Christmas gift idea (1): "Alexander Girard" by Todd Oldham & Kiera Coffee

Renowned designer Todd Oldham and writer Kiera Coffee have created this massive monograph on seminal designer Alexander Girard as the ultimate tribute to this design icon.
This 672-page book covers virtually every aspect of Girard’s distinctive career. As one of the most prolific and versatile mid-20th century designers, Girard’s work spanned many disciplines, including textile design, graphic design, typography, illustration, furniture design, interior design, product design, exhibit design, and architecture. Exhaustively researched and lovingly assembled by designer Todd Oldham, this tome is the definitive must-have book on Girard’s oeuvre.
Girard’s repertoire includes an incredible list of projects, including his bold, colorful, and iconic textile designs for Herman Miller (1952-1975), his typographic designs for La Fonda del Sol restaurant (1960), his celebrated retail store Textiles and Objects (1961), his own Girard Foundation (1962) that houses his extensive, personal collection of folk art from around the world, and his complete branding and environmental design for Braniff International Airways (1965).
Girard’s work continues to inspire new generations of designers and admirers, and this beautiful book is the ultimate tribute to his legacy.


Todd Oldham, Kiera Coffee, "Alexander Girard", Ammo Books, Los Angeles (Cal.), 2011.
Available at nb:notabene Torino, via Bellezia 12 - via Giolitti 26 a

Charles and Ray Eames's Kids Toys: As Wonderful as You'd Expect

In a new article posted by Herman Miller, Alexandra Lange, Curbed's architecture critic, examines the Eameses legacy of design intended for children, including playful prefab structures and boxes meant for building. It's clear from the analysis, accompanying archival images, and cool interactive toy that the duo valued playful design, and a gift for inspiring that same appreciation in others.

A central tenant of the design philosophy of Ray and Charles Eames was an embrace of play as an end in itself, the idea that creativity should be unconstrained and unburdened. While the couple will always be remembered for their contributions to furniture, design and cinema, it was their approach to experimentation, and their interest in seemingly tangential topics such as clowns, that inspired their seemingly endless sense of wonder and a constant drive towards exploration and improvement. As champions of those beliefs, it only goes to follow that they'd also be some of the world's foremost toy designers.

Ph. courtesy Herman Miller Archive

TIME's memory: Bobby Fischer dragged one of the building’s Eames chairs to Iceland!

This week, TIME is moving to new headquarters—so here's a look back at the old…

* * *

Bobby Fischer dragged one of the building’s Eames chairs to Iceland!

What happened was that the company commissioned Charles and Ray Eames to design the reception rooms for TIME in the new building, and their work included a Charles Eames chair. When editors moved into the space, the lore goes that they decided the chairs were so nice that they wanted to keep the chairs themselves rather than let random people sit in them. Some top staffers were notorious for hoarding them and moving them whenever they switched offices. But it wasn’t just the staff. Bobby Fischer somehow took a liking to the seat, deciding it was perfect for chess-playing. When he took on Boris Spassky in Iceland in 1972, it was while sitting on an Eames TIME-LIFE chair that he’d had brought over for the occasion.

Bobby Fischer of the U.S. right, and Boris Spassky of Russia, play their last game together in Reykjavik, Iceland, in this Aug. 31, 1972 
Courtesy: AP Photo/J. Walter Green

The villa of James Bond’s nemesis in Spectre remembers the iconic modernist home of Charles & Ray

This moroccan villa is the home of James Bond’s nemesis in Spectre. The glass, metal and concrete structure appears in the latest Bond film as tensions comes to a head and James Bond arrives at the desert lair of villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld​. 

The house as it appears in the listing – surrounded by lush greenery – is almost unrecognisable from how it looks in the film, thanks to the special effects that transplanted it to a starker, dustier desert location.

In fact, the home is only eight kilometres from the Moroccan city of Marrakesh, not a long, desolate train ride through the Sahara Desert, as the film would suggest.
The contemporary-style villa was built in 2006 and designed by Algerian-trained architect Imaad Rahmouni​.
The two-level house has three bedrooms, three bathrooms and two reception areas. The expansive open-plan living area is flanked by a thin pond and is only three stepping stones away from the lawn.
The large glass windows with black framing – reminiscent of the iconic modernist home of Charles & Ray Eames – affords uninterrupted views of the lush garden, which is dotted with palm trees.
The centrepiece is the striking pool which runs perpendicular to the house.
Accompanying the main residence is a separate guest house with three more bedrooms and its own swimming pool.

