About : american furniture warehouse plant stands
Title : american furniture warehouse plant stands
american furniture warehouse plant stands
charles eames: an artist isa title that you earn. and it's a little embarrassingto hear people refer to themselves as artists. it's like referring tothemselves as a genius. man: this was a man who wasa merlin of curiosity. he was driven by his curiosity. man: we weren't surequite what he was. was he an architect?
was he a designer? was he a filmmaker? but what he was, obviously, was somethingwe all wanted to be. ray eames: i had been trainedas a painter, but when we were workingon furniture, and again in film, it never seemed like leavingpainting in any way, because it wasjust another form.
woman: she made paintings out ofwhat she was surrounded by. everything she touched, sheturned into something magical. man: everything that they didin design, she saw as an extension of her painting. and everything they did indesign, he saw as an extension of his architecture. for them, these names likepainter and architect, they weren't job descriptions. they were ways of lookingat the world.
woman: they wereintroducing people to look at the worlddifferently. life was fun, was work, was fun,was life. woman: people would sayit was childlike behavior, but what's wrong with that? the eameses have putall this joy back in life. you know that modernism,let's face it, was getting boring. man: had they just designedthe furniture,
they'd be in the pantheon. it's the multifaceted natureof the career that is extraordinary. they give shape to america's20th century. man: i came froman architectural office where there were individualtables with a conference room, and there was carpeton the floor. there were lights. we had drafting tables,and all the equipment
that you needed,et cetera, et cetera. i walk into eames office, and it was like walkinginto a circus. woman: i walked in the door, andof course i immediately thought, "got any jobs here?" man: i'm just totally blown awayby the patina on every surface of graphics, and there weremodels everywhere, and there was just stuff. i was just overwhelmed.
man: i saw this incredibleapparition of animation stands and photographsspread out on tables. models being litfor photography, a screening room, and a wonderful wood shop. saltwater tanks. woman: there were eames chairswith steinberg drawings on them. every kind of visual treatyou can imagine.
and i thought, "i've cometo work in disneyland." ashby: if you had takenthe roof off of it, you would see that place changing constantly. so we'd just go around and take everythingout of the middle of the studio,to put up a movie set to take pictures tomorrow,and then the next day, you'd take out all the movie setand put the tables all back up,
and everybody'sback at work again. woman: it was very informal. i mean, there wasn't everany kind of routine. there were no"regular meetings." woman: because i did not havea design degree, many of the peoplein the office thought i probably shouldn't be there, but charles hada different attitude.
and he said this to me -- "i can teach youhow to draw. "if you can thinkand you can see, and you can prove that to me,you can work here." [tune chiming] franco: for four decades,901 washington boulevard in venice beach, california,was one of the most creative addresses on earth. dozens of gifted young designers
cut their teeth within the wallsof the studio. but the vision for the officecame from the top. charles eames: we have to havea place where you can recognize where you're goingwhen you start out. franco:modern design was born from the marriageof art and industry. the eames office was bornfrom the marriage of ray kaiser --a painter who rarely painted -- and charles eames --an architecture school dropout
who never got his license. "eventually, everythingconnects," charles said. furniture, toys, architecture, exhibitions, photography, and film were all connected in the wild, whimsical worldof the eames office. man: charles and ray eameswanted to bring the most magnificent experiences that you could havewith your eyes
to the largest number of people. i don't think there's anythingmore important for an artist to want to do. franco: it was a careerthat defined what it means to be a designer. and it all began with a chair. man: charles, where did theclassic eames chair come from? did it come to youin a flash, as you were shavingone morning?
it sort of came to me in a 30-year flash,if you want. franco: time magazine called it "the greatest designof the 20th century." but it didn't start outthat way. it began as a failure. responding to a competition at the museum of modern artin 1940, two unknown young architects --
charles eames and his friend,eero saarinen, set out to reinventthe very idea of the chair. man: the goal is to createan inexpensive, mass-produced chairwhich is well designed, and which is molded to the body,because it doesn't need a lot of upholstery, which is,"a," old-fashioned, and "b," expensive. upholstery is whatlouis xiv did. franco: working at the cranbrookacademy of art near detroit,
eames and saarinen thought theycould mold the new miracle material,plywood, into two directions at once to make a comfortable,form-fitting shell. woman: the critical point is where that backbecomes the seat. albrecht: the glues aren't goodenough, and the chair splinters, which means,when you'd sit on it, it would be a littleuncomfortable.
so they have to upholster it. franco: despite failing at their goal of creatinga single-piece plywood shell, charles and eerowon the competition. woman: the irony is that the chair thateames and saarinen designed, they couldn't reallymanufacture. franco: even with the upholsteryto cover the cracked surface, no existing machine couldsuccessfully mold the plywood
into the shape of the chair. man: it couldn't be made in the way that they claimedit could be made. they had designedthe look of it without designingthe substance of it. franco: after many unsuccessfulattempts, eero saarinen scrappedthe project. but charles wasn't readyto give up -- this time, with a new partner.
at cranbrook, he had becomefriendly with ray kaiser, a talented young artist who hadhelped with the chair project. marilyn neuhart:i said to ray one day, "how did you and charlesget together?" "oh! i can't talk about it." i said, "well, why not?" "well, we just did." demetrios: they sparked, andthe rest is literally history. and i think in ray,
he really found his complement. franco: but there was a problem. charles was already married. he had moved up to cranbrookfrom st. louis with his wife, catherine,and his young daughter, lucia. kirkham: the love letters arecharles's letters to ray, because the letters that raywrote back to charles, charles destroyed,because he was married. they show charles madly in lovewith her.
there's no doubt about that. he talks about walking past the buildingthat she used to live in and looking up at her window, and they are very moving. these letters are talking about a joined futureas artists together. i thinkhis decision feels made. ray certainly felt uncomfortableenough to leave cranbrook
and go away and think about what she was going to dothereafter. demetrios: catherine wasa very impressive person. knowing them both, as i did, you can see whythey didn't stay together. he really thought he hadsomething to offer the world, and this was going to bea journey with a lotof unexpectedness. this was a journey that mightnot lead to, uh, success.
and i think that maybeat that point in her life, this was not necessarily the place that catherinewanted to go. but i think that maybein charles's mind that he had wanted a lifewhere love and work and life and workwere all blended together. franco: charles quit his jobat cranbrook, and, in one last letter to ray,asked for her hand in marriage. his future with his new bride
now dependedon making the chair work. broke and short on options, charles and rayheaded from michigan to l.a. to finish what he had started. demetrios: part of this journeyto california was they were bothgoing to figure out how to mass-produce moldedplywood and compound curves -- which sounds very unromantic,but i think it probably was pretty romantic,under the circumstances.
franco: in their two-bedroomapartment in westwood village, charles and ray set upa makeshift workshop. ray eames: the --the first to -- that did the molding, which was so magic, we called it by a magic name. so we called it "kazam!" franco: the "kazam!" machine wasa jury-rigged molding device made out of heating coilsand a bicycle pump.
but in 1942,with the nation at war, raw materials were scarce,and the "kazam!" lay silent. but with the setback,there was also opportunity. the u.s. militaryneeded better splints. demetrios: the standard-issuesplint was metallic, and so the vibration ofthe two people carrying them actually would makethe wound worse. they would actually bebetter off if you grabbed a stickoff the ground and tied it to it
than with thisamplification. so charles and ray said,"well, you know, we're experimentingwith molded plywood. why don't we tryand design a new splint?" they're trying to makea three-dimensional curve, kind of a bowl, you might say. they can't quite do it yet. so they need holesin the plywood in order to release the tension,
'cause otherwiseit's going to splinter where they try to do it. but working withinthe constraints, what's nice is that this isexactly what you need for a splint, 'cause you needa place for the bandages to go. franco: in a rented warehousespace, their team of skilled designersand craftspeople made 150,000 splints. with peace approaching,charles and ray
had one thing on their minds -- applying the lessonsof the splints to the failedplywood chairs. this time, they wouldn't designthe look of the chair first. demetrios: they would never makethat mistake again. they would let the design flowfrom the learning. franco: that meantknowing who they were serving. in charles's words, it was always about being
a good host to their guests. charles eames: the people wewanted to serve were varied, and to begin with we studiedthe shape and postures of many types --averages and extremes. franco: but it was morethan just a search for the best chair design. it was the beginningof the eames design process, a process of learning by doing. charles eames: in the designof any structure,
it is often the connection that provides the keyto the solution. franco: "never delegateunderstanding," charles said. it would become a hallmarkof eames design, their secret ingredient. man: charles said,yeah, there's a secret. first you have an idea,then you discard the idea, then you have 50 other ideasand you discard them, and then you do several models,and they don't work,
and you throw them out. and the secret is work and workand work and work and work. franco: the plywood furniturewas good to go in 1946. charles said of the furniture, "we wanted to make the bestfor the most for the least." that sentiment struck a chord with the herman millerfurniture company. honest and simplein its use of materials, the plywood furniture was alsoaffordable for the common man.
together, they would become oneof the great success stories of the postwar era. albrecht: charles and ray eamesprovide much of the furniture for a kind ofupper-middle-class, educated audience moving to suburbia. when the second world war ended, it wasn't just five yearsof pent-up demand. it was actually almost 15 years,
because you also have 10 yearsof the depression. and people have much more money, so if you wanted to sort ofdo something different than your parents,you bought that eames furniture. and it was promoted that way. everything around the marketingsuggested, "here is something newfor a new society." and america was a new societyin '45. franco: in the decadesto follow,
charles and ray scored success with line after lineof eames furniture. and their unmistakable designs became a ubiquitous partof american culture, right up to today. sold for $900, 232. i think the work retainsa real freshness. elements of it still informcontemporary design today. auctioneer: $700.
auctioneer: $2,000. $2,100. auctioneer: $2,100. auctioneer: $7,000. auctioneer: fair warning,selling...$13,000. are we done? sold for $13,000. wright: the rightnessof the furniture will continue to appeal
to new generations. man: the word "eames" has nowbecome a generic word. i mean, if you go on ebay,it always says, "eames era" blah, blah, blah. so it's becomea word like "victorian." maybe it's, in a way, accurate, because just like queen victoria represents an attitude, eames also embodiesa certain approach
to life and to thinking. franco: by the early '50s,charles had grown an outsized reputationas an icon of modernism, fighting to injectan ethical dimension into american capitalism. at that price,the customer knows exactly whathe's going to get. this! franco: in mgm's"executive suite,"
william holden stars as a curiouslycharles eames-like furniture designer. we'll have a lineof low-priced furniture, a new and different line, as different from anythingwe're making today as a modern automobile isdifferent from a covered wagon. franco: in the outside world,charles's reputation may have grown larger than life,
but within the eames office, there was always the lingeringquestion of credit. sussman: there are stillsome sore issues among certain people who feelthey never were recognized as much as they should, but it's a very delicate issue. franco: the issue came to a headback in 1946 at the unveilingof the original eames chair when the museum of modern artgave charles a one-man show.
albrecht: moma gives the namecharles eames, and this causes a certaintension in the office, because it was thought to bea collaborative effort. man: it's not that he's swoopingin or is doing nothing and scarfing up all the credit, but he is not the only designerthat was involved. sussman: this happensall the time. a group of young peopleco-creating and influencing each otherand inspiring each other,
and then the question is,"who did what?" one of the last projects i worked on was"day of the dead," the film. i was down in mexicohelping with that film, shooting, gathering objects, and setting the type. and i wrote,"assistance in mexico," and i wrote the namesof the people. so charles came by my deskand said, "what is that?!"
and i said, "but we workedon it, didn't we?" ashby: i went to new yorkmany, many times, putting the time lifelobbies together, and charles never wentand saw them while the thingswere being constructed, but i could never say that i designed anythingat the eames office. i never saw anythingcome out of there that was not signatured, you know,by him and ray.
