"An artist is a title that you earn." "And it's a little embarrassing to hear people refer to themselves as artists." "It's like referring to themselves as a genius." "This was a man who was a Merlin of curiosity." "He was driven by his curiosity." "We weren't sure quite what he was." "Was he an architect?" "Was he a designer?" "Was he a filmmaker?" "But what he was, obviously, was something we all wanted to be." "I had been trained as a painter, but when we were working on furniture, and again in film, it never seemed like leaving painting in any way, because it was just anotherform." "She made paintings out of what she was surrounded by." "Everything she touched, she turned into something magical." "Everything that they did in design, she saw as an extension of her painting." "And everything they did in design, he saw as an extension of his architecture." "For them, these names like painter and architect, they weren't job descriptions." "They were ways of looking at the world." "They were introducing people to look at the world differently." "Life was fun, was work, was fun, was life." "People would say it was childlike behavior, butwhat's wrong with that?" "The Eameses have put all this joy back in life." "You know that modernism, let's face it, was getting boring." "Had they just designed the furniture, they'd be in the pantheon." "It's the multifaceted nature of the career that is extraordinary." "They give shape to America's 20th century." "I came from an architectural office where there were individual tables with a conference room, and there was carpet on 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 walking into a circus." "I walked in the door, and of course I immediately thought," ""Got any jobs here?" "'" "I'm just totally blown away by the patina on every surface of graphics, and there were models everywhere, and there was just stuff." "I was just overwhelmed." "I saw this incredible apparition of animation stands and photographs spread out on tables." "Models being lit for photography, a screening room, and a wonderful wood shop." "Saltwater tanks." "There were Eames chairs with Steinberg drawings on them." "Every kind of visual treat you can imagine." "And I thought, "I've come to work in Disneyland."" "If you had taken the roof off of it, you would see that place changing constantly." "So we'd just go around and take everything out of the middle ofthe studio, to put up a movie set to take pictures tomorrow, and then the next day, you'd take out all the movie set and put the tables all back up," "and everybody's back at work again." "It was very informal." "I mean, there wasn't ever any kind of routine." "There were no "regular meetings."" "Because I did not have a design degree, many of the people in the Office thought" "I probably shouldn't bethere, but Charles had a different attitude." "And he said this to me " ""l can teach you how to draw." ""lf you can think and you can see, and you can prove that to me, you can work here."" "For four decades, 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice Beach, California, was one of the most creative addresses on Earth." "Dozens of gifted young designers cuttheirteeth within the walls ofthe studio." "But the vision for the Office came from the top." "We have to have a place where you can recognize where you're going when you start out." "Modern design was born from the marriage of art and industry." "The Eames Office was born from the marriage of Ray Kaiser -- a painter who rarely painted -- and Charles Eames -- an architecture school dropout who never got his license." ""Eventually, everything connects," Charles said." "Furniture, toys, architecture, exhibitions, photography, and film were all connected in the wild, whimsical world of the Eames Office." "Charles and Ray Eames wanted to bring the most magnificent experiences that you could have with your eyes to the largest number of people." "I don'tthinkthere's anything more important for an artist to want to do." "It was a career that defined what it means to be a designer." "And it all began with a chair." "Charles, where did the classic Eames chair come from?" "Did it come to you in a flash, as you were shaving one morning?" "It sort of came to me in a 30-year flash, if you want." "TIME magazine called it" ""the greatest design ofthe 20th century."" "But it didn't start out that way." "It began as a failure." "Responding to a competition at the museum of modern art in 1940, two unknown young architects " "Charles Eames and his friend, Eero Saarinen, set out to reinvent the very idea of the chair." "The goal is to create an inexpensive, mass-produced chair which 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 what Louis XlV did." "Working at the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit," "Eames and Saarinen thought they could mold the new miracle material, plywood, into two directions at once to make a comfortable, form-fitting shell." "The critical point is where that back becomes the seat." "The glues aren't good enough, and the chair splinters, which means, when you'd sit on it, itwould be a little uncomfortable." "So they have to upholster it." "Despite failing at their goal of creating a single-piece plywood shell," "Charles and Eero won the competition." "The irony is that the chairthat Eames and Saarinen designed, they couldn't really manufacture." "Even with the upholstery to cover the cracked surface, no existing machine could successfully mold the plywood into the shape of the chair." "It couldn't be made in the way that they claimed it could be made." "They had designed the look of it without designing the substance of it." "After many unsuccessful attempts," "Eero Saarinen scrapped the project." "But Charles wasn't ready to give up -- this time, with a new partner." "At Cranbrook, he had become friendly with Ray Kaiser," "At Cranbrook, he had become friendly with Ray Kaiser, a talented young artist who had helped with the chair project." "I said to Ray one day," ""How did you and Charles get together?" "'" ""Oh!" "I can't talk about it."" "I said, "Well, why not?" "'" ""Well, we just did."" "They sparked, and the rest is literally history." "And I think in Ray, he really found his complement." "But there was a problem." "Charles was already married." "He had moved up to Cranbrook from St. Louis with his wife, Catherine, and his young daughter, Lucia." "The love letters are Charles's letters to Ray, because the letters that Ray wrote back to Charles," "Charles destroyed, because he was married." "They show Charles madly in love with her." "There's no doubt about that." "He talks about walking past the building that she used to live in and looking up at her window, and they are very moving." "These letters are talking about a joined future as artists together." "I think his decision feels made." "Ray certainly felt uncomfortable enough to leave Cranbrook and go away and think about what she was going to do thereafter." "Catherine was a very impressive person." "Knowing