. There is no delivery date yet of this second set.
This new Taschen publication, limited to 5,000 numbered copies, provides a comprehensive record of mid-century American architecture and brings the legendary Arts & Architecture back to life after forty years.

Eamesian mood: ‘Wilsey Road’ London Residence by Extrarchitecture

‘Wilsey Road’ London Residence was originally an Edwardian house with a poorly designed loft extension, rented out for many years. The existing house was shabby, with most of the original features already demolished during the course of it’s life. With this refurbishment extrArchitecture gave a new life to the tired terraced house in London, surprising it’s visitor when entering through the door of a conventional Edwardian facade.
The open plan at the ground floor has been visually divided in two sections by adding a toilet in a box, where three structural columns were going to support the house above. The bathroom was positioned toward the front of the house under the pitched roof, leaving room at the rear for a bedroom and a small studio with the nicest outlook.

Courtesy yellowtrace.com
see: www.yellowtrace.com.au/wilsey-road-london-residence-extrarchitecture/#gallery-2

Luca Barcellona, "Take Your Pleasure Seriously"

For Luca Barcellona, Italian graphic designer and calligrapher, letters are the building blocks of his creations. From Carolingian to tags, from the quill to the spray can, Barcellona takes the age-old craft of lettering to new heights with the inventiveness and talent of a contemporary virtuoso. His striking, expressive, and original letterforms and compositions open onto uncharted territory, laying the foundations of a new writing style.
Take Your Pleasure Seriously (a quote by Charles and Ray Eames) serves as a leitmotif for Barcellona who turned his passion into a way of life, first as a graffiti artist and then as a professional calligrapher. His production spans a broad spectrum from the reproduction of a world globe from 1569 to brand identities, book covers, ad campaigns, and performances.
This beautifully designed artist book features hundreds of drawings made over the last decade including commissioned work (Carhartt, Dolce & Gabbana, Nike, Red Bull, Universal, etc.), personal projects, performances, and many never-seen-before
work.
The book will fascinate and inspire anybody who works with letters or is interested in how they look.

In Turin this precious book is sold by Libreria NB Nota Bene, Via Bellezia 12.

Luca Barcellona, Giovanni De Faccio, and Nicola “Dee Mo” Peressoni, Take Your Pleasure Seriously, Lazy Dog, Milan.

Creativity runs in the Eames family

Many of Llisa Demetrios’ earliest memories consist of sitting in the living room of her grandparents home, showing off colorful childhood projects fashioned out of yarn, clay and wood. As Demetrios grew, the creative couple taught her about various art forms and the necessity of hard work, but also the willingness to have fun. These grandparents were none other than internationally renowned design experts, Charles and Ray Eames.
Three artistic generations of this family is being celebrated in the Petaluma Arts Center’s newest exhibit, “Work & Play: The Eames Approach.” The gallery will feature a mélange of photography, film, sculpture and design concepts tied together with the themes of curiosity and experimentation.

read all at: www.petaluma360.com/entertainment/3370487-181/creativity-runs-in-the-eames

Llisa Demetrios and her "Bouncing Ball" sculpture that is part of a display of three generations of art her family at the Petaluma Art Center on Monday January, 9, 2015. (SCOTT MANCHESTER/ARGUS-COURIER STAFF)

February 16, 2015: Eames Demetrios guest lectures at Modernism Week on the designs of Charles & Ray Eames

Event at Hilton Palm Springs, Horizon Ballroom, Palm Springs, CA.

Speaking of his Cranbrook years, Charles Eames said, “Those who know of Rembrandt early [in life] are cheated of the pleasure of discovery.” Though neither Charles nor Ray were blank slates when they arrived at Cranbrook, both saw a chance to understand more deeply. By the same token, they brought remarkable life experiences that made their learning and teaching there all the richer. Indeed, the Cranbrook philosophy and their approach to that philosophy could not have been better matched.

Charles and Ray were intensely visionary while still deeply pragmatic in their work, and both aspects were on full view during their time in Michigan. Of the legendary Eames/Saarinen Organic Chair, Charles said that in the end it was “more a statement of principle” than a fully-realized chair. But scarcely had they left Michigan, when fate (and furniture) brought them another deep Michigan connection, this time on the other side of the state, where they redeemed the promise of their early exploration through their work for Herman Miller, Inc., of Zeeland, Michigan.

A grandson of Charles and Ray Eames, Eames Demetrios is Director of the Eames Office and Chairman of the Eames Foundation. Wearing many hats including consultant, filmmaker, and author, he is best known in the design world for spearheading the successful rediscovery of the Charles and Ray Eames design heritage by new generations, as Director of the Eames Office.

St. Valentine's Day

Extract from: "16 Iconic Creations by Architects and Designers in Love" by Katherine Wisniewski

Charles and Ray Eames met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Michigan, and in 1941, Charles proposed by letter: "I cannot promise to support us very well — but if given the chance I'll sure in hell try."

courtesy Curbed.com
read all at: http://curbed.com/archives/2015/02/13/designs-by-architect-couples-in-love.php

News: The celebrated London designer Ilse Crawford of StudioIlse loves Eames

Courtesy yellowtrace.com
see at www.yellowtrace.com.au/ilse-crawford-studioilse-london-hq/

News: Corita Kent and Charles Eames

"Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent” at the Andy Warhol Museum (through April 19, 2015), examines the legacy of a nun turned full-time artist and activist whose most well-known work is the 22-cent LOVE stamp she designed. The U.S. Postal Service issued it in 1985, the year before she died of cancer.