oppewall: when a productcomes out, it's a river. it starts at one point, and it ends at another point. many people jump into italong the way. beebe: and everybody contributesa small piece, but only if they go onafter that to producea stunning amount of work, i think, are theycapable of saying,
"i did this, this, and this in the eames officewith no credit." woman: i think he ran the officea bit like a renaissance studio. you know, there'sa master painter, but then there areall the other people who help realize the work. oppewall: he may have beenexploiting us, but if you were not stupid, you were also exploitingthat relationship.
i was happy, being exploited by a proper master. man: the mostwonderful work is -- is the conscienceand the talents of a person who have every rightto have their name on it, even though it's doneby minions of other people. things good and bad, he rightfully has his nameon them, and they rightfully
are charles eames orcharles and ray eames products. arlene francis: almost always,when there's a successful man, there is a very interestingand able woman behind him. and a better casecould seldom be found than in ray and charles eames. come on in, ray. hello,i'm so happy to see you. this is mrs. eames,and she's going to tell us how she helps charlesdesign these chairs.
how do you manage that? well, uh, aside from serving as an extreme in the testing, there are a million things, but, uh, i thinkthe most difficult thing is to keep the big idea, to be able to lookcritically at the work. albrecht: arlene francis isclearly having a hard time with this husband and wifeworking together.
you know, this is the eraof "mad men," as we're watching now. this is not fitting. and charles eames is tryingto promote ray eames, as saying that,"we collaborated on this." charles eames: well, uh, ray --ray was a painter. ray worked here in new york withhans hofmann for a long time, which is a pretty good start. kirkham: i actually thoughtcharles was more embarrassed
than ray. ray is hidden away. charles is being highlighted,the great male designer. it's a very interesting moment of american sexual politicsin the 1950s. uh, i wonder if you're goingto maybe take us through and show how -- how the eameschair has developed. and, ray, shall welet charles do it, or do you wantto help with it?
please, please. no, you see, as i told you,she is behind the man, but terribly important. thank you, ray.all right, charles -- sussman: the feminist consciencehad not been yet raised. ray would always standbehind charles. and on camera or in interviews,she said hardly anything. edward p. morgan: her warmbut quiet conversation shrank to total silencebefore the camera,
but her impact on eames' workspoke for her. she sat like a deliciousdumpling in a doll's dress, concentratingon a sweep of subjects which would seeminglychoke a computer. ashby: people always madethe mistake that charles and ray,it was two brothers. they were a married couple, while at the same time,they were partners in whatevertheir design effort was.
oppewall: ray felt, i think, deeply enragedand hurt, on occasion, when it was assumed that it was actually just charles's business and it was the officeof charles eames, not the officeof charles and ray eames. it was charleswho was in charge, but the body of workwould not have been the same without ray's contributions,
and how you separate that out,i don't know. franco: if the public saw rayas little more than the devoted wifesupporting her husband, charles saw a talented artistwho had participated in the birth of abstract artin america. her mentor was the germanabstract expressionist hans hofmann. perl: hofmann is oneof the great catalytic figures in american art.
he starts a schoolin new york city in '33 with at times no more thana dozen or two students. they, together, are the seedout of which the new american artreally grows. he was getting ideas from people like mondrian, paul klee,kandinsky, but he was communicating them not as textbook learning, but asthis incredibly visceral sensation.
and i have talked to peoplewho remember him walking into the studio andlooking at a drawing of theirs and tearing it down the middle and then taking the two partsand moving them. and then suddenly somethingthat had been very static was dynamic. kirkham: so i think it's therethat ray learned some, at least, of thiswonderful capacity that she had for collaging,for juxtaposition.
she could move things aroundvery, very easily and beautifully and find form, and find formin relation to other form. sussman: ray knew what was art and what was not. and charles dependedon her aesthetic genius. oppewall: and she would putobjects on shoots that would just bringthe whole thing to life. by putting the stackof black wire chairs
naked with the wooden bird with the little wire legs, gave you a very differentfeeling about those chairs. ashby: charles could not dealwith the idea that any of the furniturewould have color on it. if you put a palette of colorsin front of him, they just -- like he couldn'thandle it. it just wentover his head. he deferred to her completelyon color sense.
beebe: she saw everythingas a painting. she had these enormous eyesthat were -- they were open like thisall the time. and i think charleswas very dependent on that. sussman: you could justhear him say, "ra-ay!" which meant, "come and help!" franco: at the libraryof congress, ray's lettersto a traveling charles
show her fastidious attentionto every detail of their life and work. man: when she writes to charlesin paris and she's talking aboutthe slides that he's just taken, and she has this sketchshowing how she and sandro and don albinsonhave changed the chair. and then she's going onabout the films, and she's going onabout elmer bernstein. then she tells him allthe places to shop in paris
and where to get his shoes and where to get her gloves and what the stitchingshould be like on the gloves and how this perfumeby balmain is $55 an ounce here, but it's cheaper in paris,"and please get it for me." seligsohn: it's as ifthey were one individual with two differentspecial areas, and a lot of it was unspoken, just eye -- eye contact.
a nodding of something --an idea that they both would agree on. peatross: so that's howyou begin to separate their artistic personalitiesand their contributions. but the separating themisn't the important part. it's what they created together. that's why it's so good. franco: perhaps the greatesteames design of all was the imageof charles and ray.
their playful self-portraits,eccentric dress, and quotable quotesall contributed to the endearing pictureof a happy, modern couple absorbed in the challengesof their work. charles and raywere cultural icons, but their public face maskeda deep desire for privacy. after long hours at 901, they would retreatto the home they built in pacific palisades.
sussman: charles and ray weretheir own community, and we werein the satellite group. and so was everybody else. ashby: i had no sense that theywere trying to keep out the outside worldor anything else. they had created a worldand a lifestyle that just required them to go in this tunnel from their house to the work, you know,back home again,
so what you surround yourselfwith and the choices you make about where you liveand how you live and the artifacts you have, they're all based upontrying to create a seamless environmentand a seamless life. franco: originally, the housewas designed by charles with eero saarinen as part of the influential case studyhousing program in 1945. but charles and ray were notones to let a good design rest.