them both, as I did, you can see why they didn't stay together." "He really thought he had something to offer the world, and this was going to be a journey with a lot of unexpectedness." "This was a journey that might not lead to, uh, success." "And I think that maybe at that point in her life, this was not necessarily the place that Catherine wanted to go." "But I think that maybe in Charles's mind that he had wanted a life where love and work and life and work were all blended together." "Charles quit his job at Cranbrook, and, in one last letterto Ray, asked for her hand in marriage." "His future with his new bride now depended on making the chairwork." "Broke and short on options," "Charles and Ray headed from Michigan to L.A." "to finish what he had started." "Part of this journey to California was they were both going to figure out how to mass-produce molded plywood and compound curves -- which sounds very unromantic, but I think it probably was pretty romantic, underthe circumstances." "In their two-bedroom apartment in Westwood Village," "Charles and Ray set up a makeshift workshop." "The -- the first to -- that did the molding, which was so magic, we called it by a magic name." "So we called it "Kazam!"" "The "Kazam!" machine was a jury-rigged molding device made out of heating coils and a bicycle pump." "But in 1942, with the nation atwar, raw materials were scarce, and the "Kazam!" lay silent." "Butwith the setback, there was also opportunity." "The U.S. military needed better splints." "The standard-issue splintwas metallic, and so the vibration of the two people carrying them actually would make the wound worse." "Theywould actually be better off if you grabbed a stick off the ground and tied it to it than with this amplification." "So Charles and Ray said, "Well, you know, we're experimenting with molded plywood." "Why don't we try and design a new splint?" "'" "They're trying to make a three-dimensional curve, kind of a bowl, you might say." "They can't quite do it yet." "So they need holes in the plywood in order to release the tension, 'cause otherwise it's going to splinter where they try to do it." "Butworking within the constraints, what's nice is that this is exactly what you need for a splint, 'cause you need a place for the bandages to go." "In a rented warehouse space, their team of skilled designers and craftspeople made 150,000 splints." "With peace approaching, Charles and Ray had one thing on their minds -- applying the lessons of the splints to the failed plywood chairs." "Thistime, they wouldn't design the look of the chairfirst." "They would never make that mistake again." "They would let the design flow from the learning." "That meant knowing who they were serving." "In Charles's words, it was always about being a good host to their guests." "The people we wanted to serve were varied, and to begin with we studied the shape and postures of many types -- averages and extremes." "But it was more than just a search for the best chair design." "Itwas the beginning of the Eames design process, a process of learning by doing." "In the design of any structure, it is often the connection that provides the key to the solution." ""Never delegate understanding," Charles said." "It would become a hallmark of Eames design, their secret ingredient." "Charles said, yeah, there's a secret." "First you have an idea, then you discard the idea, then you have 50 other ideas and you discard them, and then you do several models, and they don'twork, and you throwthem out." "And the secret is work and work and work and work and work." "The plywood furniture was good to go in 1946." "Charles said of the furniture," ""We wanted to make the best for the most for the least."" "That sentiment struck a chord with the Herman Miller furniture company." "Honest and simple in its use of materials, the plywood furniture was also affordable for the common man." "Together, they would become one of the great success stories of the postwar era." "Charles and Ray Eames provide much of the furniture for a kind of Upper-middle-class, educated audience moving to suburbia." "When the Second World War ended, itwasn't just five years of pent-up demand." "Itwas actually almost 15 years, because you also have 10 years of the Depression." "And people have much more money, so if you wanted to sort of do something differentthan your parents, you boughtthat Eamesfurniture." "And itwas promoted that way." "Everything around the marketing suggested," ""Here is something new for a new society."" "And America was a new society in '45." "In the decades to follow," "Charles and Ray scored success with line after line of Eames furniture." "And their unmistakable designs became a ubiquitous part of American culture, right up to today." "Sold for $900, 232." "I think the work retains a real freshness." "Elements of it still inform contemporary design today." "$700." "$2,000." "$2, 100." "$2, 100." "$7,000." "Fair warning, selling...$13,000." "Are we done?" "Sold for $13,000." "The rightness of thefurniture will continue to appeal to new generations." "The word "Eames" has now become a generic word." "I mean, if you go on eBay, it always says, "Eames era"" "blah, blah, blah." "So it's become a word like "Victorian."" "Maybe it's, in a way, accurate, because just like Queen Victoria represents an attitude," "Eames also embodies a certain approach to life and to thinking." "By the early '50s, Charles had grown an outsized reputation as an icon of modernism, fighting to inject an ethical dimension into American capitalism." "At that price, the customer knows exactly what he's going to get." "This!" "In MGM's "Executive Suite,"" "William Holden stars as a curiously Charles Eames-like furniture designer." "We'll have a line of low-priced furniture, a new and different line, as differentfrom anything we're making today as a modern automobile is different from a covered wagon." "In the outside world, Charles's reputation may have grown larger than life, butwithin the Eames Office, there was always the lingering question of credit." "There are still some sore issues among certain people who feel they never were recognized as much as they should, but it's a very delicate issue." "The issue came to a head back in 1946 atthe unveiling of the original Eames chair when the museum of modern art gave Charles a one-man show." "MOMA gives the name Charles Eames, and this causes a certain tension in the Office, because it was thought to be a collaborative effort." "It's not that he's swooping in or is doing nothing and scarfing up all the credit, but he is not the only designer that was involved." "This happens all the time." "Agroup of young people co-creating and influencing each other and 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 Mexico helping with thatfilm, shooting, gathering objects, and setting the type." "And I wrote, "Assistance in Mexico,"" "and I wrote the names ofthe people." "So Charles came by my desk and said, "What is that?" "!"" "And I