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.
No comments:
Post a Comment