An artist is a title that you earn and that it's a little embarrassing to hear people refer to themselves as artists. It's like referring to themselves as a genius. This was a man who was a Merlin of curiosity. He was driven by his curiosity.
We weren't sure quite what he was. Was he an architect? Was he a designer?
Was he a filmmaker? But what he was, obviously, was something we all wanted to be. I had some changes of painter, but when we were working on the furniture, again in film, it never seemed like leaving painting in any way, because it was just another form.
She made paintings out of what she was surrounded by. Everything she touched, she turned into something magical. Everything that they did in design, she saw as an extension of her painting. Everything they did in design, he saw as an extension of his architecture.
For them, these names like painter and architect, they weren't job descriptions. They were ways of looking at the world. They were introducing people to look at the world differently. Life was fun was work was fun was life. People would say it was childlike behavior, but what's wrong with that?
It seems as if they've put all this joy back in life. You know, that modernism, let's face it, was getting boring. And they just designed the furniture, they'd be in the Pantheon.
It's the multifaceted nature of the career that is extraordinary. They give shape to America's 20th century. I came from an architectural office where there were individual tables with a conference room, and there was carpet on the floor, there were lights, we had drafting tables, and all the equipment that you needed, etc., etc. I walk into Eames'office, and it was like walking into a circus. I walked in the door and of course I immediately thought, got any jobs here?
I'm just totally blown away by the patina on every surface of graphics and there were models everywhere and there was just stuff. I was just overwhelmed. I saw this incredible apparition of animation stands and photographs spread out on tables, models being lit for photography, a screening room, and a wonderful wood shop, saltwater tanks.
There were seams chairs with Steinberg drawings on them. Every kind of visual treat you can imagine. And I thought, I've come to work in Disneyland. If you had to take the roof off of it, you'd see that place changing constantly.
So we just go around and take everything out of the middle of the studio to put up a movie set to take pictures tomorrow, and then the next day you take out all the movie set and put the tables all back up and everybody's back at work again. It was very informal. I mean, there wasn't ever any kind of routine.
There were no, quote, regular meetings. Because I did not have a design degree, many of the people in the office thought I probably shouldn't be there. But Charles had a different attitude.
And he said this to me, I can teach you how to draw. If you can think and you can see, and you can prove that to me, you can work here. For four decades, 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice Beach, California, was one of the most creative addresses on earth. Dozens of gifted young designers cut their teeth within the walls of the studio. But the vision for the office came from the top.
Modern design was born from the marriage of art and industry. The Eames office was born from the marriage of Ray Kaiser, a painter who rarely painted, and Charles Eames, an architecture school dropout who never got his license. Eventually, everything connects, Charles said.
Furniture, toys, architecture, exhibitions, photography, and film were all connected in the wild, whimsical world of the Eames office. Charles and Ray Eames wanted to bring the most magnificent experiences that you could have with your eyes to the largest number of people. I don't think there's anything more important.
For an artist to want to do. It was a career that defined what it means to be a designer. And it all began with a chair.
Charles, where did the classic Eames chair come from? Did it come to you in a flash as you were shaving one morning? It sort of came to me in a 30-year flash.
Time magazine called it the greatest design of the 20th century. But it didn't start out that way. It began as a failure.
Responding to a competition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940, two unknown young architects, Charles Eames and his friend, Eero Saarinen, set out to reinvent the very idea of the chair. The goal is to create... An inexpensive, mass-produced chair which is well designed and which is molded to the body because it doesn't need a lot of upholstery, which is A, old-fashioned, and B, expensive. Upholstery is what Louis XIV did. Working at the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, Eames and Saarinen thought they could mold the new miracle material, plywood, into two directions at once to make a comfortable, form-fitting shell.
The critical... point is where that back becomes the seat. The glues aren't good enough and the chair splinters, which means when you'd sit on it, you know, it would be a little uncomfortable, so they have to upholster it.
Despite failing at their goal of creating a single piece plywood shell, Charles and Arrow won the competition. The irony is that the chair that Eames and Sarine designed They couldn't really manufacture. Even with the upholstery to cover the cracked surface, no existing machine could successfully mold the plywood into the shape of the chair.
It couldn't be made in the way that they claimed it could be made. They designed the look of it without designing the substance of it. After many unsuccessful attempts, Eero Saarinen scrapped the project. But Charles wasn't ready to give up. This time...
with a new partner. At Cranbrook, he had become friendly with Ray Kaiser, a talented young artist who had helped with the chair project. I said to Ray one day, how did you and Charles get together? Oh, I can't talk about it.
I said, well, why not? He said, well, we just did. They sparked, and the rest is literally history.
And I think in Ray, he really found his complement. But there was a problem. Charles was already married. He had moved up to Cranbrook from St. Louis with his wife Catherine and his young daughter Lucia. The love letters are Charles'letters to Ray because the letters that Ray wrote back to Charles, Charles destroyed because he was married.
They show Charles Madley in love with her, there's no doubt about that. He talks about walking past the building that she used to look in and looking up at her window and they are very moving. Those letters are talking about a joint future as artists together.
I think his decision feels made. Ray sadly felt uncomfortable enough to leave Cranbrook and go away and think about what she was going to do thereafter. Catherine was a very impressive person.
Knowing them both, as I did, you can see why they didn't stay together. He really thought he had something to offer the world. And this was going to be a journey with a lot of unexpectedness. This was a journey that might not lead to success. And I think that maybe at that point in her life, this was not necessarily the place that Catherine wanted to go.
