Stuff You Should KnowCharles and Ray Eames were superstar designers who dreamed up some of the most iconic pieces of furniture ever made. And they did much more than that.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just doing our usual chatting it up here on the podcast that we like to call stuff you should that's right.
I'm pretty excited about this one.
Yeah, this is your pick, right.
Uh, yeah, this is one I've been wanting to do for a long time.
Well, here we are, Charles, here we are. Well, I'm glad you're excited. I'm excited too. It's a pretty cool topic. The Eames, Charles and Ray Eames, Ray and Charles Eames. Depending on how you want to say, it doesn't matter because any way you slice it, they were equals.
Yeah, and you know, if you don't know who we're talking about, we should probably say so right off the bat they are, or I guess they should say we're a married couple who kind of I don't know if they changed the face of design, but they were certainly very influential and design and you know all they did all kinds of things in their career, but what they're most known for is their design of simple, eye pleasing and back then affordable furniture.
Yeah, I'm not even sure it was particularly affordable back then, but that was definitely their goal. They wanted to make the best for the most, for the least. They really tied into the ethos that they were working in, which was immediately post war economic boom America.
Yeah. I saw that there. And this was in their great documentary Eames Colon, The Architect and the Painter from twenty eleven filmmakers Jason Kohne and Bill Jersey. I've seen it twice. Now.
That's an American Masters one, isn't it.
I don't know. I think picked it up, but I don't think it originally was. But I'm not sure. But I saw it back in twenty eleven, I guess, and then watch it again yesterday and today. But they said that it was, you know, definitely sort of middle to upper middle class people were who could afford to buy their stuff at the time. But it wasn't for the lofty super rich.
Right, But it also wasn't for your average Joe Schmoe with a mortgage and all that.
Right, Well, all some stuff was okay.
So you said that they didn't necessarily change the face of design.
I don't know.
I'm not one hundred percent sure. I guess looking back with hindsight, the way that people treat them today, they're revered like gods. Yeah, for sure, But I guess maybe at the time contemporaneously they were part of a larger push. Like they worked with Aerosarinin he was a huge, hugely influential architect and designer. They worked to Charles Nelson, a hugely influential designer. They were part of like this vanguard, I guess of you modernist design again, using kind of like industrial readily available, mass producible materials, but applying really really like legitimately artistic talent and vision and design to the whole thing.
You know, I had no idea until just now that Charles Nelson Riley also worked in design.
He did. He said, I can't even do it. I can't do it in person. You me probably could. One of our dogs is named Charlie, named after Charles Nelson Riley when she was a kid.
Oh man, I mean, if that's not a joke, for I mean, gen X is the low end of that joke.
Did you see his One man Show? No, they did a documentary of his One Man's Show that he did before his death. And it's good, very touching, poignant, like Charles Nelson Riley with a little bit of his guard down.
M I'd like to see that.
Yeah, check it out. But let's say we go back to the beginning and we'll let everybody else decide whether they change the face of design or not.
All right, we'll start with well, let's start with Bernice Alexandra Kaiser, and we were like, who the heck is that her family called her re Ray and that eventually just got shortened.
To Ray got sick of that hyphen.
Yeah. She was born in Sacramento in nineteen twelve, and she ended up being interested in a lot of things, as did her future husband Charles, but she was largely an artist and largely a painter, even though she was into engineering and obviously design and all kinds of stuff like that, But she was basically a painter and would eventually study under a gentleman named Hans Hoffmann, very famous German expressionist, and was a bit of a rabble rouser in the art community early on, and that she was like, she was in a group called American abstract artists that would do things like Pickett if they didn't you know, have art shows that represented different kinds of artists.
Yeah, apparently militancy toward modernist ideas was kind of a through thread for people who were into modernism, like they really were in the face of tradition and bucking that whole thing, and part of that was kind of like a militant approach to it, which I guess includes picketing art galleries. Right, yeah, but she was part of that movement before Pollock and d'cooning. Is it to coooning or cooning?
I think it's decooning.