This first major museum exhibit to survey Kent's entire career features more than 200 screen prints, including early abstractions and text pieces, as well as more lyrical works made in the 1970s and 1980s.
Kent (1918-86), who has largely been forgotten, was hugely influential during her lifetime.
Kent and her students sometimes visited the Eames' home in Pacific Palisades on field trips. It was there that the Eames' interest in using photography to investigate the visual details of everyday life gave her a fresh perspective on photography as a creative tool.
Thus, many of the prints have text that looks skewed or bent, as if manipulated in Photoshop, but they were actually based on photographs Kent took of magazine ads, billboards, hand-painted signage and other references. She often bent or manipulated many by hand that, when photographed, became two-dimensional, but dynamically distorted, type.

Courtesy TribLive.com
see http://triblive.com/aande/museums/7701289-74/kent-warhol-art#axzz3RCFvjKao

Opinion: Tony Ash, managing director for design brand Vitra, about the fakes.

The UK is one of only three European countries failing to protect designers from intellectual property theft – damaging both their income and the reputation of their products, says Tony Ash, managing director for design brand Vitra:
/.../ when I joined Vitra, back in 1999, my predecessor gave me some advice: "Get over the fakes". Fifteen years later, I simply cannot get to grips with the fact that people are able to copy the products of designers such as Ray and Charles Eames, Ron Arad, George Nelson, BarberOsgerby, Verner Panton, Norman Foster, the Bouroullecs and Isamu Noguchi, manufactured by Vitra, without paying a penny to the designer, their heirs or the charitable foundations that have become the guardians of their work. It makes no sense.
Initially, it was Italian manufacturers who copied these products – primarily the popular models and best sellers such as the Eames Aluminium Group Chair and Eames Lounge Chair. However, having successfully challenged these rogue Italian manufacturers in court we ended up facing a newer, and far tougher, battle with Chinese manufacturers" /.../

see more at: http://www.dezeen.com/2015/01/08/tony-ash-md-vitra-copyists-creativity-design-industry-intellectual-property/

Courtesy dezeen.com

Eames Fakes: Made in China Diary

Made in China Diary is a project initiated by the Swiss designer pair Anaïde Gregory Studio. It is first and foremost a travel log retracing a five-month journey through manufacturing China.

Adopting a witty and curious approach, Anaïde Gregory Studio gaze upon the Chinese economic miracle.

Anaïde and Gregory give us a new look at local manufacturing processes, ranging from modest family operations to factory-cities resulting from success stories unlike anything seen in our region of the World. But they also grasp the dark side of this miracle, the unbridled urbanization, the negligible value of human life in the global production chain.
They reveal how the Chinese have learnt by producing for the rest of the World. Automated high-tech facilities are now replacing a labor force that is no longer cheap enough. Throughout their journey, they discover how the products and services of tomorrow are made today, exposing the reach of this new model that revolutionizes the way we consume, based on new production and quality standards.

Courtesy www.domusweb.it

See: www.domusweb.it/en/photo-essays/2015/02/03/made_in_china_diary.html
Above: several fakes eames lounge chairs

Cover Story: Novum Magazine Last Issue (December '14)

Cover of German design magazine Novum quoting Charles Eames with subtle embossing on Gmunder Material Cotton Max White. Designed with Designed with Dominic Brighton, art director at Novum.

Courtesy www.novumnet.de

News: Is the Thonet 808 lounge chair the 21st Century Eames?

Of course, the Eames is the benchmark for any lounge chair – but quite frankly, they’ve become a bit too commonplace these days. Munich-based design house Formstelle clearly thought the same, as it chose ‘collars, covers, shells and underwater worlds’ as inspirations for the Thonet 808, rather than Charles and Ray’s classic. When paired with the ottoman, the 808 looks stylish and cozy at the same time – a worthy alternative to the ‘default choice’, and a fitting platform from which to get lost in the latest Classic Driver newsletter over a glass of red wine.

Courtesy: www.classicdriver.com 

See at: http://www.classicdriver.com/en/article/design-furniture/thonet-808-lounge-chair-21st-century-eames

News. Searching for an Eamesian Mood: Mortgage Choice Brokers Studio in Melbourne

Mortgage Choice is a time-honoured brand of finance brokers with hundreds of offices across Australia. The new branch in South Yarra aimed to create a distinct identity within the larger network, appealing to all generations. While quite refined, the office is more like a studio with a comfortable, relaxed aesthetic and several eamesian pieces. Unique for a financial business, it has an open plan with the primary focus on two custom-made work stations designed as stand-alone furniture with steel up-lights at the centre.
Where separation is necessary, steel-framed glass partitions form an executive office and casual conference rooms. The glazing is segmented with irregular banding of obscure glass, based more on a fabric design than a traditional steel window detailing, providing privacy and maintaining the open feel.

