Everyone is familiar with the work of Ray and Charles Eames - even if they’re not. From chairs to spinning tops, the ubiquity of the Eames' contributions to design and public life is immeasurable - but the team at the Eames Center of Infinite Curiosity are determined to help us remember just why the Eames studio was worth commemorating. To that end, The Eames Archives at the Bay Area headquarters in Richmond, California is now open to the public.
The Eames Archives invites the public to enjoy its artifacts
Llisa Demetrios is the chief curator at the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity and the granddaughter of Charles and Ray Eames and daughter of Lucia Eames. According to her everything in the Eames Archives is considered an artifact - a curatorial choice that recognizes the Eames as contributing to a particular moment in design history, one of slow time and experimentation, curiosity and innovation.
Widely known for its furniture design, the Eames studio was a design powerhouse in the mid 20th century, producing from airport seating to school children's chairs. A sizeable sample of its output sits along the exhibition wall and in the flat files room at the Eames Archives. Here, vitrine displays with endless openable drawers of ephemera and artifacts, from tops and kites, tables and chairs, notes and letters, doodles and collage are available to peruse.
The Eames Archives represents the magpie collection of the creative duo where every object is a potential prototype for a future design, a web matrix of ideas and samples. This object library offers inspiration to the world around them as a universe of images and ideas, a world much slower and more hopeful, filled with new technology after the second World War.
The Archives team is careful to point out and showcase Ray's earliest work as an abstract painter before modernist architecture was an international phenomenon. Her keen eye for colour and detail are especially noted as an integral part of the Eames' groundbreaking work, despite having her name routinely left off projects and products due to the era's inherent sexism. She loved ribbon bows and kept colourful scraps in cigarette boxes, labeled 'Ray's scraps' in her perfect looping handwriting. Her paintings are a highlight and reflect her influence.
With the Eames Archives now up and running, and open to public tours, more is yet to come. Out on the Eames Ranch in Petaluma, an old cattle farm property with lush fields of pungent bay leaf trees and hillsides thick with mud, land has recently been acquired in the process of an expansion.
So how is land included in archival work? According to Sam Grawe, Chief Brand & Marketing Officer, restoration is conservation. The work out on the Ranch speaks to the expansive nature of design - the Eames' 'Powers of Ten' documentaries famously comments on this - to include land in the process.
In collaboration with Sonoma Mountain Institute, the Eames Institute team has also opened a dialogue with ecologists. Using the Ranch as a means to rehabilitate the land as much as to create a happy place for visitors and Eames' enthusiasts alike, the team is now aiming to build a model/system of sustainability, from restoring native grasses to redirecting and recalibrating aquifers, reorganizing cattle grazing, and upgrading farm infrastructure.
Recognizing a particular moment in design history, The Eames Archives and Ranch are a poetic ode to the prototype and the process of experimentation, curiosity, and deep time that it took to perfect so many iconic designs.
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