Yeah, before those guys, even like a decade before those guys came into it, she was part of like that first wave. So yeah, she was legit abstract artists. And then her husband was born five years previously, I think in nineteen oh seven in Saint Louis, Missouri. Just missed the World's Fair. Oh when was that nineteen oh four?
Wow, well he might have gone.
Have you ever seen meet me in Saint Louis?
Oh wait years three years prior? Sorry, that would be impossible, right, I was like, they could have taken a three year old, Yeah.
But they couldn't have taken a negative three year old.
I know they tried.
I guess technically, I guess they did if that sperm had just stayed in the same place and that was the same page and they just were frozen in time essentially reproductively.
Oh boy, yeah.
At any rate. He was born in Saint Louis in nineteen oh seven and he wanted to be an architect, essentially out of the gate. He studied architecture at Washington University in Saint Louis and he got kicked out. He left Slash got kicked out after about two years of study because he was also a militant modernist and at the time the training he was receiving was not so I described as bos art and it was not modernist at all, and they were like, get out of here, you hippie bozo. So he did.
He did not stop him though, he was like, you know, I'm still going to be an architect, Like, how often does anyone say, let me see your degree. It's true when you're just sing a house, I know. So, even though he didn't technically have the professional, you know, school credentials finished, he started practicing with a guy named Robert Walsh. He was very good at it early on, and everyone was like this guy, you know, did you see his degree? I didn't see his degree, but I'm not going to ask because you should see the way he draws up a house.
Yeah, he would hand off his drawings with this probably won't fall down.
And I think that was Frank Loyd, right, Okay. In nineteen twenty nine he got married for the first time to a woman named Katherine Warman. They were college sweethearts, I guess, and had a daughter who had end up being the only sired child for Charles Eames. He never had a kid with Ray. Her name was Lucia, and he was doing such a good job that there was an architect. You mentioned his son, Arrow Saranon earlier, but the architect, the father, I guess, Eliel Saranon, said Hey, I like what you're throwing down there, Why don't you come on out to Michigan, to the Cranberry Academy of Art in Bloomfield Heels Hills, and why don't you become well, first of all, come out for a fellowship. But you know, as you'll see, Charles Eames was very ambitious guy, and before you know it, he was the director of the industrial design program there.
Yeah, he was supposedly thinking he was just going to go there and take it easy and kind of regather, regroup, and they're like, no, you're too talented. You need to head all this up at Cranbrook.
I believe, right, which is very key because that is where Rey Ray ended up.
Yeah, I'm working together at Cranbrook. They got into one of their early materials, probably the material that made them famous at least initially but still is kind of associated with their design, plywood. Plywood. They were like, plywood, We're going to start making things out of plywood. Just watch. And I think at the time plywood doesn't have quite the connotation that does now, like the stuff you just kind of lay over your attic rafters and crawl on like. It was a little more high tech than that, but not that much more so. The idea of taking plywood and turning into a beautiful organic design that also was functional too, it was kind of groundbreaking.
Yeah, for sure. Arrow and Charles and then Ray assisted on this project. Entered a chair into a Museum of Modern Arts nineteen forty one organic Design and Home Furnishings competition, and they won. Even though this chair was technically a failure, they were you know, they realized the reason they love plywood is that they could bend it in two different directions.
They won because they found love.
Probably so, but you could, you know, you could curve wood pieces that weren't plywood. But what you couldn't do is curve a wood piece and then curve it again in a different direction. Right, But they found that with plywood you basically could. But it was pretty early on in this process. So their chair where the back met the seat would splinter, which is no good. But they ended up covering it in fabric to hide that something that you'll see. They did not like fabric later in their designs. They thought it was sort of old fashioned. It was expensive, and they were trying to make stuff a little more affordable. But they covered this thing and fabric to hide that, and they won the competition. But the chair was even though it won the competition, it was a failure in that it was it could not be mass produced basically as is.
Yeah, I saw. Another stage of their plywood bending molding design was that they figured out that they could bend it even further if they cut like a slit in the middle of it.
Oh okay, and they would make it.
Almost like a keyhole slit, so it looked like a design element, but really it was allowing them to mold it a little further than than before. They were just what they were doing throughout like the late twenties and through the whole thirties and into the forties, they were experimenting with bending plywood to their will, essentially come here plywood. Yeah, so that was I think. Did you say Ray helped on that particular one.