Courtesy: yellowtrace.com

Four (Contemporary) Lessons to Learn from Charles and Ray Eames

1. “The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests.”

This quote from Charles Eames succinctly sums up the couple’s philosophical approach to design, and it explains the charm, detail, and accessibility that characterize so much of their work. The word “guest” is tossed around so much these days as a euphemism for “customer” that it’s easy to lose track of the original meaning of the word.
The Eameses, as global travelers and enthusiastic amateur anthropologists (indeed, they saw this as part of their role as designers) learned firsthand the value of hospitality, and the role of a designer in smoothing the way for people to live and work. This means not only making things more functional, though that’s of primary importance. It also means making them more pleasing. As Charles often admonished designers: “Take your pleasures seriously.”

2. “The more you do, the more you can do.”

Perhaps the greatest secret to the success of the Eameses was that they refused to specialize. By taking commissions and launching new projects of their own for architecture, film, furniture, toys, games, museum exhibits, textiles, magazines, and more, they developed a comprehensive, even universal approach to their work. “We work because it’s a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next,” Charles said. A varied career has a way of cross-fertilizing from one domain to another.

3. “Innovate as a last resort. More horrors are done in the name of innovation than any other.”
Great designers are voracious scavengers. In this age of sampling, mashups, and copyleft activism, we can look back and see that Charles and Ray were far ahead of their time in their collage-like approach to creativity. They disapproved of the cult of originality in their time, and saw that often the best solutions come from the ground up.
“Eventually, everything connects – people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.”
This should extend to your interactions with fellow designers. Being competitive is natural, but try to create a space for idea incubation, exchange, and riffing. After all, “Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas and discoveries to others in the things you make.”

4. “A partnership is more than the sum of its parts.”

While most of us are not married to our professional colleagues (and if we are, we know it certainly presents complications absent from our romantic daydreams), nevertheless this is true of even purely creative relationships. Think about how you can create this type of nonzero economy in your own interactions. When working with a client, don’t impose your own vision from outside, but consider what unique qualities you can draw out from them.

With all their diverse accomplishments, the greatest example the Eameses left us is their dynamic, symbiotic life together. As Charles put it, “Any time one or more things are consciously put together in a way that they can accomplish something better than they could have accomplished individually, this is an act of design.”

Eames' Sample Lesson

In the spring of 1952, George Nelson, Charles Eames, and Alexander Girard took over a lecture hall at UCLA’s chemistry building to deliver the second installment of a ready-made lecture, based loosely on the theme of “art as a kind of communication.” The Sample Lesson, as it’s commonly known today (Nelson called it “Art X,” Eames called it “A Rough Sketch of a Sample Lesson for a Hypothetical Course”), evolved out of a proposed arts education policy Nelson initiated at The University of Georgia in Athens at the behest of Lamar Dodd, chairman of the Department of Fine Arts.

Nelson advocated that by using mechanized aids like slides, film, and audio, the learning experience could be expedited and augmented. “It was perfectly clear that much time was being wasted through methods originally developed for other purposes,” he explains. “For example, one class was finishing a two-week exercise demonstrating that a given color is not a fixed quantity to the eye but appears to change according to the colors around it. In a physics class, such a point would have been made in about five minutes with a simple apparatus, and just as effectively.”

The faculty responded positively to Nelson’s ideas, and he was invited to form a small advisory committee and return with a more fleshed-out proposal. He recruited Charles Eames to craft another presentation that further refined and expanded the initial line of thinking. This time however, their progressive ideas were met with hostility and confusion. The faculty felt threatened by the idea of being replaced by machines, and that performance might be evaluated quantifiably. “That night Eames and I discussed the turmoil created by what we had believed were innocuous proposals,” Nelson recalls. “It was our feeling that the most important thing to communicate to undergraduates was an awareness of relationships.” So they decided to put the proof in the pudding and lead by example: They would create a sample lesson. Recruiting Girard to the team, they set about creating their curriculum.

More a multimedia extravaganza than a lecture, the team used film, slides, sound, music, narration—even smell—to elucidate their subject. According to Charles, The Eames Office had already been working on their film A Communications Primer, from which they borrowed several image sequences and which largely determined the subject of the Sample Lesson.

Case Study Houses

The Case Study Houses were experiments in American residential architecture sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, which commissioned major architects of the day, including Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Eero Saarinen, A. Quincy Jones, and Ralph Rapson to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for the United States residential housing boom caused by the end of World War II and the return of millions of soldiers.
The program ran intermittently from 1945 until 1966. The first six houses were built by 1948 and attracted more than 350,000 visitors. While not all 36 designs were built, most of those that were constructed were built in Los Angeles, and one was built in Phoenix, Arizona. Of the unbuilt houses #19 was to have been built in Atherton, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while #27 was to have been built on the east coast, in Smoke Rise, New Jersey.
A number of the houses appeared in the magazine in iconic black-and-white photographs by architectural photographer Julius Shulman.

Above: Entenza House (Case Study House #9, 1950), Architects Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames.