This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Herman Miller, Inc.,Herman Miller for the Home, Signorello of Westport, Connecticut,and Mr. Eames Demetrios of the Eames Office
The work of the Eames Office, which specialized in furniture, product, exhibition, interior, and graphic design, as well as in film, photography, and architecture, has reemerged in the aesthetic realm of late-twentieth-century design and popular culture. Charles Eames (1907-78) and Ray Kaiser Eames (1912-88) met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, but their remarkable collaboration did not begin until their arrival in Los Angeles in 1941.
In its early years, the Eames Office, driven by the belief that good design should be affordable for everyone, experimented with new materials and manufacturing methods in the development of innovative and moderately priced furniture and architecture. Later, its energies were focused on the presentation of information using still photography and moving pictures to extend the range of exhibition design, which became a specialty. This shift at once mirrored and influenced the transformation of American culture as it moved from postwar-era consumerism to the post-industrial era of information and communication.
While it is not surprising that the Eames aesthetic has returned to prominence along with that of other mid-century talents, such as Eero Saarinen, with whom the Eameses were closely associated, the nature of the ideas behind the work is often missed by contemporary enthusiasts who, intrigued by the forms, overlook the problems and techniques that made them possible. Today, many designers and manufacturers seek to emulate the Eameses' work while ignoring their methodology, which had at its core an extraordinary attention to the details that linked the parts. As Charles Eames put it: "The details make the product. The connections, connections, connections…"
"Re-Connections" provides an opportunity to re-constitute an exhibition designed and curated by former members of the Eames Office, John and Marilyn Neuhart, twenty-five years ago, and at the same time to celebrate the recent release of a line of Eames-designed furniture manufactured by Herman Miller for the Home. The original exhibition, "Connections: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames," was a candid display of completed work and work in progress, held at the Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1976. A version of "Connections," which had been in storage, was presented at the Jean Paul Slusser Gallery at the University of Michigan in 1998. "Re-Connections" augments the Slusser Gallery show with a compilation of the Eameses' films that have been transferred to video and the inclusion of vintage and current in-production furniture. In an effort to share the designers' commitment to the everyday use of their products, gallery visitors are invited to sit in many of the chairs.
Robert A. M. Stern, Dean Dean Sakamoto, Director of Exhibitions Yale University School of Architecture
Considering Re-connections and Reconsidering Connections The Yale School of Architecture asked Ralph Caplan to respond to the text of the exhibition catalogue, which he wrote in 1976 for the original show, "Connections," excerpts of which follow.
The invitation to reconsider an essay I wrote more than thirty years ago carried the heady promise of a second chance. This time, I thought, I will get it right. Upon re-reading the piece, however, I discover, that I have nothing much to add. It was, after all, written near the unexpectedly sudden end of Charles's life and therefore of the Eames Office as it had been. It comes about as close as I can come to describing how it worked.
As for updating, it is largely implicit in the exhibit itself, which, for example, includes Eames's visionary love affair with the computer at a time when there were hardly any computers to fall for. As designers whose passion and method was making connections, they saw in its capacity to make faster and deeper connections the computer's potential for human and humane use. This breathtakingly prophetic understanding of the role of technology in our affairs was all the more impressive in a design office that like all other offices at the time, had no computer in it. The most advanced piece of comparable equipment in the Eames Office was a Selectric that its client, IBM, had pointedly sent to replace the office's manual typewriter.
Some Eames furniture is manufactured still, or again, by Herman Miller and Vitra, and the Eames films are available. But the Eames legacy is not a collection of furniture and films. The Eamses developed a design approach that is as fresh now as then and that will always be fresh because it consists of an exploratory way of working rather than a style. That way of working, and of thinking, is the real Eames legacy, left to the very different designers who have followed Charles and Ray, many of whom worked with them on projects in this show.
Ralph Caplan is the author of articles and books about the design process. He worked closely with and in the Eames office on a variety of projects.
The following is excerpted from the catalogue Making Connections: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (University of California, 1976) by Ralph Caplan.
In the narration he wrote and recorded himself for a film he and Ray made to explain a storage system they designed, Charles Eames says, "The details are not details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections..." Nothing he or anyone else has ever said or written comes closer than that to the heart of the work, and thinking, and convictions. And nothing anyone has ever said or written comes closer to describing the pattern of the Eames design practice, which might be defined as the art of solving problems by making connections. Connections between what? Between such disparate materials as wood and steel, between such seemingly alien disciplines as physics and painting, between clowns and mathematical concepts, between people-architects and mathematicians and poets and philosophers and corporate executives...
Perhaps this is as good a place as any to call attention to the connection between Charles and Ray Eames. They are husband and wife and they are full collaborators, as they have been since the early forties...
[In the exhibition "Connections"] designers John and Marilyn Neuhart have resisted the curatorial urge to "place" Eames and have tried to do something much more difficult, but much more rewarding if they pull it off: to show how the work goes-which is to say, how the work goes together. It is then an attempt to exhibit process. The most important thing to say about connections is that they are made. The most important thing to show about connections is where and how they are made...
The craft and art of Charles and Ray Eames solve problems without trying to obliterate all trace of them. Where the stops are is where the connections occur. For the detail, particularly the connection, is often the crack in the wall, the point at which a designer can sneak past the limitations while no one is looking. If you can bond rubber disks to wood, you can go a long way toward getting around the limitations of materials, and the concern with restraints is born of the design to transcend them fairly...