But I think that maybe in Charles's mind, that he had wanted a life where love and work and life and work were all blended together. Charles quit his job at Cranbrook, and in one last letter to Ray, asked for her hand in marriage. His future with his new bride now depended on making the chair work. Broke and short on options, Charles and Ray headed from Michigan to LA to finish what he had started.
Part of this journey to California was they were both going to figure out how to mass-produce mold and plywood and compound curves, which sounds very unromantic, but I think it probably was pretty romantic under the circumstances. In their two-bedroom apartment in Westwood Village, Charles and Ray set up a makeshift workshop. We built the first tool that did the molding, which was so magic, we called it by a magic name.
We still call it a kazam. The kazam machine was a jerry-rigged molding device made out of heating coils and a bicycle pump. But in 1942, with the nation at war, raw materials were scarce.
And the kazam lay silent. But with a setback, there was also opportunity. The U.S. military needed better splints.
The standard issue splint was metallic, and so the vibration of the two people carrying them actually would make the wound worse. They would actually be better off if you grabbed a stick off the ground and tied it to it than with this amplification. So Charles and Ray said, well, you know, we're experimenting with molded plywood.
Why don't we try to design a new splint? They're trying to make a three-dimensional curve, kind of a bowl, you might say. They can't quite do it yet. So they need holes in the plywood in order to release the tension because otherwise it's going to splinter where they try to do it.
But working within the constraints, what's nice is that this is exactly what you need for a splint because you need a place for the bandages to go. In a rented warehouse space. Their team of skilled designers and craftspeople made 150,000 splints. With peace approaching, Charles and Ray had one thing on their minds, applying the lessons of the splints to the failed plywood chairs.
This time, they wouldn't design the look of the chair first. They would never make that mistake again. They would let the design flow from the learning.
That meant knowing who they were serving. In Charles's words, it was always about being a good host to their guests. The people we wanted to serve were varied, and to begin with, we studied the shapes and postures of many types, averages and extremes. But it was more than just a search for the best chair design. It was the beginning of the Eames design process, a process of learning by doing.
In the design of any structure, it is often the connection that provides the key to the solution. Never delegate understanding, Charles said. It would become a hallmark of Eames'design, their secret ingredient.
Joe said, yeah, there's a secret. First you have an idea, then you discard the idea. Then you have 50 other ideas and you discard them. And then you do several models and they don't work and you throw them out.
And the secret is work and work and work and work and work. The plywood furniture was good to go in 1946. Charles said of the furniture, we wanted to make the best for the most, for the least. That sentiment struck a chord with the Herman Miller Furniture Company.
Honest and simple in its use of materials, the plywood furniture was also affordable for the common man. Together, They would become one of the great success stories of the post-war era. Charles and Ray Eames provide much of the furniture for an kind of upper middle class, educated audience moving to suburbia. When the Second World War ended, it wasn't just five years of pent-up demand.
It was actually almost 15 years, because you also have 10 years of the Depression. And people have much more money, so if you wanted to sort of do something different than your parents, you bought that Eames furniture. And it was promoted that way. Everything around the marketing suggested, here is something new for a new society.
And America was a new society in 45. In the decades to follow, Charles and Ray scored success with line after line of Eames furniture. and their unmistakable designs became a ubiquitous part of American culture, right up to today. Sold for $900,232.
I think the work retains a real freshness. The elements of it still inform contemporary design today. $21,500? The rightness of the furniture will continue to appeal to new generations. The word Eames has now become a generic word.
If you go on eBay, it always says Eames era blah, blah, blah. So it's become a word like Victorian. Maybe it's in a way accurate because just like Queen Victoria represents an attitude, Eames also embodies that.
bodies, a certain approach to life and to thinking. By the early 50s, Charles had grown an outsized reputation as an icon of modernism, fighting to inject an ethical dimension into American capitalism. At that price, the customer knows exactly what he's going to get.
This? In MGM's executive suite, William Holden stars as a curiously Charles Eames-like furniture designer. We'll have a line of low-priced furniture, a new and different line.
As different from anything we're making today as a modern automobile is different from a covered wagon. In the outside world, Charles'reputation may have grown larger than life. But within the Eames office, there was always the lingering question of credit.
There are still some sore issues among certain people who feel they never were recognized as much as they should. But... It's a very delicate issue. The issue came to a head back in 1946 at the unveiling of the original Eames chair when the Museum of Modern Art gave Charles a one-man show.
MoMA gives the name Charles Eames, and this causes a certain tension in the office because it was thought to be a collaborative effort. It's not that he's swooping in there and is doing nothing and scarfing up all the credit, but he is not the only designer that was involved. This happens all the time. A group of young people co-creating and influencing each other and inspiring each other, and then the question is, who did what? One of the last projects I worked on was Day of the Dead, the film.
I was down in Mexico helping. with that film, shooting, gathering objects, and setting the type. And I wrote, assistance in Mexico. And I wrote, the names of the people.
So Charles came by my desk and said, what is that? And I said, but we worked on it, didn't we? I went to New York many, many times, putting the Time Life Lobbies together, and Charles never went.
and saw them while the things were being constructed. But I could never say that I designed anything at the Eames office. I never saw anything come out of there that was not signatured, you know, by him and Ray. When a product comes out, it's a river.