Yeah, she worked with them, and that's where they, you know, fell in love.
Yeah. So Charles and his first wife, Catherine, divorced I think after about eleven or twelve years of marriage, and he went after Ray pretty much immediately after, and they got married in nineteen forty one. And right after they got married in nineteen forty one, they did what any self respecting artist was doing at the time. They looked westward and got into some gelapi or other and drove out to California.
Yeah, they're like, forget it, New York, We're going.
To La Also, I should say, I'm presuming they drove, but knowing me and the streak I'm on lately, they definitely flew. And everyone knows that they flew except me.
Oh come on, So they went to La I'm with you, man. They drove their butts to California.
Thanks, Chuck, You're so supportive of me.
And I like to like the Beverly Hillbillies. Charles was on top of a rocking chair.
Right, and Ray had the shotgun in her lap.
Yeah. Can you imagine? I mean that setup was very insane. There's a gun in a lap, There's an elderly woman in a rocking chair on top of a truck.
Exactly. Yeah, but that's the hillbilly way. They don't care. They'll they'll they'll look danger in the face and laugh all the way to California.
So they get to California, they started making connections, obviously pretty quickly out there to the southern California modernist scene, which was just getting going pretty hoppin'. A very key person they met and befriended was a guy named John Intenza, who published Arts and Architecture magazine, and they ended up designing twenty six different covers over like a five year period. That's a lot.
That's about half.
Yeah, I'm not a big math guy, but is it a monthly.
Yeah, if it was monthly that's sixty issues over that five years, and if they did twenty six, it's almost half of them.
As soon as I said was it monthly? I immediately panicked the name that I had just said was Arts and Architecture monthly.
No, you did, and it's just Arts and Architecture quarterly.
All right, oh quarterly. So they designed a bunch of those covers. Intenza became a big sort of supporter of theirs. And they also met a guy, an architect named Richard Neutra, who said, hey, I designed these killer apartments in Westwoode, the Strathmore apartments, and you should live in one of them because Orson Wells will live there too.
Yeah. Strathmore makes me think of like some new skyscraper, but it was like a two story house ish structured, I think, divided into three apartments. And they're still on the market these days.
So they're very nice looking.
They are. They're very cool. So they just started making connections right off the bat, but they weren't really making any money, and Charles ended up well, they were doing two things. They were spending all of their free time working at home in their apartment, which they can burn it into like a working studio bending plywood. There's a legendary machine called the Kazam Machine that no one seems to know exactly how it worked, but they used it to mold plywood. To bend plywood. Part of it involved a heavy balloon and a bicycle pump that would provide the shape that it would be molded against. But somehow it also used electricity. So Charles climbed an electrical pole and tapped into the electricity. Very very unwise thing to do, and luckily he survived. But that's how that's how broke they were. They were stealing electricity to power their Kazam machine in their studio where they were still working on plywood designs.
Yeah, it used heating coils, so that had to have been what took all of the juice. Sure, and you know, applying heat to bin something is a pretty tried and true method. So I don't know about the air pump the balloon. I can picture, uh huh, but I don't know what that bike pump did it blew up the balloon. Yeah, And if you look at the Kazam machine, it's it looks almost like a tique lounge chair that hasn't been finished yet.
Exactly exactly. It's dancing right along the line of a wick a wheelchair. So I'm not a big fan of it.
Yeah, Like I would have come in like a dummy and said, you're trying to design a chair with this thing, look at it. Just sit in it. That's right, You've got your chair.
But they called that the Kazam machine as a reference to Alec Kazam, because you would put in like plywood and glue and something magically different would appear.
Out Kazam with a exclamation plant. Yeah, sure after kazam, not after machine.
That's right, although they should have used two and been like Kazam machine.
Well, that would conjure something very deadly, so I guess.
So.
Like I said, they were pretty broke, and Charles ended up taking a job at MGM designing sets. I believe could not for life of me find out what films he actually worked on. But while there he was not happy about that. He wrote to a friend that all hope for the future is lost, but I get a regular paycheck. So he was also taking materials that he found from his work back home too, to use in their home studio. But he also made I think a lifelong friend in director Billy Wilder.