demetrios: charles eames andeero saarinen designed a house that we now callthe bridge house, and it was for this site. it would have cantileveredfrom the hillside out into the middleof the meadow. one of the ideas of the housewas to use technologies that had comeout of the war effort. so all the parts of this house were off the shelf.
franco: but the bridge housewas never built. demetrios: after world war ii, there were majormaterial shortages, and it took abouttwo or three years to even get the partsthat they had ordered. and in that time,charles and ray fell in love with this meadow. ray eames: we spent all --all our spare time here. began to think it would becriminal to put that house
in the middleof the field. woman: charles realized, "oh, we're making the classicarchitect's mistake." you finda beautiful site, and you plunk a housein the middle of it. franco:with the meadow in mind, charles and ray redesignedthe bridge house and began construction. man: it was relatively quick,
because they were relying onsome form of prefabrication, of bringing materialsto the site and assembling them. franco: on christmas eve, 1949, charles and ray moved in. hines: the eames housein los angeles on that bluffoverlooking the pacific ocean is surely one of the greatbuildings of the 20th century. franco: known to architecturalhistorians
as case study house number 8, it is the archetypalmodern house. or at least,it started that way. wright: the eames houseas it was first made is very differentfrom what it became as they lived in itthrough the years and as it acquiredall their little touches. i think people miss that unless you've really been thereand been inside of it.
now, do you remember this? do you remember this? i do.i do. uh, i don't rememberthis one here, but there was at least oneat the office. [playing tune] man: modern design has thissort of clichã© of being the, you know,the homes of super villains. very hard-edged things.
you can't have, you know,your pepperidge farm cookies on the kitchen counter,because that's going to ruin, you know,this perfect tableau of this perfect lifethat you live. but you would never look at the eames houseand think that. the container for your lifecan be simple, but that doesn't meanyour life has to be simple. sussman: what was in the housewas a combination of things
that one hadn't seen before. there was a tumbleweedhanging from the ceiling. well, now you can see a lot oftumbleweed around in people's houses,but in those days, it was [gasps]. and near the tumbleweedhanging from the ceiling, there were twohans hofmann paintings suspended fromthe deck of the roof. the floor was just anothercanvas for ray,
the ceiling wasjust another canvas, a sofa was a canvasfor a collage of objects. she would have entirelyall of her famous blue and white dishesstacked up. but she would have little redhearts or little red accents. and it was all perfect. man: i went to dinner at ray and charles's houseone night, and it came to dessert.
so what they had arrangedfor dessert was three bowls of flowers that they put in front of you to admire,so it was a visual dessert. i was really [bleep] offwith that, i can tell you. i was really --because i hadn't eaten much. i was saving up for the --so i'm looking at these stupid flowers,you know,
and i'm saying, "what the hellis wrong with these people?" you know, so i got in my car, and i drove out to the nearestdairy queen. franco: "take your pleasureseriously," charles said, and that's exactlywhat they did. [circus music playing] oppewall: every time the ringling brothersand barnum & bailey circus would come to town, we would allget out our cameras
and our ectochrome, and we'd go running downtown, and we'dphotograph the circus. man: and he said, "photograph." "what?" he said, "anything you want.just photograph." and a couple of peopleof the audience were there to feed you. it's like a machine gun, somebody was feeding youthe cartridges.
and i took a lot of pictures. man: what impressed him washow everybody knew their place, and sometimes they had two or three different tasksthat they had to do. caplan: the circus lookslike a free-for-all and is absolutelya model of constraints. oppewall: and for charles,this was one supreme example -- "the performance." "never let the blood show,"he would say.
and this went backto his philosophy of no good design,no good performance without restrictions, withoutrestraints, without rules. ashby: he goes to the circus,and he just is overwhelmed by the richness of everything, you know, the costumes and the wagons and the tent. and he comes back,and he's trying to --
you can't turn a circusinto a piece of furniture, but he's desperately wanting to. franco: charles and ray did notturn the circus into a chair, but they did turnthe eames office into a circus. [drum roll] [march playing] ashby: he wasn'tembarrassed at all about what it isthat he was doing. you know, he felt reallyconfident about,
"yeah, this is a toy shop. this -- i'm justhaving fun here. and, you know, somehow or other,you guys bring me money and tell me to go ahead,and i'm going to." franco: royalties fromherman miller gave charles the freedom to move beyondhis reputation as a designerof modern furniture. schrader: herman millerwas always after him to do more chairs, and he woulddo chairs every now and then,
but i don't think he likedto think of himself or have others think of him as the chair designer. [trumpet playing] schrader: i was a film critic, and that gave me an excuseto go down to 901. i fell in love withthe whole concept of 901, which was a kind of renaissance art workshop,where they did everything.
at the time, he was considered a kind of cutesy,passã© little filmmaker, but no one had ever writtenabout the films. franco: eames filmsare their own genre, the product not of a film studioconcerned with profits, but of a curious mindyearning to communicate the complex beautyof everyday objects. [jazz playing] charles eames: we've never usedfilm as an art form.
we just use film as a tool. [mariachi music playing] schrader: they were, at heart, a kind of mixture of vanityand self-expression. they only had one obligation,and that was to satisfy charles. charles eames:much of our energy is like the guy in vaudevillethat has the plates going, and he's
intent on getting 30 platesspinning at one time, but part of the process is quickly being aware of the onesthat are winding down, and keeping them spinning. ashby: one of the titlesthat began to circulate between all the employees was the eamery,because it was like this place where everyone was drivento work all the time. sussman: it was 24/7,
365. john neuhart: goingto the eames office and watching peopleat their desks was like watching peopletake their brains out and knead them like dough. people that camefrom the outside couldn't believe that this wasthe way things were done, but it was a delicious agony. it was like a temple for me.
oppewall: many of usunderstood very well that we were very poorly suitedfor employment in certain kinds of jobs. we were very well suitedto be there. ashby: charles had a terribletime interacting with people. several times, i hired people, and they would be therelike three days, and he'd come to me and say,"i just can't stand that guy. get him out of here."
