The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention. - Review - book review

DONALD ALBRECHT, ed The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention of recent origin York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997 205 pp; 243 ills., 165 color plates. $4950

The history of novel industrial design seems to be enjoying a novel lease on life. Almost everywhere these days there are revivals and reappraisals of dusty modernist artifacts of generations past, be it Bauhaus furniture, Art Deco lamps, or 1930 dwelling furnishings. While this cultural stretch has been noted for quite a certain number of time in the well-heeled world of coffee-table volumes it now pervades academic and museum tillage as well. A spate of fresh biographies and exhibitions of late recounting the work of leading modernists throw backs an ongoing general reconsideration of fresh design's once-lampooned heritage. For many looker-ons this indirectly exposes the overdrawn account of postmodernism itself, whose oedipal efforts to ceremoniously kill not upon the dreams and delusions of its famous forebears in a dark circular of laughter and forgetting have apparently missing their punch and, in turn round their publishers. But those who accost this development as a kind of next to the first Coming of High Modernism are poor prognosticators. a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of th is has to do with the fact that of that kind modernism is less invoked as guidance for the time to come than renewed retrospective appreciation and historical orientation. Not to insinuate however, that this fin-de-siecle focus upon modernism is simply the issue of auction house antics and flea market economics. For it is precisely modernism's aged grandiose visions that have attracted special interest. In large measure this is because a advantageous number of the long-range inclines predicted by design's avantgarde decades ago--including the miniaturization and dematerialization of technology, instant global communication, "cognitive engineering," and above all the rise of the designer as the main liaison between nation and information systems--have all become the public coin of cyberculture. Even if its original visionaries may be lengthy dead and the current generation of designers les inclined to drafting manifestos announcing these revolutionary changes for lay readers, the point is that the interwar dream of design as social engine ering has effectively approach to pass. True, its realization has scarcely ushered in the leftist utopia that many of yesteryear's design crusaders imagined, as today's WTO protester and environmentalists plainly recognize; nevertheless it is a brave of recent origin world all the same.

Still, it is an exaggeration to say that design history is now improperly preoccupied with turning its not-so-distant past into a sort of prehistory of the Internet. Certainly there is more [i]or[/i] less of that taking place, as a range of relatively rayless figures from the world of science and design have been rediscovered in novel dissertation theses and magazine profiles as forgotten soothsayers of the Digital Age. More striking, although is the extent to which many recent designers of everyday things (especially household beneficials and furniture) have enjoyed a surprising renaissance in design and cultural studies. Indeed, it is a telling and quite unremarked reaction to the advent of virtual reality: the more digitalized and abstracted the world becomes, the more tribe seize on a more real and palpable individual Put differently, the global design turn toward ever more sophisticated software has in make go round produced a kind of compensatory longing for yesterday's designer hardware. Not that design is unique here; by the agency of and large it is following more general disclosures in the visual arts. Consider the way that postmodern art's initial penchant toward video and television has created a marked backlash preoccupation with physical immediacy and in-your-face sensate experiences, what Hal nourish rightly calls the "return of the real." like a turn of events is not as rearguard as individual might imagine; after all, this kind of rethinking of the familiar and tactile in the face of rapid technological change goe to the true historical raison d'etre of modernism itself. In this way, these of recent origin trends in the visual arts (including the novel "historicist" nostalgia among design publicists and curators) mark a direct get back to the very font of modernist sensibility, namely questioning the actual place and possibility of the aesthetic particular in a world in which "everything that is solid dissolves into air."

It is in this connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts that the 1997 exhibition and accompanying catalogue, "The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention," is of great interest. Sponsored through both the Library of Congres and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, this high-profile present to view attracted a sizable number of visitors and a beneficial deal of attention. This is not in like manner surprising in itself. The Eameses remain America's greatest in quantity famous design team, whose work exhibited remarkable variety and achievement above four decades. Arguably no designers were more important or influential the couple domestically and internationally during the first sum of two units decades after 1945. Certainly Donald Albrecht is justified in writing that the Eameses "gave shape to America's twentieth century" (p 13) Simply recalling their many partnerships with of that kind diverse corporations as IBM, Westinghouse, Boeing, Herman Miller Furniture Company, and Polaroid underscores their wide-ranging capacities as designers. on the other hand it is not only the high quality and evergreen n ovelty of their design work that invite praise. No les significant is the expanse to which their collaborative design quiescences at the crossroads of various forces: abstract art and design, craft and science, reason and emotion, hardware and software, America and Europe While the catalogue is sometimes too unreserv in blurring historiography and hagiography, perhaps best noted in Vitra Director Alexander von Vegesack's annotate that the Eameses "combined an innovative use of specific materials and technologies with the timeless shape of a completed industrial product" (p. 8), the contributors generally near a balanced and quite comprehensive view of the dramatic origins and pioneering disentanglement of what is often called the "Eames design aesthetic." They elegantly repeat the Eameses' impressive output from a range of perspectives; the photo-essay "Evolving Forms" also amply chronicles their design reach across the media of fiberglass to film, plywood to pedagogy, aluminum to advertisements. individual particular poi nt that several of the commentators rightly foreground as central to the Eameses' design philosophy was their unwavering belief in the power of design to marry science and agriculture This was notable in the essay contributions by the agency of Philip and Phylis Morrison, together with Alan Lightman's suggestive piece upon the sense of mystery and amazement suffusing the Eameses' well known science films. on the contrary their love of science went far beyond their effort to apply principles of technological rationalism and mass production to the design of everyday realitys It also found expression in their pedagogical task of "how to make fundamental scientific principles accessible to a lay audience." The numerous films and exhibitions that they made for IBM upon the interface of design and science, as well as their justifiably famous 1968 film, Powers of Ten neatly throw backed this populist impulse.