"The connections, the connections. it will in the end be these details that... give the product its life."
Again, Charles Eames talking about furniture. Again, the message applies equally to the work of the offices as a whole. In the aluminum group chairs the seat pad's two outer layers of fabric and an inner layer of plastic foam are combined through electronic welding. The entire seat pad is stretched across a two-sided die-cast aluminum frame that is cylindrical at top and bottom. The ends of the seat pad are turned up over the cylinders in each corner and held by tension. Supported by metal only at the corners and sides, the fabric seat is a slung bolt of softness juxtaposed against the elegant hardness of the frame. Both qualities are visible and palpable; end and means are equally discernible and almost indistinguishable from each other.
Eames designs are anything but ambiguous. They are characterized by the kind of clarity people looked to photography for when the art was new. This clarity is never confused with severity; there are no easy geometric solutions. Rather the designs have a quality of being "in focus" that may derive from the defensibility of each detail...
[Charles] and Ray had developed a way of exploiting high-frequency electronic bonding techniques to use rubber shock mounts as joints connecting plywood seat and back to steel leg. But only after they had designed the problem in terms that made separate parts, and therefore joining necessary. The problem and the solution are visually accessible in the chair's form...
...the significance of Eames lies in the practice and not in the influence, theory, design statesmanship, or products, pervasive as some of them are. The products have been copied and the film and exhibition techniques widely imitated, but the practice remains uncopied...
...a former Eames designer remembers that the in-shop invention and development of tools had an enormous production-line advantage: ideas for new equipment and processes could be tried out on the worker while they were still just ideas, and workers could contribute information that only they had...
Any designer will tell you he must understand a given production process before he can design for it (just as almost any engineer will tell you that designers often do not). What Eames does is to become so directly involved in the technology that technological compromises can be minimized and, most important, made fruitful.
What of that universal constraint, time? The pressure of deadlines is qualitatively different from, if rarely greater than, his self-imposed pressures, and such pressure does not necessarily enhance the result as it does with many designers. Still, since it is a constraint, Eames does not disparage or hide behind it...
One reason Eames is so extremely sensitive to design restraints may be that he has so few conventional restraints imposed on him. And vice versa, for his sensitivity to restraint is largely responsible for the growth of his practice in a way that looks so astonishing permissive...
However much contemporary design owes to such Eames influences as that, I suspect that the design thinking is an equally important contribution and will be acknowledged as such.
To me the most interesting and most sanguine of contemporary design movements is the shift in design attention from objects to situations. The shift is subtle, a matter of emphasis rather than a new departure. For Charles and Ray Eames it is simply the continuation of their approach to problems. For a while the problems they dealt with were solvable by objects. When they shifted their interest to problems that were not solvable by objects, they began making films...
"The Fiberglass Chair" a modest film, is an example of the reverse. It is purportedly a film about objects and how they are made...This one transcends manufacturing: pretending to show only how these chairs are made, the film really is about why they have the meaning they do. The penciled idea; the clay thumbed and molded and scraped into form; the pouring, oozing, spraying, cutting, and baking all combine to turn an engineer's description of "random fiber distribution in color-impregnated poly-ester reinforced fiberglass" into a celebrative dance. When the chairs appear in the end they have a rather special meaning...
[The] message [of their exhibition "Think at the New York 1969 Worlds Fair"] is extremely simple and extremely urgent. It is that the methods used to solve our most complex problems are merely elaborations of the very methods we use to solve our daily problems. By implication, then, the role of the computer is less mysterious than we might have supposed.
[It is] not a complex message intellectually, but one that is, or at least was then, difficult to accept emotionally. To convey it, Eames put together a witty multi-screen presentation, combining live action, stills, animation, and a live host. To deal with information, we must abstract it and to explain abstraction Eames makes maximum use of the multiple-screen's capacity for simultaneously relating various aspects of the same phenomenon.
When consulted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the best way to infuse their technologically heavy curriculum with art, Eames rejected the idea of additional art courses or fine arts programs as "an aesthetic vitamin concentrate." Instead he designed an alternative situation, a program for enriching the students' (and the university's) communicative capabilities to the point where they could experience the aesthetic possibilities of their own discipline. [In the proposal Eames would have each student] near the end of his M.I.T. career, join one or two other students in teaching something of their major specialty to an elementary school class for a semester. The teaching could take the form of films, exhibits, lectures, games, models-whatever the team needed to make what they knew and understood meaningful to children. "...If the M.I.T. student is going to learn anything about art," Eames argued, "he will learn it here."
The Eames design calls for appreciation through the experience of searching out the aesthetic character of the student's own discipline. It also includes another favorite Eames idea: the university as a found object, a collection of traditions and facilities already on hand that can be transformed by fresh perception...
Charles and Ray once considered giving up design and joining a circus. While it is good for us that they did not do so, it is also good for us that they considered the matter so carefully and put their perception of circus lore and philosophy on film. The circus is the perfect example of the tenets they most prize: it looks like self-expression and it is not; it pushes against limits; it derives an aesthetic out of a disciplined mastery of details, and of the connections between them. More important, it is for all those reasons, fun in a very high sense. Because it is performed by people who do what Eames recommends we do: take pleasure seriously.
The circus is the epitome of situation design, a classic situation that has evolved as a chef's knife has. It is a lucid and responsive model for understanding what business these two master designers really are in and why it matters so much.