and i never did know what it was that he saw in that person that he could just notwork with them. roche: i happen to havea sort of interest in language as a means of communication,which i like to believe can be simple and direct. charles, i would say,didn't subscribe to that. uh, no, we have to -- you know,the only thing is, uh, perry, we have to have some sort ofa background before we do this,
because one sort of begins to -- sussman: his speech wasn'tyadda, yadda, yadda, yadda. it was stop and go,and stop and go. no, you -- you let me -- cutthis, let me re-- let me -- roche: he hadthis incredible ability to surround every subject with a little cloud of words. we -- we were hoping to -- there were two --there were several things.
there was, uh... roche: you finallygot the message at the end of about15 or 20 minutes of wondering, "what the hell is hetalking about?" it finally dawned on youthat he was telling you you were an absolute clown because there's something wrong. charles eames: this one isgoing to have something to do with what i think ofas the new covetables.
john neuhart: he appearedone day at a conference at ucla, and he started to speak, and itjust ran right off the track. looked up, and he said,"i'm sorry. i just --isn't going to work today." and somebody said, "no, no!" so he said,"well, give me a minute." he put his head down. and everybody waited. and it took about two minutes.
and he raised up. and he just took off.boom. charles eames: reams of paper. what you do with a ream of paper can never quite come upto what the paper offers. [cheers and applause] john neuhart: he knewwhere his center was. and there are not a lot ofpeople that can do that. i -- i have buttonsthat get pushed,
but i don't knowwhere my center is. franco: for charles,knowing where his center was meant workingfor powerful clients without compromising his ideals. and making a film to representthe united states in communist russia in 1959 would put that philosophyto the test. albrecht: at the heightof the cold war, the american government
and the governmentof the soviet union decided to holdjoint expositions. the united states would showwhat america was about to the soviet public, and the soviet union would showwhat they were about to america. and one of the centerpieceswere a series of american kitchens, and it was therethat khrushchev and nixon had their so-calledkitchen debate.
there are some instanceswhere you may be ahead of us. there may be some instances --for example, color television --where we're ahead of you. but in orderfor both of us -- [speaking russian] for both of usto benefit -- for both of us to benefit -- franco: but the u.s.information agency decided that they had to showrussians more about america
than just carsand household appliances. kirkham: the idea is thatcharles and ray will make a film about life in the usa:"glimpses of the usa." how could you make the world as we see itin the united states -- how could you make itreally credible to an audience like that? we could've shown the greatestfreeway in the united states. if we'd shown one pictureand they'd gone,
they'd say, you know, "they've got the greatfreeway interchange, but we've got one at minsk, and we're going to build oneat smolensk, and we'll have two,and they have one." but in the redundancyof the multi-image technique, in something like 12 seconds, i think we showed120 freeway interchanges. albrecht: people were sentall over the country.
friends were calledto take images so that it lookednationalistic. it couldn't look specificand regional. it had to benational and egalitarian. lucia eames: charles said --wanted pictures of people setting off for work, children coming from school,coming up from the subway. and freeways. so i did my first,
you know, helicopter flights, sort of strapped in,leaning way out. i think the state departmenthad sort of envisioned having lots of troop marches. and charles saidhe'd do the film, but he didn't want to have itreviewed before it was shown. john neuhart: the governmentreally didn't have any idea what was happening. we would have these showings
for the guy who would representthe government, coming out. it seemed like each time, it would just get going,and then it'd go blank. and we'd say, "that's as faras we are right now." and he'd say, "well... yeah, i guess it looks okay. i don't know." so he'd go away. demetrios: well, as charlessaid, sometimes
if you don't askfor people's opinions, then they don'tgive them to you. they just got therethe day before, and i think by that time, the usia was just relieved that there'd be anythingto show. ashby: you know, and here youhave this giant effort that'd gone intobuilding the building and putting the screens up,
and tickets being --all of that happening. and he's waitingtill the very last minute. it's just kind of his nature. john neuhart:right at the end, he would suddenly appear, and it would looklike it was effortless. he'd say, you know, "this is just a little somethingwe've been doing." you know, and there'd beblood all over the floor
from the thing, you know? charles eames: when we lookat the night sky, these are the stars we see -- the same stars that shine downupon russia each night. we see the same clusters,the same nebulae. and from the sky, it would bedifficult to distinguish the russian cityfrom the american city. demetrios: if you'regoing to communicate with 3 million soviet citizens,you need to say something true.
you can't just show offyou've got better weaponsor this or that. you've got to try to speakfrom the heart, and they did. was it propaganda? goodness, yes, have you seen it? yes, it's, it's sellingthe u.s., and it's selling, i think,a very sanitized usa. albrecht: of courseit was propaganda. they were cold warriors.
the difference is they -- i believe they genuinelybelieved it. kirkham: one of the interestingthings was how to end this. charles had this ideaof a jet plane. ray still felt this might bea bit hard-edged, a bit -- could havemilitary implications. we never had an ending,and one day ray walked in and said, "forget-me-nots." charles said,"okay, forget-me-nots."
franco: forget-me-nots, the universal symbolof friendship, translates directlyinto russian, nezabudki, "forget me not." kirkham: they describednikita khrushchev with tearsrunning down his cheeks. so you have this wonderfulsort of double ending of the simplicity of a flower,but then this "forget me not." and it workedlike the best hollywood movie.
franco: the moscow show madecharles and ray newly famous, not as designers of furniture,but as communicators. communicators who used imagesrather than words. wechsler: charles wasvery wary of words. it's not about writing a script. it's about a sequence of images that can tell a story. franco: in the eames film"tops," there are no words,just pictures.
oppewall: in a way,the film is a kind of an essay about the nature and meaningof a top. in the beginning,it's all about winding up, getting started,putting it together, assembling the materials. and then it'sabout throwing them, seeing how they work,what they do, how they dance,how they spin, how they sing, whatever it isthat their meaning is.