It starts at one point and it ends at another point. Many people jump into it along the way. Everybody contributes a small piece, but only if they go on after that to produce a stunning amount of work. I think, are they capable of saying, I did this, this, and this in the Eames office with no credit? I think he ran the office a bit like a Renaissance studio.
You know, there's a master painter, but then there are all the other people who help realize the work. He may have... been exploiting us but if you are not stupid you are also exploiting that relationship I was happy being exploited by a proper master the most wonderful work is is the conscience and the talents of a person who have every right to have their name on it even though it's done by millions of other people. Things good and bad, he rightfully has his name on them, and they rightfully are Charles Eames or Charles and Ray Eames products.
Almost always when there's a successful man, there is a very interesting and able woman behind him. And a better case could seldom be found than in Ray and Charles Eames. Come on in, Ray.
Hello, I'm so happy to see you. This is Mrs. Eames, and she's going to tell us how she helps Charles design these chairs. How do you manage that? Well, aside from serving as an extreme in the testing, there are a million things. But I think the most difficult thing is to keep the big idea, to be able to look critically at the work.
Arlene Francis is clearly having a hard time with this. Husband and wife working together. You know, this is the era of madmen, as we're watching now. This is not fitting, and Charles Eames is trying to promote Ray Eames and saying that we collaborated on this. Well, Ray was a painter.
Ray worked here in New York with Hans Hoffman for a long time. This is a pretty good start. I actually thought Charles was more embarrassed than Ray.
Ray is hidden away. Charles is being highlighted, the great male designer. It's a very interesting moment of American sexual politics in the 1950s. I wonder if you're going to maybe take us through and show how the Eames chair has developed.
And Ray, shall we let Charles do it? Do you want to help with it? No, you see, as I told you, she is behind the man, but terribly important. Thank you, Ray.
All right, Charles. The feminist conscience had not been yet raised. Ray would. Always stand behind Charles. And on camera or in interviews, she said hardly anything.
Her warm but quiet conversation shrank to total silence before the camera, but her impact on Eames'work spoke for her. She sat like a delicious dumpling in a doll's dress, concentrating on a sweep of subjects which would seemingly choke a computer. People always made the mistake that Charles and Ray, it was two brothers. They were a married couple. Well, at the same time, they were partners in whatever their design effort was.
Ray felt, I think, deeply enraged and hurt on occasion when it was assumed that it was actually just Charles'business and it was the office of Charles Eames, not the office of Charles and Ray Eames. It was Charles who was in charge, but the body of work would not have been the same without Ray's contributions. And how you separate that out, I don't know.
If the public saw Ray as little more than the devoted wife supporting her husband, Charles saw a talented artist who had participated in the birth of abstract art in America. Her mentor was the German abstract expressionist Hans Hoffmann. Hoffman is one of the great catalytic figures in American art.
He starts a school in New York City in 1933, with at times no more than a dozen or two students. They together are the seed out of which the new American art really grows. He was getting ideas from people like Mondrian, Paul Klee, Kandinsky.
But he was communicating them not as textbook learning, but as this incredibly visceral sensation. And I have talked to people who remember him walking into the studio and looking at a drawing of theirs and tearing it down the middle, and then taking the two parts and moving them. And then suddenly something that had been very static was dynamic.
So I think it's there that Ray learned some at least of this wonderful capacity that she had for collaging, for juxtaposition. She can move things around very, very easily and beautifully and find form and then find form in relation to other form. Ray knew what was art and what was not.
And Shaws depended on her aesthetic genius. And she would put objects on chutes that would just bring the whole thing to life. By putting the stack of black wire chairs naked with the wooden bird with the little wire legs, gave you a very different feeling about those chairs.
Charles could not deal with the idea that any of the furniture would have color on it. If you put a palette of colors in front of him, it's just like he couldn't handle it. It just went over his head.
He deferred to her completely on color sense. She saw everything as a painting. She had these enormous eyes that were, they were open like this all the time.
And I think Charles was very dependent on that. You could just hear him say, Ray, which meant come and help. At the Library of Congress, Ray's letters to a traveling Charles show her fastidious attention to every detail of their life and work. When she writes to Charles in Paris, and she's talking about the slides that he's just taken, and she has the sketch showing how she and Sandro and Don Albinson have changed the chair.
And then she's going on about the films, and she's going about... Elmer Bernstein. Then she tells him all the places to shop in Paris and where to get his shoes and where to get her gloves and what the stitching should be like on the gloves and how this perfume by Balmain is $55 an ounce here, but it's cheaper in Paris and please get it for me.
It was as if they were one individual with two different special areas and a lot of it was unspoken. Just eye contact, a nodding of something, an idea that they... that they both would agree on. So that's how you begin to separate their artistic personalities and their contributions. But the separating them isn't the important part.
It's what they created together. That's why it's so good. Perhaps the greatest Eames design of all was the image of Charles and Ray.
Their playful self-portraits, eccentric dress, and quotable quotes all contributed to the endearing picture of a happy, modern couple absorbed in the challenges of their work. Charles and Ray were cultural icons, but their public face masked the deep desire for privacy. After long hours at 901, they would retreat to the home they built in Pacific Palisades. Charles and Ray were their own community, and we were in the satellite group, and so was everybody else.
I had no sense that they were trying to keep out the outside world or anything else. They had created a world and a lifestyle that just required them to go in this tunnel from their house. to the work, you know, back home again.