said, "But we worked on it, didn't we?" "'" "I went to New York many, many times, putting the time life lobbies together, and Charles never went and saw them while the things were being constructed, but I could never say that I designed anything at the Eames Office." "I never saw anything come out of there that was not signatured, you know, by him and Ray." "When a product comes out, it's a river." "It starts at one point, and it ends at another point." "Many people jump into it along the way." "And everybody contributes a small piece, but only if they go on after that to produce a stunning amount ofwork," "I think, are they capable of saying," ""l did this, this, and this in the Eames Office with no credit."" "I think he ran the Office a bit like a Renaissance studio." "You know, there's a master painter, butthen there are all the other people who help realize the work." "He may have been exploiting us, but if you were not stupid, you were also exploiting that relationship." "I was happy, being exploited by a proper master." "The most wonderful work is -- is the conscience and the talents of a person who have every right to have their name on it, even though it's done by minions of other people." "Things good and bad, he rightfully has his name on them, and they rightfully are Charles Eames or Charles and Ray Eames products." "Almost always, when there's a successful man," "Almost always, when there's a successful man, there is a very interesting and able woman behind him." "And a better case could seldom befound 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 Charles design 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 think the most difficult thing is to keep the big idea, to be able to look critically at the work." "Arlene Francis is clearly having a hard time with this husband and wife working together." "You know, this is the era of "Mad Men,"" "as we're watching now." "This is not fitting." "And Charles Eames is trying to promote Ray Eames, as saying that, "We collaborated on this."" "Well, uh, Ray -- Ray was a painter." "Ray worked here in New York with Hans Hofmann for a long time, which is a pretty good start." "I actually thought Charles 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 politics in the 1950s." "Uh, I wonder if you're going to maybe take us through and show how -- how the Eames chair has developed." "And, Ray, shall we let Charles do it, or do you want to 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 " "The feminist conscience had not been yet raised." "Ray would always stand behind Charles." "And on camera or in interviews, she said hardly anything." "Her warm but quiet conversation shrank to total silence before the camera, but her impact on Eames' work spoke for her." "She sat like a delicious dumpling in a doll's dress, concentrating on a sweep of subjects which would seemingly choke a computer." "People always made the mistake that Charles and Ray, it was two brothers." "They were a married couple, while at the same time, they were partners in whatever their design effort was." "Ray felt, I think, deeply enraged and hurt, on occasion, when it was assumed that it was actually just Charles's business and it was the office of Charles Eames, not the office of Charles and Ray Eames." "It was Charles who was in charge, but the body of work would not have been the same without Ray's contributions, and how you separate that out, I don't know." "If the public saw Ray as little more than the devoted wife supporting her husband," "Charles saw a talented artist who had participated in the birth of abstract art in America." "Her mentor was the German abstract expressionist" "Hans Hofmann." "Hofmann is one of the great catalytic figures in American art." "He starts a school in New York City in '33 with at times no more than a dozen or two students." "They, together, are the seed out of which the new American art really grows." "He was getting ideas from people" "like Mondrian, Paul Klee, Kandinsky, but he was communicating them not as textbook learning, but as this incredibly visceral sensation." "And I have talked to people who remember him walking into the studio and looking at a drawing of theirs and tearing it down the middle and then taking the two parts and moving them." "And then suddenly something that had been very static was dynamic." "So I think it's there that Ray learned some, at least, of this wonderful capacity that she had for collaging, for juxtaposition." "She could move things around very, very easily and beautifully and find form, and find form in relation to other form." "Ray knew what was art and what was not." "And Charles depended on her aesthetic genius." "And she would put objects on shoots that would just bring the whole thing to life." "By putting the stack of black wire chairs naked with the wooden bird with the little wire legs, gave you a very different feeling about those chairs." "Charles could not deal with the idea that any of the furniture would have color on it." "If you put a palette of colors in front of him, they just-- like he couldn't handle it." "It just went over his head." "He deferred to her completely on color sense." "She saw everything as a painting." "She had these enormous eyes that were -- they were open like this all the time." "And I think Charles was very dependent on that." "You could just hear him say," ""Ra-ay!"" "Which meant, "Come and help!"" "At the Library of Congress," "Ray's letters to a traveling Charles show herfastidious attention to every detail of their life and work." "When she writes to Charles in Paris and she's talking about the slides that he's just taken, and she has this sketch showing how she and Sandro and Don Albinson have changed the chair." "And then she's going on about thefilms, and she's going on about Elmer Bernstein." "Then she tells him all the places to shop in Paris and where to get his shoes and where to get her gloves and whatthe stitching should be like on the gloves and howthis perfume by Balmain is $55 an ounce here," "but it's cheaper in Paris, "and please get it for me."" "It's as if they were one individual with two different special areas, and a lot of it was unspoken, just eye -- eye contact." "A nodding of something -- an idea thatthey both would agree on." "So that's how you begin to separate their artistic personalities and their contributions." "Butthe separating them isn't the important part." "It's what they created together." "That's why it's so good." "Perhaps the greatest Eames design of all was the image of Charles and Ray." "Their playful self-portraits, eccentric dress, and quotable quotes all contributed to the endearing picture of a happy, modern couple absorbed in the challenges of their work." "Charles and Ray were cultural icons, buttheir public face masked a deep desire for privacy." "After long hours at 901, they would retreat to the home they built in Pacific Palisades." "Charles and Ray were their own community, and we were in the satellite group." "And so was everybody