Courtesy Domain.com

Cranbrook's Golden Age: How a Freewheeling School Changed American Design

Tuesday, November 17, 2015, by Patrick Sisson

Alumni visits don't get much more high profile than Ray Eames's brief return to Cranbrook Academy of Art in May 1980. Half of the dynamic design couple whose grabbag of inventive projects became synonymous with post-war Modernism, Ray, who had been widowed a little less than two years prior, was then living by herself in the trailblazing Case Study house she built with her late husband Charles. Known for its pioneering layout and polychromatic interior, the home, decorated with the vast quantity of objects, artwork, and collectables accrued by the couple over nearly four decades together, must have been a potent source of memories.

But Ray's trip to speak at the Michigan arts school where she met her husband in 1940 proved a similar catalyst for nostalgia. A Detroit Free Press article from that summer says she was "smiling continuously." During a discourse that covered all manner of design topics, she often "wandered into memories."

"It was an extraordinary time when we were here," Eames is quoted as saying. "There wasn't a degree involved, only people who were here to learn."

The legend of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and its role as a prewar petri dish for American modernism, revolves around the brief period of time from roughly 1937 to 1941. Ray, Charles, and a host of future architects and designers crossed in and out of each other's paths, studying and teaching at the wooded campus roughly 25 miles north of Detroit. But Cranbrook's singularity didn't just stem from its collection of talent. An experiment in education by founder George Booth, a wealthy industrialist, his wife Ellen, and Eliel Saarinen, an eminent Finnish architect who designed the campus and served as the first president, Cranbrook was a new institution, a modern arts colony that reflected the times. The philosophies that Ray and her classmates picked up there could be considered the DNA of modern design: cross-disciplinary thought, organic forms, and a fidelity to experimentation and research.

courtesy curbed.com

Read all at: http://curbed.com/archives/2015/11/17/cranbrook-academy-american-modern-design-charles-ray-eames-knoll-saarinen-bertoia.php

Point of view: "The Atlantic" on Charles and Ray

The Vision of Charles and Ray Eames: how two designers from the 20th century influenced and predicted the way people would live in the 21st.

by Sophie Gilbert

*   *   *

In a 1972 short film titled “Design Q&A,” Charles Eames offered answers to a series of questions about design, a field in which he and his wife, Ray, had envisioned everything from medical splints and airport seating to low-cost housing and children’s toys. “What is your definition of design, Monsieur Eames?” asked the interviewer, Madame L’Amic. “One could describe design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose,” Charles replied. They continued:

MADAME L’AMIC: What are the boundaries of design?
CHARLES EAMES: What are the boundaries of problems?

This Eamesian understanding of design as a solution rather than a luxury—as something that’s about industry as much as art—encapsulates the unique philosophy and vast influence of Charles and Ray Eames, a husband-and-wife team whose lightness of touch and Californian joie de vivre infuses contemporary offices and homes. Would Ikea be the same without the Eameses? Would Apple? Their work is best remembered via the molded-plywood and leather lounge chair that bears the Eames name, but their vision of design as something that could get “the best to the greatest number of people for the least” lives on in less tangible ways. The Eameses, above all else, helped democratize the genre.
/.../
But it’s impossible not to sense the Eamesian influence in low-cost, flat-packed furniture sold at Ikea, or Crate and Barrel, or Target. The way-it-should-be-ness of their chairs so infuses modern design that their own works have inspired countless contemporary imitators—something Charles himself might have appreciated. “To be realistic,” Charles Eames once said, “one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before.”
/.../
Much of their impact is harder to trace: The designer Dieter Rams, whose work for Braun is unmistakably felt in the work of Apple’s chief designer, Jonathan Ive, has credited them as an influence, and certainly Apple’s synergy of form and function, lightness of spirit, and commitment to process borrows heavily from the Eamesian model. Their belief that everyday objects can both define and provide meaning makes them one of the most enduring creative forces of the 20th century. They predicted the future even if they couldn’t describe it. “What is the future of design?” Madame L’Amic asked Charles Eames at the end of their Q&A. His response: a montage of images featuring fruit, plants, and flowers, as if to point at how the encapsulation of function and beauty has really been all around us, all along.

courtesy: theatlantic.com

read all at: www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/charles-and-ray-eames-beyond-the-chair/415764/

Ron Frank dies at 84: Long Beach furnishings store was on modernism's leading edge.

