STYLE NV WISHES AHPPY BIRTHDAY TO RAY EAMES

HAPPY BIRHTDAY TO RAY EAMES, who was born today, December 15th 1912. Ray Eames is half the tour de force design duo Charles & Ray Eames. Together, The Eames couple designed some of the most important examples of 20th century furniture; they also applied their talents to devising ingenious children's toys, puzzles, films, exhibitions and such iconic mid-20th century Los Angeles buildings as the Eames House and Entenza House in Pacific Palisades.




From researching this feature, it is clear, that their success in design stems from their happily married home life together, and whilst the Eames furniture has usually been listed as by Charles Eames, Ray was deeply involved and should be considered an equal partner. The Eames fabrics were mostly designed by Ray, as were the Time Life Stools. But in reading the various books on Eames, and seeing the photos of furniture development, it is clear that Ray's involvement is absolute



Ray Eames was born in Sacramento, California in 1912 as Bernice Alexandra Kaiser. She came from a close, creative family. Her father, Alexander Kaiser, was a theatre manager-turned-insurance salesman and both parents encouraged her love of art, film and dance. After her father's death in 1929, Ray and her mother, moved to New York to be closer to her brother, Martin, an army cadet at West Point. Ray enrolled at the Art Students League and studied painting under Hans Hoffman.



When her mother died in 1940, Ray moved to Cranbrook. She began studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she met Charles Eames while preparing drawings and models for the Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition where she met and fell in love with Charles. He divorced his first wife, Catherine, in May, 1941 and married Ray in Chicago a month later. They set off for a long honeymoon drive to their new home in Los Angeles. On the journey, they picked up tumbleweed from the road which still hangs from the ceiling of the Eames House today.



Whilst Charles found work at MGM studios as a set designer, Ray created covers for California Art & Architecture magazine. Setting up a workshop studio in their spare room in their home, they began experimenting with moulding plywoods. They produced their first mass produced manufactured product which a year later, the US Navy made an order of for 5000 units.



The US Navy order enabled the Eames to rent an office on Santa Monica Boulevard in 1942 and to gather a group of collaborators including Harry Bertoia and Gregory Ain. Continuing their experiments, they produced sculpture, chairs, screens, tables and even toy animals in plywood. The US furniture group, Herman Miller, was persuaded to put some of these pieces into production by George Nelson, its head of design. All the Eames' plywood combined an elegant organic aesthetic with a love of materials and technical ingenuity.



These qualities were also apparent in the showroom they designed for Herman Miller in 1949 and the Case Study Houses, a low cost housing project sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine which included the Eames House, a steel structure with sliding walls and windows. Designed for cheap, speedy construction, it took five men 16 hours to raise the steel shell and one man three days to build the roof deck. Spacious, light and versatile, the vividly coloured Eames House was described by the design historian Pat Kirkham as looking like "a Mondrian-style composition in a Los Angeles meadow".



Unsurprisingly, the house and its contents epitomised Charles and Ray's approach to design and their "good life" concept of celebrating the beauty of everyday objects as well as precious ones. The dried-out tumbleweed from their honeymoon hung alongside a Robert Motherwell painting. Toys, masks and other folkloric souvenirs collected from their travels were laid out on tables next to stones, buttons, pieces of bark and favourite books. The British architects, Peter and Alison Smithson, described the house as "a cultural gift parcel". Its fusion of the mass-manufactured and folkloric appeared in the Eames' films and graphic projects, like their 1952 interlocking House of Cards game, for which Eliel Saarinen coined the term "spiritual function".



Charles and Ray sustained this spirit in the way they dressed: he in open-necked shirts and loose pants, she in a bohemian version of a conventionally feminine wardrobe of short-sleeved blouses and full skirts. The film director Billy Wilder and his wife Audrey, who befriended the Eames after commissioning a sadly unbuilt house from them, remarked that Ray's idea of formal dress was to put on a clean blouse and Charles' take on black tie was literally to wear a black tie. Ray's self-consciously feminine guise underscored the role she adopted within their relationship of Charles' younger, adoring protege and underplaying her contribution to their work, which contrasts with the picture of painted by Charles himself of a gifted, energetic woman.



After plywood, the Eames focused on equally zealous experiments with other materials by creating furniture in fibreglass, plastic, aluminium and, for the 1956 Lounge Chair, leather and very opulent plywood. The Lounge became an icon of the 1960s and 1970s - no ambitious executive had made it until there was one in his (or very occasionally) her office - but Charles always expressed a preference for his earlier, less expensive plywood designs.



Their collaboration with Herman Miller continued and extended to Vitra, its European partner. The Eames also began a long-lasting relationship with IBM for which they made films and designed exhibitions. Like all important designers, the Eames was blessed with good timing. There were no shortage of empathetic corporate partners in the expanding US post-war economy at a time of rapid advances in materials and production processes and their democratic view of design struck a chord in an era of growing affluence. Throughout the 1950s, their furniture was exhibited in the Good Design shows with which MoMA, New York sought to raise the public's awareness of design.



