Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer plays with a chair of Charles and Ray

"Wavefunction" is an interactive installation by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer showed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States (April 22‒July 30, 2017).

Wavefunction is a kinetic sculpture comprised of fifty to one hundred Charles and Ray Eames moulded chairs (designed in 1948) and placed in a regular array of rows, facing the entrance to the exhibition space. When someone approaches the work, a computerised surveillance system detects their presence and the closest chairs automatically begin to lift off the ground, creating the crest of a wave that then spreads over the whole room. A system of electromechanical pistons raises each chair forty centimetres from the ground. The pistons are controlled by a computer that runs the mathematics of fluid dynamics, thus making the waves interfere with each other, creating turbulence or becoming calm, just like real water.
The idea of a 'function' as a field for artistic experimentation is a motivation for this piece. Other references include: the mathematics of dynamic systems, capable of generating complex non-linear, behaviours, the materialisation of surveillance and turbulence and the anti-modular reinterpretation of the work of modern designers such as Charles and Ray Eames.

Ph. courtesy: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

“Saving Orphan Films”: Eames Screening at Wexner Center

Today: See the Eames film Day of the Dead and other “orphan films” at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio). Introduction by Jeff Lambert, executive director of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Saving “Orphan” Films is part of the third-annual film festival, Cinema Revival: A Festival of Film Restoration.
Established in 1997, the National Film Preservation Foundation was formed by Congress to help save America’s film heritage. In this program, the foundation’s Jeff Lambert introduces a program of “orphan films”—works with no corporate owner or copyright holder and at greatest risk of falling through the cracks—whose preservation the NFPF is supporting. The program includes films by Charles and Ray Eames, Owen Land, and Shirley Clarke, among others. (Program approx. 90 mins., 16 & 35mm)

Event Details:
Wexner Center for the Arts (Ohio State University, Columbus)

Saturday, February 25, 2017
4:30 pm

Program Lineup:

Fifty Million Years Ago(Service film, 1925; 35mm, silent, tinted)
Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Faces & Fortunes(Goldsholl Design & Film Associates, 1959; 16mm, sound, color)
Print courtesy Chicago Film Archives.

Young Braves(Michael Jacobsohn, 1968, 16mm, sound, b&w)
Print courtesy New York Public Library.

A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, CA

(Owen Land, 1974; 16mm, sound, color)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

24 Frames Per Second (Shirley Clarke, 1977; 16mm, sound, color)
Print courtesy Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

Day of the Dead(Charles and Ray Eames, 1957; 35mm, sound, color)
Preserved by Library of Congress.

Multiple Sidosis(Sid Laverents, 1970; 16mm/35mm, sound, color)
Print courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Thanks for sharing: eamesoffice.com + wexarts.com + Library of Congress

Charles and Ray Eames, Day of the Dead, 1957

Eames Lecture in Genk, Belgium

Today, in conjunction with the exhibition The World of Charles and Ray Eames, join C-mine for a lecture on the work and legacy of Charles and Ray Eames by Eames Office director, Eames Demetrios.

Eames Demetrios is best known for his work as director of the Eames Office, but he is also the grandson of Charles Eames. He is striving to introduce a younger generation to the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames and ensure that the design duo’s unique work is preserved and shared worldwide. At C-mine, he will speak about the mission of the Eames Office and the many ways that Charles and Ray’s research and projects have left a lasting mark on the design world.
Lecture in collaboration with Architectuurwijzer.

Event Details
Monday, February 20, 2017
8:15 pm
Great hall C-mine Cultural Centre
Language: English

Exhibition & Lecture: € 17 general / € 12 under 26 years
Exhibition only: € 12 general / € 7 under 26 year
Tickets available at C-mine’s welcome desk or online.

Thanks for sharing eamesoffice.com + C-mine

Eames Demetrios, Director of the Eames Office

New Development Threatens the Original Eames-Designed Herman Miller Showroom

The 1949 famous building could be surrounded by a mixed-use hotel, retail, and residential tower.
Developer Jason Illoulian’s Faring Capital (which also owns Norms La Cienega and the Factory nightclub on Robertson) owns the showroom, as well as the adjacent 1931 art deco building (formerly Poliform), former Tommy Hilfiger retail store, and 4-story apartment house. He has plans to use the space to build a mixed-use development. The multi-story project includes a hotel, retail, and approximately 80 residential units, according to West Hollywood associate planner Adrian Gallo. It would only partially preserve the Eames showroom.
“They’re keeping the first half of it intact,” Gallo said of the showroom. “And the back half of it would be the new building.” Adrian Scott Fine, preservation director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, wants to see a more sensitive approach. “I understand that the intent is to preserve the front of the building,” he says. “It’s more than a facadectomy.”
The original showroom interior was modular and designed to show off furniture the way it might look in a home. Charles and Ray Eames designed covers for Arts & Architecture magazine, and their pieces were ubiquitous in the magazine’s Case Study House program.
Representatives for the developer will be sharing more plans last February 9 at a community meeting for neighbors to learn how the project will affect them. Roy Rogers Oldenkamp, president of the West Hollywood Preservation Alliance, is confident the new project will save much of the original building. Oldenkamp relayed a Faring spokesman’s message that the project will “peel back the layers of time to bring the Eames masterwork as close to the original as possible.”
It’s one thing to update the interiors of a neoclassical building when stone and stucco hide everything. Saving a glass façade requires a real master.
We wish that Charles and Ray were still around to take the job.