else." "I had no sense that they were trying to keep out the outside world or anything else." "They had created a world and a lifestyle thatjust required them to go in this tunnel from their house to the work, you know, back home again, sowhat you surround yourself with and the choices you make about where you live and how you live" "and the artifacts you have, they're all based upon trying to create a seamless environment and a seamless life." "Originally, the house was designed by Charles with Eero Saarinen as part of the influential case study housing program in 1945." "But Charles and Ray were not ones to let a good design rest." "Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen designed a house that we now call the Bridge House, and it was forthis site." "It would have cantilevered from the hillside out into the middle of the meadow." "One of the ideas of the house was to use technologies that had come out of the war effort." "So all the parts of this house were off the shelf." "But the Bridge House was never built." "After World War ll, there were major material shortages, and it took about two or three years to even get the parts thatthey had ordered." "And in that time, Charles and Ray fell in love with this meadow." "We spent all -- all our spare time here." "Began to think itwould be criminal to put that house in the middle ofthe field." "Charles realized," ""Oh, we're making the classic architect's mistake."" "You find a beautiful site, and you plunk a house in the middle of it." "With the meadow in mind," "Charles and Ray redesigned the Bridge House and began construction." "It was relatively quick, because they were relying on some form of prefabrication, of bringing materials to the site and assembling them." "On Christmas Eve, 1949," "Charles and Ray moved in." "The Eames house in Los Angeles on that bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is surely one of the great buildings ofthe 20th century." "Known to architectural historians as Case Study House Number 8, it is the archetypal modern house." "Or at least, it started that way." "The Eames house as it was first made is very different from what it became as they lived in it through the years and as it acquired all their little touches." "I think people miss that unless you've really been there and been inside of it." "Now, do you remember this?" "Do you remember this?" "I do." "I do." "Uh, I don't remember this one here, but there was at least one at the Office." "Modern design has this sort of cliché 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 perfecttableau of this perfect life that you live." "But you would never look at the Eames House and think that." "The container for your life can be simple, but that doesn't mean your life has to be simple." "What was in the house was a combination of things that one hadn't seen before." "There was a tumbleweed hanging from the ceiling." "Well, now you can see a lot of tumbleweed around in people's houses, but in those days, itwas." "And nearthe tumbleweed hanging from the ceiling, there were two Hans Hofmann paintings suspended from the deck of the roof." "The floorwas just another canvas for Ray, the ceiling was just another canvas, a sofa was a canvas for a collage of objects." "She would have entirely all of her famous blue and white dishes stacked up." "But she would have little red hearts or little red accents." "And it was all perfect." "I went to dinner at Ray and Charles's house one night, and it came to dessert." "So what they had arranged for dessert was three bowls of flowers thatthey put in front of you to admire, so it was a visual dessert." "I was really off with that," "I can tell you." "I was really -- because I hadn't eaten much." "I was saving up for the -- so I'm looking atthese stupid flowers, you know, and I'm saying, "What the hell is wrong with these people?" "'" "You know, so I got in my car, and I drove out to the nearest Dairy Queen." ""Take your pleasure seriously," Charles said, and that's exactly whatthey did." "Every time the Ringling Brothers and Barnum  Bailey Circus would come to town, we would all get out our cameras and our ectochrome, and we'd go running downtown, and we'd photograph the circus." "And he said, "Photograph."" ""What?" "'" "He said, "Anything you want." "Just photograph."" "And a couple of people of the audience were there to feed you." "It's like a machine gun, somebody was feeding you the cartridges." "And I took a lot of pictures." "What impressed him was how everybody knew their place, and sometimes they had two or three different tasks thatthey had to do." "The circus looks like a free-for-all and is absolutely a model of constraints." "And for Charles, this was one supreme example " ""the performance."" ""Never let the blood show," he would say." "And this went back to his philosophy of no good design, no good performance without restrictions, without restraints, without rules." "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 circus into a piece of furniture, but he's desperately wanting to." "Charles and Ray did not turn the circus into a chair, butthey did turn the Eames Office into a circus." "He wasn't embarrassed at all about what it is that he was doing." "You know, he felt really confident about," ""Yeah, this is a toy shop." "This " " I'm just having fun here." "And, you know, somehow or other, you guys bring me money and tell me to go ahead, and I'm going to."" "Royalties from Herman Miller gave Charles the freedom to move beyond his reputation as a designer of modern furniture." "Herman Miller was always after him to do more chairs, and he would do chairs every now and then, but I don't think he liked to think of himself or have others think of him as the chair designer." "I was a film critic, and that gave me an excuse to go down to 901." "I fell in love with the 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, passé little filmmaker, but no one had ever written about the films." "Eames films are their own genre, the product not of a film studio concerned with profits, but of a curious mind yearning to communicate the complex beauty of everyday objects." "We've never used film as an art form." "We just use film as a tool." "They were, at heart, a kind of mixture of vanity and self-expression." "They only had one obligation, and thatwas to satisfy Charles." "Much of our energy is like the guy in Vaudeville that has the plates going, and he's intent on getting 30 plates spinning at one time, but part of the process is quickly being aware of the ones that are winding down," "and keeping them spinning." "One of the titles that began to circulate between all the employees was the Eamery, because it was like this place where everyone was driven to work all the time." "It was 24/7, 365." "Going to the Eames Office and watching people at their desks was like watching people take their brains out and knead them like dough." "People that came from the outside couldn't believe that this was the way things were done, but