The Eames' furniture, especially elegant office chairs such as the Lounge and Aluminium Series now seem synonymous with mid-20th century Corporate America, but Charles and Ray equally influential at making respectable the then-neglected folk crafts not only in the US but in India, for which they produced the 1950s Eames Report on raising standards of design training. These concerns dominated their later work in the 1970s when, able to live comfortably on their Herman Miller and Vitra royalties, they concentrated their creative energy on propagating their ideas in exhibitions, books and films.





Work remained the centre of their lives - with working days running from 9am to 10pm and a full-time cook on hand so they needn't leave the studio to eat - until Charles' death in 1978. Ray then worked hard to complete any unfinished projects but, having done so, did not seek new ones. She devoted the rest of her life to communicating their ideas through talks and writing. Ray Eames died of cancer on 21 August 1988, ten years to the day after Charles.



With such a vast back catalogue of designs, it is hard to pick out STYLE NV’s favourites.

STYLE NV CHATTING WITH - Claire Brewster

Claire Brewster's intricate paper cut bird pictures are stunning. Using beautiful old maps, she cuts out birds and flowers . STYLE NV caught up with her recently to talk about her work.

http://www.stylenv.co.uk/blogs/blogEntry.cfm?b=50

STYLE NV - TRENDS: Bring back the Paper Chain

More by luck than good judgement I am bang on trend with Christmas decorations this year and was possibly avant garde last season tidings. Although there have been no wedding bells since moving in with my boyfriend, there has certainly been a marriage of Christmas decorations. Unlike our relationship, it was not a match made in heaven, but in these austere times, I decided to just go with it, throw it all together and hope for the best. We now have a multitude of baubles, in a full rainbow of colours; black, white, pink, blue, green, red, purple, yellow and orange adorn our tree, mantle piece and anything that stands still for long enough!

Thus we have happily greeted the season with a retro themed tree. In retrospect, retro Christmas revival was always going to happen, Mad Men has infiltrated every possible fashion vintage is no longer a fashion trend, it’s a way of life, so multi coloured fairy lights and glass baubles is just the next step. So let’s go one step further and bring back my favourite decoation that has been sadly overlooked recently - the humble paper chain!

http://www.stylenv.co.uk/blogs/blogEntry.cfm?b=49

STYLE NV Wishes Happy Birthday to CONSTANCE SPRY

My mother had a Constance Spry’s Cookery Book – a giant tombe of a book, bound in bright pink cotton; it was hilariously old fashioned and my sisters and I used to love mocking its contents. It was not until recently that I have read about Constance Spry’ work and life in more detail, did I realise just what a front running, STYLE NV woman Constance Spry really was.

Few people have had such a powerful influence over the way we decorate our homes as Constance Spry. First as a teacher and social reformer, then as a society florist and best-selling author, Spry taught mid-20th century Britons how to beautify their homes with such unassuming materials as berries, vegetable leaves, twigs, ferns and weeds displayed in a motley assortment of containers from gravy boats and bird cages, to tureen lids and baking trays.
In an era when millions of people were decorating their homes to their own taste for the first time, Constance Spry helped them to do so with flair and for very little money. Believing that everyone had the right to beautify their home and that the means of doing so could be found in woods, hedgerows, vegetable patches or scraps of wasteland, Spry popularised her democratising and essentially bohemian style of home-making by dispensing no-nonsense advise in books, articles and radio broadcasts all over the world. “I do feel strongly,” she once wrote, “that flowers should be a means of self-expression for everyone.”

STYLE NV Review - At Home With the Georgians

Sitting a few millimeters away from my radiator, whilst this wintery weather wars on outside, I can’t help but feel sorry for the Georgians, or in fact any other period in history that didn’t have central heating. All well and good high summer, but right now I’m rather pleased I live in a time where I flick a switch and can feel totally toasty in my little home office.

Last night I watched the new series At home with the Georgians (BBC2) presented by Professor Amanda Vickery and I can’t wait till next week. It was a fascinating insight into how the Georgians lived and how they felt about their homes. What made it so good was that Vickery brought the whole thing to life giving real insight normal Georgians, living their lives, using a letters, diary entries which she called up using her e-reader. She used actors to reconstruct and narrate the stories she told.http://www.stylenv.co.uk/blogs/blogEntry.cfm?b=47

COMMENT - Christmas Illuminations

Tonight, the 1st of December marks the grand Christmas Light switch on ceremony for our lovely Irish next door neighbours. This year we are guests of honour because we have helped them buy a set of lights to go on their large fir tree in their front garden. Earlier this year, we had bought ourselves a set of white outdoor festoon lights, to illuminate our back garden. Our neighbour, Dennis was most impressed with them and asked us for the vendor’s details. “At last” I arrogantly thought, “I’ve managed to make them stylish! No longer will there be five sets of different multi coloured lights wrapped round the enormous fur tree outside their house and maybe, just maybe they will also take down the light, shaped like a Christmas tree, which sits, all year round, on the top of their very tall fir tree”!The lights were bought and Dennis and Joan knocked on our door to proudly show us that they had arrived.. . . .


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