So what you surround yourself with and the choices you make about where you live and how you live and the artifacts you have, they're all based upon trying to create a seamless environment and a seamless life. Originally, the house was designed by Charles with AeroSerenin as part of the influential case study housing program in 1945. But Charles and Ray were not ones to let a good design rest. Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen designed a house that we now call the Bridge House and it was for this site. It would have cantilevered from the hillside out into the middle of the meadow.
One of the ideas of the house was to use technologies that had come out of the war effort. So all the parts of this house were off the shelf. But the Bridge House was never built. After World War II, there were major material shortages.
It took about two or three years to even get the parts that they had ordered. And in that time, Charles and Ray fell in love with this meadow. We spent all our spare time here.
We began to think it would be a criminal to put that house in the middle of the field. Charles realized, oh, we're making the classic architect's mistake. You find a beautiful site and you plunk a house in the middle of it. With the meadow in mind, Charles and Ray redesigned the bridge house and began construction. It was relatively quick because they were relying on some form of prefabrication, of bringing materials to the site and assembling them.
On Christmas Eve 1949, Charles and Ray moved in. The Eames House in Los Angeles on that bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is surely one of the great buildings of the 20th century. Known to architectural historians as case study house number eight, it is the archetypal modern house, or at least it started that way.
The Eames house as it was first made is very different from what it became as they lived in it through the years and as it acquired all their little touches. I think people miss that unless you've really been there and been inside of it. Now, do you remember this? Do you remember this?
I do. I do. I don't remember this one here, but there was at least one at the office.
Modern design has this sort of cliche of being the homes of super villains. Very hard-edged things. You can't have your Pepperidge Farm cookies on the kitchen counter because that's gonna ruin this perfect tableau of this perfect life that you live. But you would never look at the Eames house and think that.
The container for your life can be simple, but that doesn't mean your life has to be simple. What was in the house was a combination of things that one hadn't seen before. There was a tumbleweed hanging from the ceiling.
Well now you can see a lot of tumbleweed around in people's houses, but in those days it was... And near the tumbleweed hanging from the ceiling... There were two Hans Hoffman paintings suspended from the deck of the room. The floor was just another canvas for a ceiling was just another canvas.
A sofa was a canvas for a collage of objects. She would have entirely all of her famous blue and white dishes stacked up, but she would have little red hearts or little red accents. It was all.
Perfect. I went to dinner at Ray and Charles'house one night, and it came to dessert. So what they had arranged for dessert was three bowls of flowers that they put in front of you to admire, so it was a visual dessert.
I was really fucked off with that. I can tell you. I was really, because I hadn't eaten much, I was saving up for this. So I'm looking at these stupid flowers, you know.
I say, what the hell is wrong with these people? You know, I say, I got my car and I drove out to the nearest Dairy Queen. Take your pleasure seriously, Charles said.
And that's exactly what they did. Every time the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus would come to town, we would all get out our cameras and our ectochrome, and we'd go running downtown, and we'd photograph the circus. And he said, photograph. What?
He said, anything you want to, just photograph. And a couple of people in the audience were there to feed you. It was like a machine gun. Somebody was feeding you the cartridges. And I took a lot of pictures.
What impressed him was how everybody knew their place. And sometimes they had two or three different tasks that they had to do. The circus looks like a free-for-all and is absolutely a model of constraints.
And for Charles, this was one supreme example. The performance. Never let the blood show, he would say.
And this went back to his philosophy of no good design, no good performance without restrictions, without restraints, without rules. He goes to the circus and he just is overwhelmed by the richness of... Everything, you know, the costumes and the wagons and the tent.
And he comes back and he's trying to, you can't turn a circus into a piece of furniture, but he's desperately wanting to. Charles and Ray did not turn the circus into a chair, but they did turn the Eames office into a circus. He wasn't embarrassed at all about what it is that he was doing. You know, he felt really confident about, yeah, this is a toy shop.
I'm just having fun here. And somehow or other, you guys bring me money and tell me to go ahead, and I'm going to. Royalties from Herman Miller gave Charles the freedom to move beyond his reputation as a designer of modern furniture. Herman Miller was always after him to do more chairs and he would do chairs every now and then, but I don't think he liked to think of himself or have others think of him as the chair designer.
I was a film critic, and that gave me an excuse to go down to 901. I fell in love with the whole concept of 901, which is a kind of renaissance art workshop, where they did everything. At the time, he was considered a kind of cutesy-passé little filmmaker, but no one had ever written about the films. James'films are their own genre.
The product not of a film studio concerned with profits, but of a curious mind yearning to communicate the complex beauty of everyday objects. We've never used film as an art form. We just use film as a tool. They were, at heart, a kind of mixture of vanity and self-expression. They only had one obligation, and that was to satisfy Charles.
Much of our energy is like the guy in vaudeville that has the plates going, and he's intent on getting 30 plates spinning at one time, but part of the process is quickly being aware of the ones that are winding down and even them spinning. One of the titles that began to circulate within all the employees was the Emory, because it was like this place where everyone was driven to work all the time. It was 24-7, 365. Going to the Eames office and watching people at their desk was like watching people take their brains out and knead them like dough.
People that came from the outside couldn't believe that this was the way things were done. But it was a delicious agony. It was like a temple for me. Many of us understood very well that we were very poorly suited for employment in certain kinds of jobs. We were very well suited to be there.