itwas a delicious agony." "Itwas like a temple for me." "Many of us understood very well thatwe were very poorly suited for employment in certain kinds of jobs." "We were very well suited to be thete." "Charles had a terrible time interacting with people." "Several times, I hired people, and they would be there like three days, and he'd come to me and say, "l 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 not work with them." "I happen to have a 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 subscribetothat." "Uh, no, we have to -- you know, the only thing is, uh, Perry, we have to have some sort of a background before we do this, because one sort of begins to " "His speech wasn't yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda." "It was stop and go, and stop and go." "No, you -- you let me -- cut this, let me re-- let me " "He had this incredible ability to surround every subject with a little cloud ofwords." "We -- we were hoping to -- there were two -- there were several things." "There was, uh..." "You finally got the message at the end of about 15 or 20 minutes of wondering," ""Whatthe hell is he talking about?" "'" "It finally dawned on you that he was telling you you were an absolute clown becausethere's something wrong." "This one is going to have something to do with what I think of as the new covetables." "He appeared one day at a conference at UCLA, and he started to speak, and it just 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." "Reams of paper." "What you do with a ream of paper can never quite come up to what the paper offers." "He knew where his center was." "And there are not a lot of people that can do that." "I " " I have buttons that get pushed, but I don't know where my center is." "For Charles, knowing where his center was meant working for powerful clients without compromising his ideals." "And making a film to represent the United States in communist Russia in 1959 would put that philosophy to the test." "At the height of the Cold War, the American government and the government of the Soviet Union decided to hold joint expositions." "The United States would show what America was about to the Soviet public, and the Soviet Union would show what they were about to America." "And one of the centerpieces were a series of American kitchens, and it was there that Khrushchev and Nixon had their so-called Kitchen Debate." "There are some instances where you may be ahead of us." "There may be some instances -- for example, color television -- where we're ahead of you." "But in order for both of us " "For both of us to benefit -- for both of us to benefit " "But the U.S. Information Agency decided that they had to show Russians more about America than just cars and household appliances." "The idea is that Charles and Ray will make a film" ""Glimpses of the USA."" "How could you make the world as we see it in the United States -- how could you make it really credible to an audience like that?" "We could've shown the greatest freeway in the United States." "If we'd shown one picture and they'd gone, they'd say, you know," ""They've got the great freeway interchange, but we've got one at Minsk, and we're going to build one at Smolensk, and we'll have two, and they have one."" "But in the redundancy of the multi-imagetechnique, in something like 12 seconds," "I think we showed 120 freeway interchanges." "People were sent all overthe country." "Friends were called to take images so that it looked nationalistic." "It couldn't look specific and regional." "It had to be national and egalitarian." "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, helicopterflights, sort of strapped in, leaning way out." "I think the State Department had sort of envisioned having lots of troop marches." "And Charles said he'd do the film, but he didn'twant to have it reviewed before it was shown." "The government really didn't have any idea whatwas happening." "We would have these showings for the guy who would represent the government, coming out." "It seemed like each time, itwould just get going, and then it'd go blank." "And we'd say, "That's as far as we are right now."" "And he'd say, "Well..." "Yeah, I guess it looks okay." "I don't know."" "So he'd go away." "Well, as Charles said, sometimes if you don't ask for people's opinions, then they don't give them to you." "They just got there the day before, and I think by that time, the USlAwas just relieved that there'd be anything to show." "You know, and here you have this giant effort that'd gone into building the building and putting the screens up, and tickets being -- all of that happening." "And he's waiting till the very last minute." "It's just kind of his nature." "Right at the end, he would suddenly appear, and itwould look like itwas effortless." "He'd say, you know," ""This is just a little something we've been doing."" "You know, and there'd be blood all over the floor from the thing, you know?" "When we look atthe night sky, these are the stars we see -- the same stars that shine down upon Russia each night." "We see the same clusters, the same nebulae." "And from the sky, it would be difficult to distinguish the Russian city from the American city." "If you're going to communicate with 3 million Soviet citizens, you need to say something true." "You can't just show off you've got better weapons or this or that." "You've got to try to speak from the heart, and they did." "Was it propaganda?" "Goodness, yes, have you seen it?" "Yes, it's, it's selling the U.S., and it's selling, I think, a very sanitized USA." "Of course it was propaganda." "They were Cold Warriors." "The difference is they " "I believe they genuinely believed it." "One of the interesting things was how to end this." "Charles had this idea of a jet plane." "Ray still felt this might be a bit hard-edged, a bit -- could have military implications." "We never had an ending, and one day Ray walked in and said, "Forget-me-nots."" "Charles said, "Okay, forget-me-nots."" "Forget-me-nots, the universal symbol of friendship, translates directly into Russian," "Nezabudki, "forget me not."" "They described Nikita Khrushchev with tears running down his cheeks." "So you have this wonderful sort of double ending of the simplicity of a flower, butthen this "Forget me not."" "And it worked like the best Hollywood movie." "The Moscow show made Charles and Ray newly famous, not as designers of furniture, but as communicators." "Communicators who used images ratherthan words." "Charles was very wary of words." "It's not about writing a script." "It's about a sequence of images that can tell a story." "In the Eames film "Tops,"" "there are no words, just pictures." "In a way, the film is a kind of an essay aboutthe nature and meaning of a top." "In the beginning, it's all aboutwinding up, getting started, putting it together, assembling the materials." "And then it's aboutthrowing them, seeing how they work, what they do, how they dance, how they spin, how they sing, whatever it is