Ron Frank, whose knowledge and savvy marketing of modern design helped keep his family's iconic Long Beach furnishings store in the vanguard of a powerful movement for 50 years, has died. He was 84.
Until Frank Bros. came along in the late 1930s, Long Beach wasn't known as a hotbed of modernism. But from their store on Long Beach Boulevard, the Franks — starting with Ron's father Maurice and uncle Ed — educated a broad public about the progressive aesthetic behind midcentury modern style.
Ron Frank took over the business in the mid-1960s and kept it on the leading edge for the next three decades with sophisticated promotion and marketing. He was particularly known for mounting playful in-store exhibitions that showcased the latest trends, including plastic, vinyl and inflatable furniture as well as the work of his friends Charles and Ray Eames.
"He had a thoughtful way of getting people interested in contemporary design," said Cara Mullio, who wrote "Long Beach Architecture: The Unexpected Metropolis" with Jennifer Volland and is co-curating an exhibition on Frank Bros. at Cal State Long Beach's University Art Museum that will open in 2017.
"His approach wasn't just here's some furniture … in a stagnant display. It was 'Let's have Eames chairs flying from the ceiling. Let's engage people in a very three-dimensional way,'" Mullio said. "Ron Frank definitely had a business sensibility, but coupled with that he was very creative."
Frank was the third generation of his family in the furniture business. His grandfather, Louis Frank, sold new and used furniture and appliances with his son Maurice at Frank & Son, founded in 1930 in a converted bus barn.
Frank Bros. was born in 1938 when the elder Frank retired and his other son, Ed, joined Maurice and persuaded him to focus on contemporary furnishings.
Their store — one of the first in the country to showcase Scandinavian furniture — became an engine for spreading the modernist ethic. Through Ed Frank's friendship with John Entenza, the publisher and editor of the influential magazine Arts & Architecture, Frank Bros. provided the furnishings for the Case Study houses, the influential experiments in residential design directed by Entenza and executed by such leading architects as Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano and Pierre Koenig.
Ron Frank joined the business after completing his military service in 1954. In 1965 he took over the retail operation when his uncle Ed left to run Moreddi, the manufacturing and importing division.
By then, Frank was well-grounded in every aspect of the business. "He had chores there as a kid," said his daughter, Marni Good, who confirmed her father's death Wednesday at his Long Beach home from Parkinson's disease.
Born in Long Beach on Jan. 31, 1931, Frank attended Polytechnic High School before earning a business degree from USC in 1952. He spent two years in the Army, stationed at Ft. Ord and later in Germany, where he worked as a typist and cartoonist for a military newspaper.
At Frank Bros., he found an artistic outlet in producing witty copy for ads that ran in Arts & Architecture. In the late 1960s he began organizing shows that attracted a diverse clientele from around the Southland.
One of his shows, "The Emotional Eye" in 1970, featured a 6-foot-wide beanbag chair in a room painted black. The exhibits were a way to show people that furniture was about more than function.
"He had the ability to really give the user an enjoyment of life," said Peter Loughrey, the founder and owner of Los Angeles Modern Auctions, which specializes in modern art and design. "If you knew Ron, he always had a smile, a twinkle in his eye. That wasn't lost on Frank Bros. clients. It wasn't just an Eames chair you were buying, but you were buying a kind of optimism. If you were shopping at Frank Bros., you were shopping for optimism."
Frank's exhibitions and other innovations drew customers who were well-heeled as well as many who sought sophisticated decor on smaller budgets. For the latter group he introduced a layaway program and sold good copies of designer furnishings next to the originals.
"We were probably the only store in the United States where you could have a genuine Eames chair and a copy" side by side, he said in a video interview for the Getty Research Institute in 2013.
Many customers chose the original if they could afford it, but Frank was happy if someone on a schoolteacher's salary, for instance, chose the less expensive knock-off.
"He would give choices so that people who were very interested in contemporary design but couldn't afford it could still have it," Nancy Frank, his wife of 53 years, said in an interview Thursday. "It was very progressive at the time."
Besides his wife and daughter, Frank is survived by a son, Brian Maurice Frank; and four grandchildren.
In 1982 Frank sold the business to the Danica furniture company. He retained ownership of the building, but it was destroyed in a fire during the 1992 riots that followed the Rodney King verdict.
Frank preserved hundreds of Frank Bros. catalogs, ads, photographs, correspondence and other ephemera spanning the 52-year history of the family business. In 2009 he donated the archive to the Getty Research Institute, which regards the material as an important addition to its project documenting the tastemakers of midcentury design.
"We didn't have a tremendous amount of material about the interior design and vision," said Marcia Reed, chief curator at the Getty institute. "This really gives the back story on the vision that Ed, Maurice and Ron Frank put forward.

"The first Frank Bros. store in Long Beach. The store — one of the first in the country to showcase Scandinavian furniture — became an engine for spreading the modernist ethic.

Courtesy Los Angeles Time
Read all at: http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-ron-frank-20151115-story.html

Paris | Friday, November 13, 2015

courtesy: Banksy

Eames Hang It All - Vitra Black Collection

As you probably know, this midcentury classic dates back to 1953, a playful piece with a purpose - to encourage children to pick up their clothes and hang them up. It appealed to kids and of course, adults too in its original colourful finish.
Now it is back as part of the "Vitra Black Collection" on both black and and brown (aka chocolate). The black version has a powder-coated, steel-wire frame with wooden rollers in black ash with the brown version also using a powder-coated steel-wire frame, but with wooden rollers in walnut.

