Modern design - Charles & Ray Eames, and the Bauhaus

I was at least an average art history student at university, so I could certainly identify the work of Christopher Dresser, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Peter Behrens, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Herbert Bayer and Marcel Breuer. After university I could identify Robin and Lucienne Day’s work with my eyes closed. But not Charles and Ray Eames.

Now an exhibition of Charles and Ray Eames’ work is on at the Barbican (Oct 2015 until mid Feb 2016), and I knew nothing about them. So I am citing the home page of the exhibition called The World of Charles & Ray Eames at the Barbican Art Gallery in London.

Eames House Living Room, 1948 

Credit: Barbican Art Gallery
Nature comes from the outside, into their living room

The husband and wife are more famous now than when they were alive, their work the ultimate examples of mid-century style. But Catherine Ince, curator of a retrospective show at the Barbican, said: “A mid-century lifestyle choice is not what they were. Their pioneering and influential work was about much more. It covered not only furniture, product design, architecture, exhibition and interior design, but graphics, photography, film, multi-media installations, new models of education and a whole way of seeing the world.”

Ince has spent much of the past three years studying archives that cover 750,000 photographs, drawings and papers, including personal and business correspondence. The search revealed the way the couple thought about design, expressed in the pithy maxim they loved:  “to provide the best for most, for the least”.

“Their approach was about satisfying the needs of the user. They aimed to produce designs that were better to use, which took account of spiritual and emotional needs. For them, design was the expression of an objective and a process of action — a problem to be solved by applying a curious intellect and engaging with the surrounding technologies and social conditions.”

Charles trained as an architect and Ray as an artist. They met at Cranbook Academy of Art in Detroit in 1940, married in 1941 and moved to California. Charles collaborated with Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen on a chair for the Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition held by MoMA in New York. This led to Ray and Charles developing the use of laminated ply in a chair in 1946.

They were invited in 1948 to enter the MoMA Low-Cost Furniture Competition. Their design La Chaise, inspired by Gaston Lachaise’s 1927 sculpture Reclining Nude, was rejected by judges because it was considered too specialised and too expensive. However the judges admired its striking, good-looking and inventive moulded construction. La Chaise finally went into production in 1950 and is now one of the couple’s signature works.

In 1945 the pair began designing a case Study House #8 on a wooded bluff overlooking the ocean in Pacific Palisades Los Angeles. Construction began on what is now the Eames House in 1948. Made of prefabricated panels and glass, the influential couple lived there and entertained many leading contemporary designers, architects and film-makers.

The couple created a dynamic theatre of household objects curated with the utmost care, regularly changing them and their locations to enhance family life. They wanted to show their appreciation of other cultures and simple objects they found in everyday use in places such as Mexico and India.

Barcelona chair, 1929 

designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his partner
Note the smooth lines

Eames soft pad lounge chair, 1958
leather and aluminium

Eames moulded plywood chairs and table
1946

In 1943 they set up their design practice, the Eames Office. Their furniture designs were made by Herman Miller, for whom they developed the moulded fibreglass chair in 1949. Their iconic room set, For Modern Living, featured in a show in Detroit. This has been recreated for this Barbican show.

The couple designed numerous exhibitions for IBM, including its pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1964-5). For the American government, they created Glimpses of the USA (1959) in Moscow, while Indira Gandhi commissioned them for the 1965 exhibition, Nehru: His Life and his India.

The Barbican article does not say who their greatest influence was. The couple’s search for perfection in largely undec­or­ated designs led to exhaustive modelling and this resulted in designs that had an honest, functional aesthetic. So it is not a huge leap to suggest the couple was most inspired by the Bauhaus designers in Germany, design artists who believed firmly in the philosophy that Form Follows Function. One look at Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s chairs from the mid 1920s suggested the American couple also liked the Germans’ materials and shapes.