that their meaning is." "But then you come to one moment where there's an architectural plan on thetabletop, a blueprint, and what spins is a thumbtack, and you realize you have suddenly gotten directly into the essence of what it means to be a top." "Things have meaning, things have personality, things express ideas." "Many designers were and still are happy with the manipulation of objects." "Hewas only truly deeply happy manipulating an idea." "Beginning in the 1950s, the idea ofthe computer triggered fear in the minds of Americans." "People were seeing computers, and there was a worry about them." "And this notion of the electronic brain feeds into fears that we're going to be taken over by machines." "At the time, computers were synonymous with just one company -- ibm." "What was ibm's product?" "Big vacuum tube machines, huge room-size machines, building-size machines, so that the average individual was feeling an alien, science-fiction type invasion of my privacy." "How do you combat that?" "lBM turned to the Eames Office." "To overcome the computer's PR problem," "Charles and Ray set out to humanize it." "Properly related, it can maintain a balance between man's needs and his resources." "It's done in this, what to us today looks really corny -- but at the time, this was thoughtto be radical -- to do a film for a science company, like a cartoon." "Something has now emerged that might make even our most elegant theories workable." "And you go from the abacus." "As human problems become more complex, people invent more complicated machines to solve those problems, and the culmination of that is the computer." "This is a story of a technique in the service of mankind." "It's not going to take over the world, it's not going to be robots." "It's the logical evolutionary progression of man developing products to solve problems." "Charles's visionary interest in computers helped to bring ibm into the Eames Office stables." "But it was not expertise that made Charles and Ray indispensible to the rapidly growing company." "You sell your expertise," "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 learn about a subject." "And the journey -- of him not knowing to knowing -- was his work." "Over two decades, Charles and Ray would complete dozens of projects, large and small, for ibm." "But perhaps the most bold was their pavilion for the 1964 New York World's Fair, a 1.2-acre experimental space celebrating the role of computers in everyday life." "I was drawing the stuff as fast as he could conjure it up, and they came up with this idea of putting thattheater up on top of these trees." "And so I knew they were going to have 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 way to make all that happen." "And he's just so excited about this thing." "And I'm just standing there like that." "And I said, "Charles, this is just nuts."" "And he says, "Yeah, and no one had told us not to do it."" "For the show in Moscow, they had used seven screens." "But at the ibm Pavilion, there were 22." "Charles was very big on making people feel welcome." "You don'tjust get them in an auditorium and showthe film." "You have a host." "But, uh, it was very hard." "Everything you said not only had to be memorized and rehearsed, but it had to be timed, so when you pointed to this screen, what you were talking about appeared on this screen." "And the same with that screen and all the others." "Butthe problem was, the host had a nervous breakdown." "As Charles and Ray's reputation as visual communicators grew, so did their list of corporate clients." "N is for..." "Westinghouse, Boeing, and Polaroid all trusted the Eames Office to solve their problems." "When the Office was hired by Alcoa to show off the uses of aluminum, they built a solar-powered Do-Nothing Machine, which did exactly that." "That was in the golden years, when the heads of corporations would speak, a chair away from the designer." "So that if you needed to talk to somebody, you talked to the decision maker." "You didn't talk to a manager who talked to a director who talked to a chief director who talked to a vice president who talked to a senior vice president who talked to an executive vice president who was allowed to talk to God." "Almost never was there a dissenting voice." "We trusted his decision making entirely." "So his freedom to do and to explain and to conceive and execute was almost unparalleled." "They didn't have contracts." "They had a handshake." "All those huge projects were done on a handshake." ""We're going to give you the best product, butwe can't tell you what it's going to cost."" "And for ibm and for Polaroid, and for Herman Miller, it was okay." "And for Charles, these gentlemen's agreements went both ways." "The budget for "Mathematica" was $150,000." "It actually ended up costing $300,000, and Charles paid for the $150,000 that itwent over budget." "Sothe whole thing aboutwhatthings cost and trying to keep it within the budget and meet the clients, he didn't care about -- he cared about it, but he just, he couldn't stop himself." "Charles and Ray's career began 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 titans as selling out." "They wanted to work for the Google of their time, and they did, and it allowed them incredible experimentation." "And they believed they could have a bigger impact on everyday life by working forthe bigger company." "lBM shared Charles's concern that American kids were falling behind in math and science." "And as usual, they gave the Office free rein to address the problem." "Maybe, Charles felt, a film could help." "We begin with a scene one meter wide, which we view from just one meter away." "Now, every ten seconds, we will look from ten times farther away, and our field of view will be ten times wider." ""Powers of Ten" would become the best known of all the Eames films, viewed in countless classrooms and copied freely by filmmakers around the world." "Everyone has seen "Powers of Ten."" "They may not have seen the version Charles did, but they have seen one of the countless rip-offs ofthat film." "Ten to the sixth, a one with six zeros, a million meters -- soon the earth will show as a solid sphere." "Nobody had done a 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." "The trip back to the picnic on the lakefront will be a sped-up version, reducing the distance to the Earth's surface by one power of ten every two seconds." "It's "Ch-ch-ch-ch-shoo,"" "excessive information, dizzying information." "Ten to the ninth meters, ten to the eighth..." "Like in a chase sequence in a movie, everything is going by so fast, it forces the observer to choose the information that's truly important, which is the car or the person that is running away from you " "i.e., the idea." "One." "We are back at our starting point." "Eames was aware that, in fact, that this was somewhat dizzying, and that it wasn't possible to get all of this information across in a single viewing, and that was fine." "What he probably didn't know