Eames: The Architect and the Painter

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 another form.

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,

but what'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.

Salt water 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

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 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 be there,

but Charles had a differentattitude.

And he said this to me...

"I can teach you how to draw.

"If 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

cut their teeth within the walls of the 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't think there'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 XIV 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,

it would 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 chair that 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 artistwho 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 ajourney that might not lead to, uh, success.

And I think that maybe at that point in her life,

this was not necessarily