Eames: The Architect and The Painter
The film Eames: The Architect and The Painter goes through the careers and lives of Charles & Ray Eames. I suppose the title of the documentary is meant to be ironic, since Charles and Ray Eames were not defined by a single trade or profession. They worked in various industries, from filmmaking to furniture design to painting.
The first iteration of the famous chair, created in response to a brief for the competition ‘Organic Design in Home Furnishings’ competition held by the Museum of Modern Art, was considered a failure by it’s designers Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. The brief was to create a piece of furniture that is well designed, can be mass produced, and has no upholstery. Despite the fact that the chair looked the part, it could not be mass produced easily, as it could not be moulded from a single piece of plywood. Importance was given to the look of the product, but not the substance and knowing how it could be made.
During World War II, Charles and Ray were chosen by the U.S. Navy to create a new leg splint. This gave them the opportunity to perfect their technique of moulding plywood utilising the custom made Kazam! machine. After the war, they returned to the chair project, applying the lessons learnt from the leg splint to the process of creating a new chair, which naturally went on to kick off their huge success.
The most striking thing to me, throughout the entire film, came from observing their design process. A quote from the film, “never delegate understanding” seems so relevant to members working in the Eames studio. Teams would approach assignments in a very hands-on manner, doing their own research and testing, and iterating. This was basically the design-build-test approach that we are taught in university, but it feels like everyone in the Eames studio did this more organically, as if it was the only way to work.