but then you come to one moment where there's an architecturalplan on the tabletop, a blueprint,and what spins is a thumbtack, and you realize you have suddenly gottendirectly into the essence of what it means to be a top. things have meaning,things have personality, things express ideas. many designers wereand still are happy with
the manipulation of objects. he was only truly deeply happy manipulating an idea. franco: beginning in the 1950s,the idea of the computer triggered fear in the mindsof americans. albrecht: people were seeingcomputers, and there was a worryabout them. and this notionof the electronic brain feeds into fears that we're
going to be taken overby machines. franco: at the time, computerswere synonymous with just one company -- ibm. seligsohn:what was ibm's product? big vacuum tube machines,huge room-size machines, building-size machines, so that the average individualwas feeling an alien, science-fiction typeinvasion of my privacy. how do you combat that?
franco: ibm turnedto the eames office. to overcome the computer'spr problem, charles and ray set outto humanize it. narrator: properly related,it can maintain a balance between man's needsand his resources. albrecht: it's done in this, what to us todaylooks really corny -- but at the time, this wasthought to be radical -- to do a film for a sciencecompany, like a cartoon.
narrator: something has nowemerged that might make even our most elegant theoriesworkable. albrecht: and you gofrom the abacus. as human problemsbecome more complex, people inventmore complicated machines to solve those problems, and the culmination of that isthe computer. narrator: this is a storyof a technique in the service of mankind.
albrecht: it's notgoing to take over the world, it's not going to be robots. it's the logicalevolutionary progression of man developing productsto solve problems. franco: charles's visionaryinterest in computers helped to bring ibm intothe eames office stables. but it was not expertisethat made charles and ray indispensible tothe rapidly growing company. wurman: you sell your expertise,
you have a limited repertoire. you sell your ignorance,it's an unlimited repertoire. he was selling his ignorance and his desire to learnabout a subject. and the journey -- of him not knowing to knowing --was his work. franco: over two decades,charles and ray would complete dozens of projects,large and small, for ibm. but perhaps the most bold wastheir pavilion
for the 1964 new yorkworld's fair, a 1.2-acre experimental space celebrating the roleof computers in everyday life. ashby: i was drawing the stuff as fast as hecould conjure it up, and they came up with this idea of putting that theaterup on top of these trees. and so i knew they were going tohave these plungers going into the ground --they are going to move,
you know,400 people up on this ramp. and i knew, as a designer,i knew i was going to have to figure out some wayto make all that happen. and he's just so excitedabout this thing. and i'm just standing therelike that. and i said,"charles, this is just nuts." and he says, "yeah, and no onehad told us not to do it." franco: for the show in moscow,they had used seven screens. but at the ibm pavilion,there were 22.
caplan: charles was very big onmaking people feel welcome. you don't just get them inan auditorium and show the film. you have a host. but, uh, it was very hard. everything you said not only hadto be memorized and rehearsed, but it had to be timed, so when you pointedto this screen, what you were talking aboutappeared on this screen. and the same with that screenand all the others.
but the problem was, the hosthad a nervous breakdown. franco: as charles and ray'sreputation as visual communicators grew, so did their listof corporate clients. man: n is for... singers:♪ navigation equipment ♪ ♪ network protectors ♪ ♪ nuclear plant control ♪
♪ nuclear reactor plants ♪ ♪ for surface shipsand submarines ♪ franco: westinghouse,boeing, and polaroid all trusted the eames office to solve their problems. when the office was hiredby alcoa to show off the usesof aluminum, they built a solar-powereddo-nothing machine, which did exactly that.
sussman: that wasin the golden years, when the heads of corporationswould speak, a chair away from the designer. so that if you neededto talk to somebody, you talkedto the decision maker. you didn't talk to a managerwho talked to a director who talked to a chief director who talked to a vice president who talked toa senior vice president
who talked toan executive vice president who was allowed to talk to god. seligsohn: almost neverwas there a dissenting voice. we trusted his decision makingentirely. so his freedom to doand to explain and to conceive and execute was almost unparalleled. beebe: they didn't havecontracts. they had a handshake.
all those huge projectswere done on a handshake. "we're going to give youthe best product, but we can't tell youwhat it's going to cost." and for ibm and for polaroid,and for herman miller, it was okay. franco: and for charles, these gentlemen's agreementswent both ways. ashby: the budget for"mathematica" was $150,000.
it actually ended upcosting $300,000, and charles paidfor the $150,000 that it went over budget. so the whole thingabout what things cost and trying to keep itwithin the budget and meet the clients,he didn't care about -- he cared about it, but he just,he couldn't stop himself. franco: charles and ray's careerbegan with a utopian notion of providing low-cost,high-quality goods to the masses
through industrial production. but they never viewed their work for corporate titansas selling out. albrecht: they wanted to workfor the google of their time, and they did, and it allowedthem incredible experimentation. and they believed they couldhave a bigger impact on everyday life by workingfor the bigger company. franco:ibm shared charles's concern that american kids were fallingbehind in math and science.
and as usual, they gavethe office free rein to address the problem. maybe, charles felt, a film could help. narrator: we beginwith a scene one meter wide, which we view from justone meter away. now, every ten seconds,we will look from ten times farther away, and our field of view will beten times wider.
franco: "powers of ten" wouldbecome the best known of all the eames films,viewed in countless classrooms and copied freely byfilmmakers around the world. schrader: everyone has seen"powers of ten." they may not have seenthe version charles did, but they have seen one of the countless rip-offsof that film. narrator: ten to the sixth,a one with six zeros, a million meters --soon the earth will show
as a solid sphere. tondreau: nobody had donea movie like that. how can you fail,doing a cosmic zoom in and out from all that is? and so the concept is,all by itself, mind-blowing. narrator: the trip back tothe picnic on the lakefront will be a sped-up version,reducing the distance to the earth's surface by onepower of ten every two seconds. it's "ch-ch-ch-ch-shoo,"
excessive information,dizzying information. narrator: ten to the ninthmeters, ten to the eighth... schrader: like in a chasesequence in a movie, everything is going by so fast, it forces the observer to choosethe information that's truly important, which is the caror the person that is running away from you --
i.e., the idea. narrator: one. we are backat our starting point. schrader: eames was aware that,in fact, that this was somewhat dizzying, and that it wasn't possible to get allof this information across in a single viewing,and that was fine. what he probably didn't know was that he was also lookinginto the future
of audio-visual perception. the pace at which we receiveinformation today is as fast as he was doingback then. narrator: as a single protonfills our scene, we reach the edgeof present understanding. sussman: as time went on, charles became more and moreand more interested in ideas, especially scienceand mathematics. ray was less engaged.