Charles had a terrible time interacting with people. Several times, I hired people, and they would be there like three days, and he'd come to me, he'd say, I just can't stand that guy. Get him out of here. And I never did know what it was that he saw in that person that he just could not work with them. I happen to have a sort of an interest in language as a mean of communication, which I like to believe can be simple and direct.
Charles, I would say, didn't subscribe to that. Now we have to, the only thing is, we have to have some sort of a background before we do this because one sort of ability to surround every subject with a little cloud of words. We were hoping to...
There were two, there were several things. You finally got the message at the end of about 15 or 20 minutes of wondering what the hell is he talking about. It finally dawned on you that he was telling you you were an absolute clown because there's something wrong.
This one is going to have something to do with what I think of as the new covetables. He appeared one day at a conference at UCLA and he started to speak and it just ran right off the track. He looked up and he said, I'm sorry, I just isn't going to work today. And somebody said, no, no. So he said, well, give me a minute.
He put his head down, and everybody waited. And it took about two minutes, and he raised up, and he just took off. Boom!
Reams of paper. What you do with a ream of paper can never quite come up to what the paper offers. He knew where his center was, and there are not a lot of people that can do that.
I have buttons that get pushed, but I don't know where my center is. For Charles, knowing where his center was meant working for powerful clients without compromising his ideals. And making a film to represent the United States in communist Russia in 1959 would put that philosophy to the test.
At the height of the Cold War, the American government and the government of the Soviet Union decided to hold joint expositions. The United States would show what America was about to the Soviet public, and the Soviet Union would show what they were about to America. And one of the centerpieces were a series of American kitchens, and it was there that Khrushchev and Nixon had their so-called kitchen debate.
There are some instances where you may be ahead of us. There may be some instances, for example, color television, where we're ahead of you. But in order for both of us, for both of us to benefit, for both of us to benefit.
But the U.S. Information Agency decided that they had to show Russians more about America than just cars and household appliances. The idea is that Charles and Ray will make a film about Life in the USA, glimpses of the USA. How could you make the world as we see it in the United States, how could you make it really credible to an audience like that?
We could have shown the greatest freeway in the United States. If we'd shown one picture and it had gone, they would say, you know, they've got a great freeway interchange, but we've got one at Minsk and we're going to build one at Maljansk and we'll have two and they have one. But in the...
The redundancy of the multi-image technique, in something like 12 seconds, I think we showed 120 freeway interchanges. People were sent all over the country, friends were called, to take images so that it looked nationalistic. It couldn't look specific and regional. It had to be national and egalitarian. Charles wanted pictures of people setting off for work, children coming from school, coming up from the subway, and freeways.
So I did my first, you know, helicopter flights, sort of strapped in, leaning way out. I think the State Department had sort of envisioned having lots of troop marches, and Charles said he'd do the film, but he didn't. I wanted to have it reviewed before it was shown. The government really didn't have any idea what was happening.
We would have these showings for the guy who would represent the government coming out. It seemed like each time it would just get going and then it'd go blank. And we'd say, that's as far as we are right now. And he said, well, yeah, I guess it looks okay. I don't know.
And so he'd go away. Well, as Charles said, sometimes if you don't ask for people's opinions, then they don't give them to you. They just got there the day before, and I think by that time, the USIA was just relieved that there'd be anything to show. And here you have this giant effort that had gone into building the building and putting the screens up and tickets being sent. All of that happening and he's waiting until the very last minute.
It's just kind of his nature. It was right at the end, Hugh, suddenly appear. And it would look like it was effortless.
He'd say, you know, this is just a little something we've been doing. And there would be blood all over the floor from the thing, you know. When we look at the night sky, these are the stars we see. The same stars that shine down upon Russia each night.
We see the same clusters, the same nebula. And from the sky, it would be difficult to distinguish the Russian city from the American city. If you're going to communicate with 3 million Soviet citizens, you need to say something true. You can't just show off you've got better weapons or this or that.
You've got to try to speak from the heart. And they did. It was a propaganda. Goodness, yes. Have you seen it?
Yes, it's selling the U.S. and it's selling, I think, a very sanitized USA. Of course it was propaganda. They were cold warriors. The difference is that I believe they genuinely believed it.
One of the interesting things was how to end this. Charles had this idea of a jet plane. Ray still felt this might be a bit hard-aged, a bit...
could have military implications. We never had an ending. And one day Ray walked in and said, Forget-me-nots.
Charles said, OK, forget-me-nots. Forget-me-nots. The universal symbol of friendship. Translates directly into Russian, НЕЕЗАБУДКИ, forget me not. They describe Nikita Khrushchev with tears running down his cheeks.
So you have this wonderful sort of double ending of the simplicity of the flower, but then this forget-me-not, and it worked like the best Hollywood movie. The Moscow show made Charles and Ray newly famous, not as designers of furniture, but as communicators. Communicators who used images rather than words. Charles was very wary of words.
It's not about writing a script, it's about a sequence of images that can tell a story. In the Eames film Tops, there are no words, just pictures. In a way, the film is a kind of an essay about the nature and meaning of a top.
In the beginning, it's all about winding up, getting started, putting it together, assembling the materials. And then it's about throwing them, seeing how they work, what they do, how they dance, how they spin, how they sing, whatever it is that their meaning is. But then you come to one moment where there's an architectural plan on the tabletop, a blueprint, and what spins is the thumbtack.
And you realize you have suddenly gotten directly into the essence of what it means to be a top. Things have meaning, things have personality, things express ideas. Many designers were and still are happy with the manipulation of objects.
