It's all Charles and Ray Eames' fault

I'm not going to write a treatise about Charles and Ray Eames. 

There are inumerable sites, books, etc. that document the powerful impact that this husband and wife team had on the visual culture and context of the USA and the world.

What I am going to talk about is that it is pretty much their fault that I went to architectural school.  I hold them personally responsible.  I thought ALL architects designed buildings, fabric, toys, household items and made films.  Oh, and fell in love and married each other and lived happily ever after.

When I was young, I played with the cards:

Pride of place in my parent's living room when I was growing up was one red and one black Lounge Chair Wood:

When Pops opened his private practice as a psychiatrist and the Merchant's National Bank building in downtown Topeka, he furnished it with Herman Miller furniture including a rolltop desk designed by George Nelson:

His desk chair was a cloth version of one of the Aluminum Group chairs that the Eames' designed for Herman Miller:

In architectural school I adored the house they designed, the modularity of it.  Looking at it now, it's hard to fathom what a game changer this design was.  It was designed in 1945 by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, and ... "The design used pre-fabricated materials ordered from catalogues, a continuation of the idea of mass-production."  ....  Let me just say it again:  DESIGNED IN 1945.  Designers have been drawing on this aesthetic now for FIFTY SIX YEARS.

Later, as an architect, I was able to get the legendary lounge chair and ottoman (can you say "trade discount"?) for Pops to sit in at home.  He was fortunate to get one of the last production runs that used Brazilian rosewood as the external "skin" of the molded plywood shell.  This was in an earlier time of blissful ecological ignorance when it wasn't understood that the Brazilian rainforests were being raped and pillaged.  But I digress.

Oh, and from 1968, the Powers of Ten.

In 1998, "Powers of Ten" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".  It completely blew my mind when I saw it the first time.  Still does.

Here's a short film that Charles and Ray Eames did for the Polaroid Company, for the SX70 camera. 

Complex technology, simply explained.  When I watched this, I thought about the excitement surrounding the new inventions and ideas that infused the world at that time.  Think about all the technologies that came together in this one potent little box: (from the film, at about 8:17)

"...they are coordinates, parts of a single strategy working together to protect and fulfill the original hope.  This invention is finally a system, call it a system of novelties.... in the end it links the inventors, the engineers, the workers, the distributors into one chain of craftsmanship.  The user is the final link.  The device helps to meet the universal need to do things well."

What has happened to this spirit of innovation?  This pride in craftsmanship? This feeling of continuity linking design to execution?  Thoughtful design? Good writing?  "..the universal need to do things well..." ?

Sometimes I despair.

Charles and Ray, circa 1948.  Ride on!

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