i mean, i'm no mathematician,and i'm no -- not an architect, i'm not -- i haven't hadcertain training, so i just try to help in the waythat i -- in any way i can. i don't stop to thinkwhether i can. i just go as far as i can. and if i -- if i can't, i can't. tondreau: i think raymay have suffered from a feelingof marginalization,
because someof those last projects were heavy on ideasand not as heavy on the kind of visual richnessthat was ray's forte. giovannini: she's no longeras instrumental in the entire thing. she can apply an aesthetic, she can dress a set, and so on, but, um, she's no longeras central. franco: ray's exquisite taste,her eye for form and color,
made her indispensibleto the office. but it could also bea terrible burden. oppewall: i remember peeringinto ray's office only once or twice, because when the door openedand i looked into it, i thought, "i don't ever wantto look in there again, because it's a littlefrightening." ashby: ray had a little room,smaller than charles's, directly across the hallfrom his,
that was justabsolutely jammed with all of her littlepieces of paper and all of her little slides and all of the little notes that people had mailed to her and that she was mailingto them. beebe: and she would go inand find things. she would say, "oh, i have one," and she would disappearinto the room
and come outwith the perfect kite. or she'd go in and findthe perfect scarf or something. she would go,and she would fuss with it, and change it one day, and the next day,she would look at it again and changea little something else. and i think over the years, the perfectionismdid get in the way. in a way, it crippled her.
woman: here is oh, a picnicbasket, a drawing of a basket. up in seaview village, so probably deborah sussman. it's a letterfrom lily saarinen. that's cool. look at that,i've never seen that. there we go -- "dearest queenof all pack rats." i think it was almosta nervous tic with her.
she was constantlymaking notes, and usually on the back ofbenson & hedges wrappers. this is one of the wrappers, and on this side she designed somethingthat looks very reminiscent of someof her fabric designs. and you turn it over, and yousee it's a benson & hedges. and on this sideare notes she made for lighting of the puppet shows
at the ibm pavilion. caplan: you'd find themeverywhere. they'd drive you crazy. and they could say, "buy soap," or "liver and onionsfor dinner," or they'd havevery elaborate ideas. marilyn neuhart:she had her suits made, and they had pockets that wentall the way to the hem. so whatever she wanted to keep,
she would just shovein the pockets. man: so what would happenwith these notes? mcaleer: well, for a time,she asked the staff to try to type them up,and i think it became too overwhelmingfor the staff. it was such an avalancheof notes. tondreau: ray didn't communicatelike everybody else does. she expected that you pre-understoodwhat she was talking about.
the people who didn'tmake the effort would sometimes usethe epithet "crazy rayzy," simply because theydidn't understand her. but ray is not crazy.she's brilliant. beebe: and ray hada lot of competition for charles's attention, which i don't think anybody everreally gave her credit for. that everybody wanted charlesand not ray. oppewall: he was the guy thatthe ibm executives would call.
he was the guy that you went to to discuss the projectsintellectually. he was very charismatic. charles was extremelycharismatic. he was very handsome. he was very handsomeand very charismatic. i know that word is reallyoverused, but he was. and especially very charismaticto women. blaich: he reminded meof henry fonda,
and i met henry fonda one time,and i told henry fonda this, that i thoughtthey looked alike, and he said,"that's a compliment." sussman: i mean, he hadthese dimples, and he -- "aw, shucks,"kind of guy. schrader: he was handsomeand smart, and cool. so, you know, that's a kind oflethal combination. wechsler: it was the vision. it was the personality.
it was the charm. it was the unexpected. it was the person. this is just a small selection of letters that i went through to find things that pertainparticularly to the work. "in the next few weeks, i mustpull together a preliminary film for the 'franklin and jefferson'show." and then the rest is personal.
beebe: i think their marriage, it was a mystery to everybody,in a way. they were emotionallyextremely bonded. but he found excitementand thrills outside of ray, and outside of the office, which was reallycrushing to her. wechsler: i met him when he wason the visiting committee for the architecture departmentat m.i.t. and i was a youngassistant professor.
charles said, "let's experiment with some films on art." i have many, many letters,extraordinary letters. because we didn't livein the same city, we tried to see each otheras we could. he had come to london, and i was there,and i could not get away. and he said, "i will comeand stand in front of the house at a certain time," and islipped out of this
rather formal dinner, and there he was, and we justlooked at each other. we had a very profound lovefor each other. he wanted very muchfor us to get married and to have a child, and to close --he wanted to close the eames office in venice, which he found very burdensome, and for us to open an officetogether in new york.
and i made a decision -- and i don't know if wasthe right decision -- that i couldn't do it to ray. because i had a friendshipwith her, but above all because they hadbeen together so long, and i knew how muchshe depended on him. and i said, "i can't do it." beebe: ray dealt with itvery privately. she was hurt deeply,
but she wasn'tthe kind of person who would have said,"it's me or her." oppewall: i don't thinkshe wanted to leave. i think it was somethingthat she had to accept. this wasn't the era of easy-come, easy-gorelationships. there was too muchshared life and community, and the fact that he, you know, had other relationships outsideof the office...
he seemed to be constructedthat way. kirkham: but there is a positionthat i think is nonsense, which is to say that becausecharles was having a relationshipwith somebody else that he couldn't then carry ona collaboration with ray. i mean,that clearly didn't happen. franco: in fact, charles and raywere about to collaborate on the largest,most complex project the office wouldever undertake.