He was only truly deeply happy manipulating an idea. Beginning in the 1950s, the idea of the computer triggered fear in the minds of Americans. People were seeing computers and there was a worry about them.
And this notion of the electronic brain feeds into fears that we're going to be taken over by machines. At the time, computers were synonymous with just one company, IBM. What was IBM's product? Big vacuum tube machines, huge room-sized machines, building-sized machines, so that the average individual was feeling this is an alien, science-fiction-type invasion of my privacy.
How do you combat that? IBM turned to the Eames office. To overcome the computer's PR problem, Charles and Ray set out to humanize it.
Properly related, it can maintain a balance between man's needs and his resources. It's done in this, what to us today looks really corny. But at the time, this was thought to be radical to do a film for a science company like a cartoon.
Something has now emerged that might make even our most elegant theories workable. And you go from the abacus as human problems become more complex. People invent more complicated machines to solve those problems, and the culmination of that is the computer. This is a story of a technique in the service of mankind.
It's not going to take over the world, it's not going to be robots. It's the logical evolutionary progression of man developing products to solve problems. Charles'visionary interest in computers helped to bring IBM into the Eames office stables. But it was not expertise that made Charles and Ray indispensable to the rapidly growing company.
You sell your expertise, you have a limited repertoire. You sell your ignorance, it's an unlimited repertoire. He was selling his ignorance and his desire to learn about a subject. And the journey of him not knowing to knowing was his work. Over two decades, Charles and Ray would complete dozens of projects, large and small, for IBM.
But perhaps the most bold was their pavilion for the 1964 New York World's Fair, a 1.2-acre experimental space celebrating the role of computers in everyday life. I was drawing this stuff as fast as he could. conjure it up. And they came up with this idea of putting that theater up on top of these trees. And so I knew they're gonna have these plungers going into the ground, they're gonna move, you know, 400 people up on this ramp.
And I knew, as a designer, I knew I was gonna have to figure out some way to make all that happen. And he's just so excited about this thing, and then I'm just standing there like that. And I said, Charles, this is just nuts.
And he says, yeah, and no one has told us not to do it. For the show in Moscow, they had used seven screens. But at the IBM Pavilion, there were 22. Charles was very big on making people feel welcome.
You don't just get them in an auditorium and show the film. You have a host. But it was very hard.
Everything you said not only had to be memorized and rehearsed, but it had to be timed so when you pointed to this screen, what you were talking about appeared on this screen, and the same with that screen and all the others. But the problem was the host had a nervous breakdown. As Charles and Ray's reputation as visual communicators grew, so did their list of corporate clients. Anna's for... Navigation equipment, network protectors, nuclear plant control, nuclear reactor plants for surface ships and submarines.
Westinghouse, Boeing, and Polaroid all trusted the Eames office to solve their problems. When the office was hired by Alcoa to show off the uses of aluminum, they built a solar-powered do-nothing machine, which did exactly that. That was in the golden years when the heads of corporations would speak a chair away from the designer.
So that if you needed to talk to somebody, you talked to the decision maker. You didn't talk to a manager who talked to a director who talked to a chief director who talked to a vice president who talked to a senior vice president who talked to an executive vice president who was allowed to talk to God. Almost never was there a dissenting voice.
We trusted his decision making entirely. So his freedom to do and to explain and to conceive and execute was almost unparalleled. They didn't have contracts. They had a handshake. All those huge projects were done on a handshake.
We're going to give you the best product, but we can't tell you what it's going to cost. And for IBM, and for Polaroid, and for Herman Miller, it was okay. And for Charles, these gentlemen's agreements went both ways.
The budget for Mathematica was $150,000. It actually ended up costing $300,000, and Charles paid for the $150,000 that it went over budget. So the whole thing about what things cost and trying to keep it within the budget and meet the clients, he didn't care about it.
He cared about it. But he just, he couldn't stop himself. Charles and Ray's career began with the utopian notion of providing low-cost, high-quality goods to the masses through industrial production.
But they never viewed their work for corporate titans as selling out. They wanted to work for the Google of their time, and they did. And it allowed them incredible experimentation.
And they believed they could have a bigger impact on everyday life by working for the bigger company. IBM shared Charles'concern that American kids were falling behind in math and science. And as usual, they gave the office free reign to address the problem. Maybe, Charles felt, a film could help.
We begin with a scene one meter wide, which we view from just one meter away. Now every ten seconds we will look from ten times farther away, and our field of view will be ten times wider. Powers of Ten would become the best known of all the Eames films.
Viewed in countless classrooms, and and copied freely by filmmakers around the world. Everyone has seen Powers of X. They may not have seen the version Charles did, but they have seen one of the countless ripoffs of that film. Ten to the sixth, a one with six zeros, a million meters.
Soon the Earth will show as a solid sphere. Nobody had done a movie like that. How can you fail doing a cosmic zoom in and out from all that it is?
And so the concept is all by itself mind-blowing. The trip back to the picnic on the lakefront will be a sped-up version, reducing the distance to the Earth's surface by one power of ten every two seconds. There's choo-choo-choo-choo-choo-choo, excessive information, dizzying information.
Ten to the ninth meters, ten to the eighth. Like in a chase sequence in a movie, everything is going by so fast, it forces the observer... to choose the information that's truly important, which is the car or the person that is running away from you, i.e., the idea. One, we are back at our starting point. Eames was aware that, in fact, that this was somewhat dizzying and it wasn't possible to get all of this information across in a single viewing, and that was fine.