was that he was also looking into the future of audio-visual perception." "The pace at which we receive information today is as fast as he was doing back then." "As a single proton fills our scene, we reach the edge of present understanding." "As time went on," "Charles became more and more and more interested in ideas, especially science and mathematics." "Ray was less engaged." "I mean, I'm no mathematician, and I'm no -- not an architect," "I'm not " " I haven't had certain training, so I just try to help in the way that I -- in any way I can." "I don't stop to think whether I can." "I just go as far as I can." "And if I -- if I can't, I can't." "I think Ray may have suffered from a feeling of marginalization, because some of those last projects were heavy on ideas and not as heavy on the kind of visual richness that was Ray's forte." "She's no longer as instrumental in the entire thing." "She can apply an aesthetic, she can dress a set, and so on, but, um, she's no longer as central." "Ray's exquisite taste, her eye for form and color, made her indispensible to the Office." "But it could also be aterrible burden." "I remember peering into Ray's office only once or twice, because when the door opened and I looked into it," "I thought, "l don't everwant to look in there again, because it's a little frightening."" "Ray had a little room, smallerthan Charles's, directly across the hall from his, thatwas just absolutely jammed with all of her little pieces of paper and all of her little slides and all of the little notes" "that people had mailed to her and that she was mailing to them." "And she would go in and find things." "She would say, "Oh, I have one,"" "and she would disappear into the room and come out with the perfect kite." "Or she'd go in and find the perfect scarf or something." "Shewould go, and she would fuss with it, and change it one day, and the next day, she would look at it again and change a little something else." "And I think over the years, the perfectionism did get in the way." "In a way, it crippled her." "Here is oh, a picnic basket, a drawing of a basket." "Up in Seaview Village, so probably Deborah Sussman." "It's a letter from Lily Saarinen." "That's cool." "Look at that, I've never seen that." "There we go " ""Dearest Queen of all Pack Rats."" "I think it was almost a nervous tic with her." "She was constantly making notes, and usually on the back of Benson  Hedges wrappers." "This is one of the wrappers, and on this side she designed something that looks very reminiscent of some of herfabric designs." "And you turn it over, and you see it's a Benson  Hedges." "And on this side are notes she made for lighting ofthe puppet shows at the ibm pavilion." "You'd find them everywhere." "They'd drive you crazy." "And they could say, "Buy soap,"" "or "Liver and onions for dinner,' or they'd have very elaborate ideas." "She had her suits made, and they had pockets that went all the way to the hem." "So whatever she wanted to keep, she would just shove in the pockets." "So what would happen with these notes?" "Well, for a time, she asked the staff to try to type them up, and I think it became too overwhelming forthe staff." "It was such an avalanche of notes." "Ray didn't communicate like everybody else does." "She expected that you pre-understood what she was talking about." "The people who didn't make the effort would sometimes use the epithet "Crazy Rayzy,"" "simply because they didn't understand her." "But Ray is not crazy." "She's brilliant." "And Ray had a lot of competition for Charles's attention, which I don't think anybody ever really gave her credit for." "That everybody wanted Charles and not Ray." "He was the guy that the ibm executives would call." "He was the guy that you went to to discuss the projects intellectually." "He was very charismatic." "Charles was extremely charismatic." "He was very charismatic." "He was very handsome." "He was very handsome and very charismatic." "I know that word is really overused, but he was." "And especially very charismatic to women." "He reminded me of Henry Fonda, and I met Henry Fonda one time, and I told Henry Fonda this, that I thought they looked alike, and he said, "That's a compliment."" "I mean, he had these dimples, and he -- "Aw, shucks," kind of guy." "He was handsome and smart, and cool." "So, you know, that's a kind of lethal combination." "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 pertain particularly to the work." ""ln the next few weeks, I must pull together a preliminary film for the 'Franklin and Jefferson' show."" "And then the rest is personal." "I think their marriage, it was a mystery to everybody, in a way." "They were emotionally extremely bonded." "But he found excitement and thrills outside of Ray, and outside of the Office, which was really crushing to her." "I met him when he was on the visiting committee forthe architecture department at M.I.T." "and I was a young assistant professor." "Charles said, "Let's experiment with some films on art."" "I have many, many letters, extraordinary letters." "Because we didn't live in the same city, we tried to see each other as we could." "He had come to London, and I was there, and I could not get away." "And he said, "l will come and stand in front of the house at a certain time," and I slipped out of this ratherformal dinner, and there he was, and we just looked at each other." "We had a very profound love for each other." "He wanted very much for 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 office together in New York." "And I made a decision -- and I don't know if was the right decision -- that I couldn't do it to Ray." "Because I had a friendship with her, but above all because they had been together so long, and I knew how much she depended on him." "And I said, "l can't do it."" "Ray dealtwith it very privately." "Shewas hurt deeply, but shewasn't the kind of person who would have said, "It's me or her."" "I don't think she wanted to leave." "I think itwas something that she had to accept." "This wasn't the era of easy-come, easy-go relationships." "There was too much shared life and community, and the fact that he, you know, had other relationships outside of the Office... he seemed to be constructed that way." "But there is a position that I think is nonsense, which is to say that because Charles was having a relationship with somebody else that he couldn't then carry on a collaboration with Ray." "I mean, that clearly didn't happen." "In fact, Charles and Ray were about to collaborate on the largest, most complex project the Office would ever undertake." "For the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, the Eames Office designed" ""The World of Franklin and Jefferson,"" "a traveling show made up of three films, 40,000 words translated into four languages, and thousands of photographs and objects, including a stuffed bison." "When "Franklin and Jefferson" opened in Paris, it was seen by 50,000 people in two months." "More than a thousand visitors