Yeah and great.
Yeah, Billy Wilder. Isn't he Chad our director from the Stuff You should Know TV Show's favorite director?
Oh?
Is he?
I think Chad said The Apartment is his favorite movie of all time.
It's a great one. That's what our pal Scott Ackerman chose for a movie crush.
Okay, yeah, there you go.
So yeah, one of the great movies. And Billy Wilder did all kinds of great movies.
You had me at Sunset Boulevard, Yeah, exactly. So the em Shase the reason Billy Wilder figures into it, aside from like, wow, there's the name drop right there. The em shase, which is a very famous well shave lounge decked out in leather with like a pillow to go under your caves and everything. It's to me, it looks like what your psychologists would use while they gave you a guy innecological exam. It's like a cross between a couch and your shrink's office and an exam table in your doctor's office.
Oh well, just a word of advice if your psychologists trying to give you a gynological kind of logical exam.
That's exit stage left. Quickly. Yeah, so, yes, thank you for taking my joke and turning it really dark.
Well, you know, I just want to make sure everyone understood clearly.
But the reason Billy Wilder inspired the Eames Shays is that he would take naps on sets, and apparently there was one that bless him that Charles Eames witness where Billy Wilder was taking a nap on a six by twelve inch plank that was stood up on two saw horses. That's where he was napping. That's no good, no, So Charles was like, I need to help my friend here.
All right. I think that's a good time for a break. You get Billy Wilder asleep in the corner one of those psychologists chases.
No, this one's straight. It's not the other one. The curvy one's the lush chaise.
Oh really, because I saw the chase was the curvy one.
Now there's two. One of the curvy one is called lush chaise. The emshaise, the original em shase is like it looks like one of their like aluminum group leather upholstered chairs, but laid out essentially flat.
Oh Billy Wilder should stuck around.
I'm telling you my my description of it was like spot on.
In my head, though it made more sense for the Curby one. Your description.
Yeah, I guess so if you wanted to be really comfortable.
All right, we'll take a break and we'll be right back.
And stub with Joshua John. All right.
So World War two rolls around, and this was a bit of a shift for everybody in the world, probably but certainly for the Eames family. Southern California is very was and still is very big in defense manufacturing, and the military said, hey, this plywood stuff is really something.
Have you seen this plywood?
We like to you know, it's lightweight, it's you know, can be bent in two different directions out here if you have a kazam machine and we're into it. And they knew a guy named Wendell Scott, an old friend of Charles's, who was a Navy doctor. They got together for a visit. He saw this kazam machine and he said, wait a minute. We've been using these metal leg splints for war and these things are no good that they're not good for protection in the field. We need metal for other things. And we think that you might be able to or I think you might be able to build some better wooden splints out of bending plywood.
Yeah, so that's exactly what they did. They recruited a friend that Charles had made an MGM, a theater designer named Margaret Harris, and together with them and Intenza, they're pretty much their benefactor by this point. In Los Angeles, they created a wooden splint for the US Navy that was lightweight. It had strategic holes in it that made it extra light weight, but also you could run straps through to strap the leg to the splint. They were stackable, very very important. So it was mass producible, it was extremely mobile, it was lightweight, but it also looked kind of nice. I mean, as far as leg splints go, it's an attractive legs point.
Yeah.
It was called the Transportation egg splint. Egg splint, Oh, my.
Lord, Transportation Egg's Benedict leg splint.
And they made five thousand. The Navy ordered five thousand of these things, so all of a sudden they had a little money coming in.
Yeah, because at ten dollars per that's what they charged. Yeah, they could have that'd be a million dollars a million dollar order.
That's a lot of dough.
And that's not my math. I just went ahead and converted it to today's dollars. That's what I.
Oh, okay, I was about to say, here we go.
Five thousand times ten is a million.
