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Eames the power of ten1/3/2024 Charles supported them financially by working as a film set designer for MGM, sneaking potentially useful materials off the lot to build a plywood molding machine in the spare bedroom of their tiny apartment. Eames Office LLC.Īs newlyweds in Los Angeles, the Eameses continued the experiments with plywood that they had started at Cranbrook. Their wedding followed a month after Charles finalized his divorce from his second wife.Ĭharles Eames on an Eames favorite, the plywood lounge chair and ottoman, in 1956. The couple had met the previous year at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where Charles had become a star teacher (and campus lothario) after a patchy career in architecture, and Ray had worked as an assistant on one of his projects. “Powers of Ten” is the closing work in the Barbican show, which covers the period beginning in 1941 after Charles, then 34, married Ray, 29, and they moved to Los Angeles. “Powers of Ten,” a 10-minute film made by the couple in 1968 to demonstrate the power of a number and the relative size of the universe, was reinterpreted as a performance in “Superpowers of Ten” by the Office of Political Innovation, a group of young New York and Madrid-based architects, this month at the opening of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The Eameses’ use of films and exhibitions to explain complex scientific and technological developments to the public also syncs with the emergence of data visualization as a new form of information design that pursues the same goals. This vision of the Eameses is timely, given the growing interest in a similarly fluid and eclectic interpretation of design. To the Eameses, design was a way of life and a means of looking at the world, trying to understand how it was changing, and visualizing those changes for other people.” “We felt it was time to look at them afresh by showing their full range of work. “So many people think of Charles and Ray Eames as the brilliant designers of famous chairs, and so they were,” said Catherine Ince, who curated the exhibition. The Eameses’ acclaimed furniture, including the 1958 Aluminum Group chairs and 1962 Tandem Sling Seating that still furnish countless offices and airports respectively, appears throughout the Barbican show, but its focus is on the couple’s less well known, but no less compelling work as filmmakers, information designers and design theorists. The story fits neatly with the popular perception of the Eameses as the dashing Charles and his resourceful wife, Ray, who were among the most successful and accomplished furniture designers of the 20th century, and were so devoted to their work that, even when broke, they spent every spare dollar on prototypes. The battered seat and trash can are now displayed in “The World of Charles and Ray Eames,” an exhibition running through Feb. Sadly for the Eameses, they could only afford to pay for one, and had to leave the other with the boat builder, who plonked it on top of a metal trash can and sat on it for years. LONDON - When Charles and Ray Eames were designing a fiberglass seat for a chair in their Los Angeles studio in the early 1950s, they hired a local boat builder to make two prototypes.
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