Thanks for sharing: Los Angeles Magazine
Photography by Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Herman Miller showroom designed in 1949 by Charles and Ray Eames

Eames spotting 2017: Sherlock

Martin Freeman (aka John Watson) in "The Lying Detective", Sherlock, season 4, episode 3, 2017.

Eames Spotting 2017: Matthew McConaughey

Ph. Craig McDean

Courtesy wmagazine.com

How House Industries Designs Its Retrotastic Logos and Typefaces

In 2000 Andy Cruz and his coworkers at House Industries decided to create a font based on the legacy of designers Charles and Ray Eames. After immersing themselves in Eames archives at the Library of Congress and interviewing Herman Miller engineers, the type designers landed on a whimsical set of letters based on Ray’s handwriting. But when they presented it to Eames Demetrios, the famed designers’ grandson, he recoiled.
“He was very clear that we weren’t really bringing much to the table, as far as bringing some new thinking to the Eames story,” Cruz recalls. The feedback stung, but it was valuable. By that time, Cruz and the rest of House Industries had left their scrappy, upstart days behind them (the designers had recently released their wildly successful Neutra typeface, which you probably know as the Shake Shack font), but they’ve never grown allergic to criticism. In fact, if Cruz’s candid new monograph is any indication, receptivity has been essential to his type foundry’s success.
In House Industries: The Process Is the Inspiration,Cruz joins co-founders Rich Roat and Ken Barber in reflecting on a quarter century’s worth of work. But rather than publish page after page of type designs and logos, Cruz, Roat, and Barber amassed case studies for a handful of notable projects, from a logo for Hermès Japan to a set of designs based on hot-rodding. Through detailed accounts, the designers candidly explore not just their successes but their failures—what inspired them, what tripped them up, and how they arrived at a finished product.
In the case of the Eames font collection, House Industries heeded Demetrios’s advice. “He showed us how to go back and try to build something that wasn’t a regurgitation of something we’d seen before, but a tool that could point to something we love about Eames,” Cruz says. The result was a typeface that channels Eames-ian principles like elegance, sturdiness, and economy of space without parroting any Eames ephemera.
Understanding how to make vintage designs feel fresh has made House Industries popular with clients ranging from the Jimmy Kimmel Show to director JJ Abrams, a House Industries fanboy and author of the book’s introduction. But what Cruz and his colleagues took away from the Eames project is a fraction of what the designers have learned running House Industries these past 25 years. You’ll find a few choice examples of other lessons in the gallery above—and many more in the new monograph itself.

Thanks for sharing: wired.com

Ph. Carlos Alejandro / Courtesy of House Industries

 

These cool midcentury home and design ads are everything you'd expect

There is a impressive digital database, called AdSausage, with over 40,000 vintage advertisements just waiting for your perusal.
The searchable database has it all: from hilarious 1950s and ‘60s advertisements for dishwashers, irons, and ovens, to ‘70s magazine ads for the latest in telephone technology, which stood a far cry from, say, today’s smartphone.
We are, natch, particularly enamored of the “Design” category, which includes a groovy, full-page midcentury Herman Miller Furniture ad for Charles Eames’s Aluminum Group, and the most amazing set of ads for architectural and residential lighting. The spots aren’t just from U.S. magazines, either: In our dive into the archives, we spotted clippings from European journals, too.
The documents were digitized under the supervision of a scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, who, according to AdSausage, oversees the scanning of each page on the site with a “multidetector positron scanner.” This minimizes the dirt and other grime on the originals when scanned and, thus, maximizes our ability to lose hours at a time wading through glorious commercial kitsch of yore.
Take a look over at AdSausage.

Thanks AdSausage and Curved.com for sharing.

Christmas Cards sent to Charles and Ray Eames

These Christmas cards are from the Library's nearly 1,000,000-item collection of photographs drawings, films, slides and manuscripts from Charles and Ray. The Eameses saved hundreds of cards (see here) from friends, family and colleagues -- some among the greatest artists and designers of our time. 

Harry Weese

Robert Osborn

Toshihiro Katayama

     Sister Corita Kent

Christmas Card 1942

Christmas card from Charles and Ray Eames to Harry Weese, 1942