saw it each day in London and Warsaw." "But when it came to New York, the reception was different." "When it appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," "The New Yotk Times reviewed it, and the headline was," ""What Is This Stuff Doing at the Met?" "'" "It was one of the first times the Eameses were ever criticized." "It had an enormous amount of text." "Nobody could have possibly read it all, it was so dense." "This show was a bit picky for me, too many little objects that I would remember none." "It was too many things to see." "I can remember about ten things." "He knew so much about all these things, he couldn't edit out something." "These are things of the period and of the time, from MountVernon." "They were all so interesting to him, and he was familiarwith them, and he could see all these connections." "But you can't keep it all in your head if you're not that familiarwith it." "You could call it clutter, butthat's not what Charles would have called it, because clutter is just stuff that's dropped and abandoned and forgotten and leftthere." "It was dense, and it was complex, but there was a mind at work placing itthere." "Whether you as the recipient were willing and able to accept that is another question." "They're pushing up against the envelope ofwhattechnology could do, because they're trying to give the visitor a hypertext experience, but they're doing it in physical space." "And it doesn'twork." "They are anticipating what the computer can do today very easily with layering text and giving you at different levels." "So it's a failure, but it's an honest failure." "The criticism of "Franklin and Jefferson"" "hit Charles hard." "The "Franklin and Jefferson" show was an exhausting show because it was huge, and I think sort of the machinery of doing that was just tiring." "I saw Charles at his happiest" "I saw Charles at his happiest when he was getting to do a lot of photography." "And he was very engaged directly on the creative process of doing the photographs -- which led me to the idea that maybe he felt he was missing something, you know, because he had had the transition to more of an executive position at the Office." "It was very hard for him, because he didn't really have a successor, and for the years that 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 shutthis down?" "'" "And he said, "I'd like to."" "And Sullivan said, "Whatwould you do?" "'" "And he said, "I'd just travel and shoot."" ""But," he said, "l don't know what to do about Ray, and closing the Office."" "He was tired, and he was," "I don't know if it was his heart, but he was cold a lot." "I brought him one morning -- it was a Saturday morning, and I'd made applesauce cake or something, and I brought it to the office, and I handed it to Charles wrapped in tin foil," "and itwas still warm, and he took it, pressed it to his chest, and he was thrilled to have that warmth just sort of on his chest." "I was out of the office the day that he died." "It was, in a way, it was expected." "It just didn't seem possible." "I mean, I knew that some people that Charles worked with, men in the East, wept." "He was such a dominant force in the lives of designers that... it was like there was suddenly a big empty hole." "There are still days when I'm driving down the highway, thinking about things, and I think," ""Why did you die?" "I'm notthrough with you yet!" "I haven't finished asking you the questions I wanted to ask."" "He was the most important person in my life." "I mean, he could be, he could really be tough, you know, but he... he was an extraordinary person." "After Charles died, suddenly Ray was the head of the Office." "She gathered everybody around, and she talked about her goals and what she wanted to do, and how she needed our help." "And it was really very powerful, because she had never donethat before." "But she feltthis huge burden about carrying on the name and carrying on the Office." "And I think itwas 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."" "Without Charles, activity in the Eames Office dwindled, until it was time to finally close 901." "Ray focused on the painstaking work of cataloguing the voluminous 40-year output of the Eames Office." "Nearly 350,000 photographs and half a million documents had to be organized for shipment to the Library of Congress." "But over the years, a new generation" "Iifted Ray from Charles's shadow, discovering in her exuberant design sense a refreshing alternative to the austerity of modernism." "And Ray seemed to finally find her voice as one of the most influential women of American design." "Best for the most for the least, that was always the principle." "That's why we became interested in mass production." "At that point, women began to point to Ray." "You know, "lf there are two Eameses, why aren't they both credited?" "'" "And now, of course, they are." "She kept saying, in the hospital, "What day is it?" "'" "And I would say, "It's Wednesday the 18th."" "And she would say, "Oh."" "And then the next time I would come, then she would say, "What day is it?" "'" ""It's Thursday."" ""Oh."" "I think she wanted to die on the same day as Charles because it sort of symbolized their being one." "Her last statement was one of being with Charles." "This guy and that guy could trade places." "There's probably an Eames chair" "Iiterally in every single issue thatwe've published." "You know, you could go from the DAX to the DSS to the LCW, you know, you'll get thiswhole range." "Clockwise just a little." "Just a little." "Thefurniture still has a quality that every young designer is searching for, because of the amount of thought that's been put into it by everyone whose hands touch the project." "I think you see that optimism of the American spirit in their design." "It provided just a great blueprint for how we could live our lives." "What furniture designers ever have produced 40 to 50 pieces of furniture that have been in production for five decades?" "Butthe other thing is the sheer joy, that aspect of play." "No one else, I think, had that combination of the pragmatic and the aesthetic." "Seven..." "They loved to say, "We don't do art." "We solve problems."" "It's the process." "It's, how do we get from where we are to where we want to be?" "Grasp the rear of the viewfinder..." "Charles and Ray were always looking to the future." "They weren't sort of sitting around, telling war stories about organic furniture." "What they were doing is like," ""What's the nextthing?" "'" "They were there for the major moments in American history, and they were really the pioneers of the information age." "The visitor can try out the computer as a carrier of information." "The breadth of the work is extraordinary, but there is also a unifying theme of beauty and a desire to reach a broad audience." "So if it was pulled forward a little bit?" "Every designer owes them some amount of debt, but at the same time, part of that debt should be to kind of take what they did and move beyond it."