Earlier this year, the property known as the Eames Ranch, became the headquarters of the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, a nonprofit that showcases how the lessons and the learnings of Charles and Ray Eames can potentially help solve challenging problems. The Institute has launched an immersive digital portal that will make the duo’s process and work available to all.
After Ray and Charles passed away, the Eames family safeguarded the designers’ legacy by preserving the contents of the original Eames Office at 901 Washington in Venice, California. And while the office files, films, and photographs went to the Library of Congress (which houses more than one million items about the Eames Office), and other objects went to other museums (the Vitra Design Museum, for example, owns many experimental models and prototypes), a vast majority of items have been cared for by the family and now form the basis of the Eames Collection. Today, the Eames Institute is making this important body of work accessible to everyone.
The Eames Collection contains thousands of objects ranging from handmade prototypes and furniture components, to exhibition elements and even folk art. It contains personal ephemera and photographs from Ray and Charles as well as the tools they used to do their work (ranging from drawing implements to the 901 library). The Eames Collection offers a peek into their extraordinary partnership, their varied interests, and their process of how they designed. Under the curatorial leadership of Ray and Charles’s youngest granddaughter Llisa Demetrios, the Eames Institute is working to fully document and preserve the Collection, while also making it publicly accessible through exhibitions and the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity’s website.
“I learned so much living here in Petaluma with my mother 20 years ago, and got to see the wonder of people’s faces when they would experience this material firsthand,” said Demetrios in an interview. “With the institute and our new website, it’s exciting to think about how many more people will get to share that experience, and for the legacy of my grandparents to evolve in surprising and delightful ways.”
The new Eames Institute of Curiosity just launched its latest exhibition, the fifth in a series, “The Ever-Evolving Eames Aluminum Group: Exploring the Iconic Office Furniture that Ray and Charles Eames Created.” Curated by Demetrios, the exhibition delves into one of the Eameses most notable designs: the Aluminum Chair Group.
Charles Eames had already been working on furniture as part of architecture ever since he started to practice architecture in 1930. But it really wasn’t until he started to work for Eliel Saarinen, and with Eero Saarinen, that he had any idea of what a “concept” was. Eames once stated that he believed that what he and Eero did for the Museum of Modern Art’s Organic Furniture Competition in 1940 was really a statement of concept. “We weren’t particularly concerned with the economics of the solution even though at the time we thought we were,” Charles Eames said in an interview in 1958.
The idea for the cast aluminum chair came about when designer Alexander Girard came to visit the Eames Studio in 1957, and they were talking about furnishing the Columbus, Indiana, home of Xenia and J. Irwin Miller designed by Eero Saarinen. “Sandro [Girard] was bemoaning the fact that there was no real quality outdoor furniture that he could get for such a place—that is the quality he wanted,” said Eames in an interview.
Indeed, during the 1950s, most outdoor furniture at the time was cheaply made, and often purchased at a supermarket or gas station. The Eames Studio looked at previous examples of modern outdoor furniture—like Larsen Lewis 1939 cantilevered rocking chair for Heywood Wakefield or Alice Roth’s 1946 stacking Lounge Chair for the Troy Sunshine Company—both of which had innovative details for their time. The modern outdoor furniture that Girard and the Eameses would design were not only durable and comfortable, they would be defined by its innovative combination of aluminum and textiles.
“You start on a close human scale,” said Charles Eames. “Here is a friend who has done something. He needs something for it, and you become involved. As we were trying to analyze the reasons why there was nothing available on the market to suit him, we were of course starting to write a program for designing the object to fill this void. That’s how it started.”
Charles Eames went on: “Well, having the program in mind, you gradually begin to stew about it—while traveling in planes and so on. The actual idea, the idea for the chair—that is, the gimmick, the device that made it possible is something I recall drawing on the back of an envelope.” That “gimmick” was a cross-sectional sketch akin to an architectural section that Charles came up with.
Aside from Ray and Charles Eames, Don Albinson, Dale Bauer, and Bob Staples were the Eames staff members most closely involved in developing the prototypes (Some later furniture bases were designed by Peter Pearce). As the group of designers collaborated, it became evident that materials like aluminum and synthetic textiles would be durable and withstand the elements.
Image courtesy of Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, photo by Pippa Drummond
Girard and the Eames Office developed an innovative polyester saran plastic woven cloth fabric that was laid into the chair side members with triple-layer folds at the seat, back, and head areas—a radical innovation, and one that would be repeated countless times in the Eameses designs.
Additionally, these materials are emblematic of developments in material resources and technologies that shaped U.S. postwar design. The demands of war led to increased aluminum production, and in the same period much effort was directed towards creating plastics and synthetic textiles that could be used in place of conventional materials.
The Eameses’ Indoor-Outdoor Group first launched in 1958—the debut collection included four chairs and an ottoman, with two companion tables—was swiftly renamed the Eames Aluminum Group, and subsequently transformed from leisure seating to lightweight office chairs. Together, these names allude to a significant trend of the postwar period: the increasing value placed on leisure activities—especially those that took place outdoors. In particular, the suburban backyard became an important site of entertainment and relaxation, and thus a new frontier for modern design. As we move to a post-pandemic workplace, the idea of indoor-outdoor furniture is all the more relevant today.
Unlike many museums devoted to the work of a single designer, the aim of this Institute in opening the Eames archive to the public, is not to venerate but to debunk the notion that the Eameses were geniuses. “Ray and Charles didn’t believe in the notion of the gifted few,” Demetrios said. “They believed that you got good at what you liked to do through practice, exploration, understanding, and effort. Their genius maybe wasn’t genius after all, maybe it was just a lot of hard work and dedication.” She points out that the biggest misconception about Ray and Charles is that people think of them as designers with a capital D. “They actually called themselves tradesmen; people came to them with a problem to solve,” she noted.
Previous exhibitions from the Institute have been devoted to the lives of Charles and Ray before they joined forces, an exhibition on their plywood experiments that the studio did during the war, and “Form Follows Formulation” showcasing the couple’s quest to create a comfortable and affordable shell chair, and “Return to Sender,” an exhibition devoted to the promotional tools and communication devices by the Eameses. All the exhibitions are online. Visit eamesinstitute.org to experience all five virtual exhibitions.