What he probably didn't know was that he was also looking into the future of audio-visual perception. The pace at which we receive information today is as fast as he was doing back then. As a single proton fills our scene, we reach the edge of present understanding.
As time went on, Charles became more and more and more interested. In ideas, especially science and mathematics, Ray was less engaged. I mean, I'm no mathematician, and I'm not an architect, I haven't had certain training, so I just try to help in any way I can. I don't stop to think whether I can, I just go as far as I can. And if I can't, I can't.
I think Ray may have suffered from a feeling of marginalization because some of those last projects were heavy on ideas and not as heavy on the kind of visual richness that was Ray's forte. She's no longer as instrumental in the entire thing. She can apply an aesthetic, she can dress a set and so on, but she's no longer as central. Ray's exquisite taste, her eye for form and color, made her indispensable to the office.
But it could also be a terrible burden. I remember peering into Ray's office only once or twice. Because when the door opened and I looked into it, I thought, I don't ever want to look in there again because it's a little frightening.
Ray had a little room, smaller than Charles's, directly across the hall from his that was just absolutely jammed. With all of her little pieces of paper and all of her little slides and all of the little notes that people had mailed to her and that she was mailing to them. And she would go in and find things.
She would say, oh, I have one. And she'd disappear into the room and come out with the perfect kite. Or she'd go in and find the perfect scarf or something.
She would go and she would fuss with it and change it. One day, and the next day she would look at it again and change it a little something else. And I think over the years, the perfectionism did get in the way.
In a way, it crippled her. Here is, oh, a picnic basket. A drawing of a basket.
Deb in Seaview Village, so that's probably Deborah Sussman. It's a letter from Lily Sarandon. Oh, look at that. I've never seen that. There we go.
Dearest queen of all pack rats. I think there was almost a nervous tick with her. She was constantly making notes, and usually on the back of Benson & Hedges wrappers.
This is one of the wrappers, and on this side, she designed something that looks very reminiscent of some of her fabric designs. And then you turn it over, and you see it's the Benson & Hedges. And on this side are notes she made for lighting of the puppet shows. at the IBM Pavilion. You'd find them everywhere.
They'd drive you crazy. And they could say, buy soap or liver and onions for dinner. Or they'd have very elaborate ideas. She had her suits made and they had pockets that went all the way to the hem. So whatever she wanted to keep, she would just shove in the pockets.
So what would happen with these notes? Well, for a time, she asked the staff to try to type them up. And I think it became too overwhelming for the staff. It was such an avalanche of notes.
Ray didn't communicate like everybody else does. She expected that you pre-understood what she was talking about. The people who didn't make the effort would sometimes use the epithet, crazy Ray Z, simply because they didn't understand her.
But Ray's not crazy. She's brilliant. And Ray had a lot of competition for Charles'attention, which I don't think anybody ever really gave her credit for.
That everybody wanted Charles and not Ray. He was the guy that the IBM executives would call. He was the guy that you went to to discuss the projects intellectually.
He was very charismatic. Charles was extremely charismatic. He was very charismatic, he was very handsome.
He was very handsome and very charismatic. I know that word is really overused, but he was. And especially very charismatic to women. He reminded me of Henry Fonda.
And I met Henry Fonda one time and I told Henry Fonda this, that I thought they looked alike, and he said, that's a compliment. I mean he had this dimples and he was a shucks kind of guy. He was handsome and smart and cool. So you know that's a kind of lethal combination. It was the vision, it was the personality, it was the charm, it was the unexpected, it was the person.
This is just a small selection of letters that I went through to find things that pertain particularly to the work. In the next few weeks I must pull together a preliminary film for the Franklin and Jefferson show. And then the rest is personal.
I think their marriage, it was a mystery to everybody in a way. They were emotionally extremely bonded. But he found excitement and thrills outside of Ray and outside of the office.
Which was really crushing to her. I met him when he was on the visiting committee for the architecture department at MIT. And I was a young assistant professor. Charles said, let's experiment with some films on art. I have many, many letters, extraordinary letters, because we didn't live in the same city and we tried to see each other as we could.
He had come to London and I was there and I could not get away. And he said, I will come and stand in front of the house at a certain time. And I slipped out of this rather formal dinner. And there he was. And we just looked at each other.
We had a very profound love for each other. He wanted very much for us to get married and to have a child and to close, he wanted to close the Eames office in Venice which he found very burdensome and for us to open an office together in New York and I made a decision I don't know if it was the right decision that I couldn't do it to Ray Because I had a friendship with her, but above all because they had been together so long and I knew How much she depended on him? And I said I can't do it Ray dealt with it very privately She was hurt deeply But she wasn't the kind of person who would have said, it's me or her. I don't think she wanted to leave.
I think it was something that she had to accept. This wasn't the era of easy-come, easy-go relationships. There was too much shared life and community, and the fact that he, you know, had other relationships outside of the office.
He seemed to be constructed that way. But there is a position that I think is nonsense, which is to say that because Charles was having a relationship with somebody else, that he couldn't then carry on a collaboration with Ray. I mean, that clearly didn't happen.