for the nation's bicentennialcelebration in 1976, the eames office designed "the worldof franklin and jefferson," a traveling show made upof three films, 40,000 wordstranslated into four languages, and thousands of photographsand objects, including a stuffed bison. when "franklin and jefferson"opened in paris, it was seen by 50,000 peoplein two months.
more than a thousand visitorssaw it each day in london and warsaw. but when it came to new york, the reception was different. albrecht: when it appeared atthe metropolitan museum of art, the new york times reviewed it, and the headline was, "what is this stuffdoing at the met?" it was one of the first times the eameses were evercriticized.
it had an enormousamount of text. nobody could have possibly readit all, it was so dense. wurman: this show wasa bit picky for me, too many little objectsthat i would remember none. it was too many things to see. i can remember about ten things. he knew so muchabout all these things, he couldn't edit out something. these are thingsof the period
and of the time,from mount vernon. wurman: they were allso interesting to him, and he was familiar with them, and he could see all theseconnections. but you can't keep it allin your head if you're notthat familiar with it. oppewall: you couldcall it clutter, but that's not what charleswould have called it, because clutter isjust stuff that's
dropped and abandonedand forgotten and left there. it was dense, and it was complex, but there was a mind at work placing it there. whether you as the recipient were willing and able to acceptthat is another question. albrecht: they're pushing upagainst the envelope of what technology could do,
because they're trying to givethe visitor a hypertext experience, but they're doing itin physical space. and it doesn't work. they are anticipating what the computer can do todayvery easily with layering text and givingyou at different levels. so it's a failure,but it's an honest failure. the criticism of"franklin and jefferson"
hit charles hard. demetrios: the"franklin and jefferson" show was an exhausting show because it was huge, and i think sort ofthe machinery of doing that was just tiring. tondreau: i saw charlesat his happiest when he was getting to doa lot of photography. and he was very engaged directlyon the creative process
of doing the photographs -- which led me to the ideathat maybe he felt he was missing something,you know, because he had hadthe transition to more of an executiveposition at the office. beebe: it was very hard for him,because he didn't really have a successor, and for the yearsthat i was there, he was always looking for the perfect person.
it was a battle one day with the ibm representative,mike sullivan, and mike said,"why don't you shut this down?" and he said, "i'd like to." and sullivan said,"what would you do?" and he said, "i'd just traveland shoot." "but," he said, "i don't knowwhat to do about ray, and closing the office." beebe: he was tired, and he was,
i don't know if it was hisheart, but he was cold a lot. i brought him one morning --it was a saturday morning, and i'd made applesauce cakeor something, and i brought it to the office, and i handed it to charleswrapped in tin foil, and it was still warm,and he took it, pressed it to his chest, and he was thrilledto have that warmth just sort of on his chest.
john neuhart: i was out ofthe office the day that he died. it was, in a way,it was expected. sussman: it just didn'tseem possible. i mean, i knew that some peoplethat charles worked with, men in the east, wept. he was such a dominant force inthe lives of designers that... it was like there was suddenlya big empty hole. oppewall: there are still days when i'm drivingdown the highway,
thinking about things,and i think, "why did you die? i'm not through with you yet! i haven't finished asking youthe questions i wanted to ask." he was the most important personin my life. i mean, he could be, he couldreally be tough, you know, but he... he was an extraordinaryperson. beebe: after charles died,
suddenly ray was the head of the office. she gathered everybody around, and she talked about her goalsand what she wanted to do, and how she neededour help. and it was really very powerful, because she had neverdone that before. but she felt this huge burdenabout carrying on the name and carrying on the office.
and i think it was killing her. and i said, "come on, ray,why don't you just close the office,and let's go and paint." and she said"no, that's all in the past. i can't do that anymore." franco: without charles, activity in the eames officedwindled, until it was timeto finally close 901. ray focusedon the painstaking work
of cataloguing the voluminous40-year output of the eames office. nearly 350,000 photographs and half a million documentshad to be organized for shipment to the library of congress. but over the years,a new generation lifted rayfrom charles's shadow, discovering in herexuberant design sense a refreshing alternativeto the austerity of modernism.
and ray seemed to finallyfind her voice as one of the most influentialwomen of american design. best for the most for the least, that was always the principle. that's why we became interested in mass production. sussman: at that point, women began to point to ray. you know, "if there aretwo eameses,
why aren't they both credited?" and now, of course, they are. beebe: she kept saying, inthe hospital, "what day is it?" and i would say,"it's wednesday the 18th." and she would say, "oh." and then the next timei would come, then she would say,"what day is it?" "it's thursday." "oh."
i think she wanted to dieon the same day as charles because it sort of symbolizedtheir being one. her last statement was oneof being with charles. this guy and that guycould trade places. there's probably an eames chair literally in every single issuethat we've published. you know, you could go from the dax to the dssto the lcw, you know, you'll getthis whole range.
man:clockwise just a little. just a little. the furniture still hasa quality that every young designer is searching for,because of the amount of thought that's been put into it by everyone whose hands touchthe project. i think you see that optimismof the american spirit in their design.
it providedjust a great blueprint for how we could live our lives. peatross: what furnituredesigners ever have produced40 to 50 pieces of furniture that have been in productionfor five decades? but the other thing isthe sheer joy, that aspect of play. no one else, i think,had that combination of the pragmaticand the aesthetic.
narrator: seven... sussman: they loved to say,"we don't do art. we solve problems." it's the process. it's, how do we getfrom where we are to where we want to be? narrator: grasp the rearof the viewfinder... demetrios: charles and ray werealways looking to the future. they weren'tsort of sitting around,
telling war stories aboutorganic furniture. what they were doing is like, "what's the next thing?" albrecht: they were there for the major momentsin american history, and they were really thepioneers of the information age. narrator: the visitorcan try out the computer as a carrier of information. albrecht: the breadthof the work is extraordinary,
but there is also a unifyingtheme of beauty and a desire to reacha broad audience. so if it was pulled forwarda little bit? every designer owes themsome amount of debt, but at the same time, part ofthat debt should be to kind of take what they didand move beyond it.