Highlights from Barbican Center, London

News: The new Brooklin Museum of food and drink is part Willy Wonka, part Eameses.

Before this week, the Museum of Food and Drink was largely conceptual. In the mind of Dave Arnold, an author, food history obsessive, and the founder of groundbreaking New York City bar Booker & Dax, MOFAD was not only already built, it had already begun planning future exhibits that could tour the country and enchant the public.
But MOFAD had to first open, which it did earlier this week. The 3,000-square-foot space in the heart of Williamsburg (it used to house a parking garage), on which the museum holds a five-year lease, is far removed from the museums of elementary school class trips. "We wanted MOFAD to look like Willy Wonka meets the Eameses" says Peter Kim, the museum's executive director.
The launch has been promised ever since Arnold birthed a Kickstarter in 2013 to raise funds for a MOFAD pop-up. Those contributions helped build MOFAD's first exhibit, a pop-up called 'BOOM! The Puffing Gun and the Rise of Breakfast Cereal,' but Arnold wanted to establish a permanent brick-and-mortar location for his culinary deep dives.
"We are not a science museum," he told. "Science is just a lens. We are concept- and experience-driven, and we wanted to showcase the grand story of how our food system got to be the way it is."
The first exhibit, titled 'Flavor: Making It and Faking It,' is an expansive look at the modern age of the flavor industry, which began in the late 19th century when German chemists discovered vanillin, the primary chemical compound of the vanilla bean. When the MOFAD team first began to workshop ideas, which also included an opening exhibit on food on the battlefield or a look at food from farm to toilet (says Kim, "That didn't seem like the best first course"), the concept of flavor was much more broadly defined.

By Matt GilesRead all at: www.popsci.com/mofad-explores-25-billion-flavor-industry

News: "Silicon City: Computer History Made in New York"

“Silicon City: Computer History Made in New York", opening Friday, Nov. 13, is an exhibition at the New York Historical Society that charts the area’s rise as a technology hub from the 19th century to the 1980s.
“Silicon City,” begins with Samuel Morse’s telegraph and the many wonders that sprang from Thomas Edison’s New Jersey laboratories. In contrast to Silicon Valley (which was still largely made up of fruit orchards as late as the 1960s), such early inventions did not lead to wave after wave of entrepreneurial innovation. Instead they gave rise to vast, monopolistic or quasimonopolistic enterprises that helped define 20th-century America — chief among them IBM and AT&T. But during the ’60s, improbably enough, this spawned a fusion of art and technology that could only have begun in New York.
IBM is represented in “Silicon City” by such artifacts as a System/360 computer, from a line of mainframes that revolutionized the industry in the ’60s, and the groundbreaking film “THINK” that Charles and Ray Eames produced for the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

The “Egg,” a multiscreen installation recalling the IBM Pavilion’s oval theater at the 1964 World Fair, at the "Silicon City" exhibition at the New-York Historical Society.CreditRead all at: www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/arts/design/the-big-bang-of-art-and-tech-in-new-york.html?_r=0

The “Egg,” a multiscreen installation recalling the IBM Pavilion’s oval theater at the 1964 World Fair, at the "Silicon City".

Courtesy: Emon Hassan for The New York Times.

 

News: 'Peanuts' Creator Charles M. Schulz Makes It Into California Hall of Fame near Eameses

The man behind beloved characters like Charlie Brown and Snoopy joins inductees Charles & Ray Eames and many others.

*   *   *

“Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz officially made it into the California Hall of Fame Wednesday night, joining seven other California notables in the ninth class to be inducted.
Best known for the iconic comic strip which is slated to become a state license plate when enough takers purchase the Snoopy-laden plate, Schulz lived and worked in California from 1958 til his passing in 2000.
To this day, the “Peanuts” comic strip holds a beloved place in the hearts of young and old alike, bridging generations and cultures with its timeless antics and heartfelt messages.
Schulz, who lived in Santa Rosa, CA most of his life was honored with the Spirit of California medal along with Charles & Ray Eames and many others.

This year’s medal recipients join 88 Californians previously inducted into the California Hall of Fame for contributions to the worlds of art, science, literature, activism, technology, philanthropy, entertainment, business and sports.

Courtesy: United Feature Syndicate - Peanuts

Parallels: "Day of the Dead" in Eameses and James Bond's Spectre.

Ph. courtesy Warner Bros. (2015) and Eames Office (1957).