In fact, Charles and Ray were about to collaborate on the largest, most complex project the office would ever undertake. For the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, the Eames office designed The World of Franklin and Jefferson, a traveling show made up of three films, 40,000 words translated into four languages, and thousands of photographs and objects, including a stuffed bison. When Franklin and Jefferson opened in Paris, it was seen by 50,000 people in two months. More than a thousand visitors saw it each day in London and Warsaw. But when it came to New York, the reception was different.
When it appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Times reviewed it, and the headline was, What is this stuff doing at the Met? It was one of the first times the Eameses were ever criticized. It had an enormous amount of text.
Nobody could have possibly read it all. It was so dense. The show was a bit picky for me.
Too many little objects that I would remember none. It was too many things to see. I can remember about ten things.
He knew so much about all these things he couldn't edit out something. These are things of the period and the time from Mount Vernon. They were all so interesting to him. And he was familiar with it and he could see all these connections.
But you can't keep it all in your head if you're not that familiar with it. You could call it clutter, but that's not what Charles would have called it. Because clutter is just stuff that's dropped and abandoned and forgotten and left there. It was dense and it was complex, but there was a mind at work placing it there.
Whether you, as the recipient, were willing and able to accept, that's another question. They're pushing up against the envelope of what technology could do, because they're trying to give the visitor a hypertext experience, but they're doing it in physical space. And it doesn't work.
They are anticipating what the computer can do today very easily with layering text and giving you at different levels. So it's a failure, but it's an honest failure. The criticism of Franklin and Jefferson hit Charles hard.
The Franklin and Jefferson show was an exhausting show because it was huge. And I think sort of the machinery of doing that was just tiring. I saw Charles at his happiest when he was getting to do a lot of photography. And he was very engaged directly on the creative process of doing the photographs, which led me to the idea that maybe he felt he was missing something, you know, because he had had to transition to more of an executive position at the office. It was very hard for him because he didn't really have a successor.
And for the years that I was there, he was always looking for the perfect person. It was a battle. One day with the IBM representative, Mike Sullivan, and Mike said, why don't you shut this down? And he said, I'd like to. And Sullivan said, what would you do?
And he said, I'd just travel and shoot. But he said... I don't know what to do about Ray closing the office.
He was tired, and he was, I don't know if it was his heart, but he was cold a lot. I brought him one morning, it was a Saturday morning, and I made applesauce cake or something, and I brought it to the office, and I handed it to Charles, wrapped in tinfoil, and it was still warm, and he took it and pressed it to his chest, and he was thrilled to have that warmth just sort of on his chest. I was out of the office the day that he died.
It was, in a way, it was expected. It just didn't seem possible. I mean, I knew that some people that Charles worked with, men in the East, wept.
He was such a dominant force. in the lives of designers that it was like there was suddenly a big empty hole. There are still days when I'm driving down the highway thinking about things and I think, why did you die? I'm not through with you yet. I haven't finished asking you the questions I wanted to ask.
He was the most important person in my life. I mean, he could be, he could really be tough, you know, but he, he was an extraordinary person. After Charles died, suddenly Ray was the head of the office.
She gathered everybody around and she talked about her goals and what she wanted to do and how she needed our help. And it was really very powerful because she had never done that before. But she felt this huge burden about carrying on the name and carrying on the office.
And I think it was killing her. And I said, come on, Ray, why don't you just close the office and let's go and paint? And she said, no, that's all in the past.
I can't do that anymore. Without Charles, activity in the Eames office dwindled until it was time to finally close 901. Ray focused on the painstaking work of cataloging the voluminous 40-year output of the Eames office. Nearly 350,000 photographs and half a million documents had to be organized for shipment to the Library of Congress.
But over the years, a new generation lifted Ray from Charles's shadow, discovering in her exuberant design sense a refreshing alternative to the austerity of modernism. And Ray seemed to finally find her voice as one of the most influential women of American design. Best for the most for the least.
That was always the sort of principle. That's why we became interested in mass production. At that point, women began to point to Ray. You know, if there are two Eameses, why aren't they both credited?
And now, of course, they are. She kept saying in the hospital, what day is it? And I would say, it's Wednesday the 18th. And she would say, oh. And then the next time I would come, she would say, what day is it?
It's Thursday. Oh. I think she wanted to die on the same day as Charles because it sort of symbolized their being one.
Her last statement was one of being with Charles. There's probably an Eames chair literally in every single issue that we've ever published. You know, you could go from the DAX to the DSS to the LCW. You know, you get this whole range.
Clockwise, just a little. Just a little. The furniture still has a quality that every young designer is searching for because of the amount of thought that's been put into it by everyone whose hands touch the project.
I think you see that optimism of the American spirit in their design. It provided just a great blueprint for how we could live our lives. What furniture designers ever have produced 40 to 50 pieces of furniture that have been in production for five decades? But the other thing is the shared joy, that aspect of play.
No one else I think had that combination of the pragmatic and the aesthetic. Seven? They love to say, we don't do art. We solve problems.
It's the process. It's how do we get from where we are to where we want to be. Rats, the rear of the viewfinder cap.
Charles and me were always looking to the future. They weren't sort of sitting around telling war stories about organic furniture. What they were doing is like, what's the next thing?
They were there for the major moments in American history and they were really pioneers of the information age. The visitor can try out the computer as a carrier of information. The breadth of the work is extraordinary but there is also It's also a unifying theme of beauty and a desire to reach a broad audience. So if it was pulled forward a little bit... Every designer owes them some amount of debt, but at the same time, part of that debt should be to kind of take what they did and move beyond it.