So such money that they were able to form a company called the Plywood I'm sorry, deply formed wood Company. They had a little office in Venice Beach at the time, and they sold that thing. They didn't want to be in that business, really, so they built it and they sold it to a company based out a mission called Evans Products. Charles worked there for a little while, headed up the molded plywood division. And then the big, big change in their life came in nineteen forty three when they opened up what they called nine oh one, which was their office. It's still there today at nine oh one now it's Abbot Kenney Boulevard. Back then it was West Washington Boulevard in Venice.
Gotcha. So, yeah, the leg splint thing was not just a little boondoggle we went on. The reason it was important was they made a bunch of contexts. They got a lot of business experience, they got a little money, and they essentially that's what gave them the foundation to move up from being broke theater designers who were just kind of working in their apartment to legitimate furniture designers who now had their own business in office.
Yeah, I mean they got equipment too, and materials they had. They were pretty set up there at nine oh one, for sure, And if you watch the documentary or just know about nine oh one, it was a it was a bit of a kind of a crazy wonderland to work at. Some of the designers there said it was like working at Disneyland. It was fun. There weren't sort of regular routines. There weren't stuffy staff meetings. It was just one of those places where, you know, long before you know, every tech office in the world was like, let's have a ping pong table and you know, skittles all over the place. They had a sort of a classy version of that in nineteen forty three, which was not how offices worked back then, even creative offices.
Yeah, as we'll see. One of the things they're also known for is they made a line of toys. And the reason they also kind of forade into toys is because at least two Charles, but I think also to Ray as well. Charles often like gets the quotes, but they were in such sink that I assume in a lot of cases, Ray probably felt at least similar, if not the same. But in this instance, Charles had some quote about how play is actually serious business, that that's the kind of thing that unlocks curiosity. Just doing an activity simply for the activity's sake just kind of resets the brain and the mind. So I'm not at all surprised to hear that their office was was like that, because that's just what they seemed to do. They would just do stuff learn by doing all the time.
Yeah. Another reason they went into things like toys and then later filmmaking, as we'll see, is he didn't as great as his reputation was. He didn't want to be chair guy.
Sure, plus he really liked toys.
Yeah, but he's so good at chairs.
Right. Well, that's the thing, like when you hear the word emes like almost probably eighty percent of the time, if not more, the next word is chair. Yeah, because the chairs that they designed are so iconic and the first one that they hit the market with. So they opened the office in nineteen forty three. By nineteen forty six, they had a chair in mass production. At first with that Evans products. But eventually Evans is like, we don't really know what we're doing. We're more of the leg splint producers. Maybe you guy should talk to Herman Miller.
Yeah, and that's what they did.
They came up with the Eames Chair would, the ECW. Nowadays it's called the LCW the lounge chair would and it's molded bent plywood on a plywood base and it is gorgeous and it's actually super comfortable without a lick of padding on it.
Yeah, it's you know, they figured out if you mold something just right to where the human body can function well in it. And they were into form, but they were very much into function. They did not want some weird, fancy looking thing that's not fun or comfortable to sit on. Ever.
Yeah, Ray had a quote and I assumed Charles probably felt the same way, is that what works is better than what looks good. The looks can change, but what works works, and there's a ton of wisdom in there.
That was actually Ray, That's what I said. Oh, oh oh, okay, I didn't get the joke.
I've made a reference to the joke where I went on some horrible tangent earlier about Yeah, I was about to do it again. So thank you for saving everyone.
So Herman Miller you mentioned, this is a big deal because the Herman Miller company out of Michigan was great at making furniture. They were producing modernist furniture. Oh boy, did we already have a big mistake with Charles Nelson?
I don't know. I guess maybe maybe I said Charles.
All right, Well, George Nelson is who we're talking about, very iconic designer. In fact, in my little studio here, I'm looking at a George Nelson clock.
Which one.
The one that is rounded wood?
Yeah, like the balls on the end, the ball clock.
I mean it's like someone took a round ball made of wood and then sliced the first third of it off and that's a clock face.
I got you, Okay, Yeah, we have the eye clock.
The eye clock. I think I know which one you're talking about.
It it looks like an eye and the like the numbers. It doesn't have numbers, but you know, like the little lines that go to the numbers. It has those, but they're in some crazy, weird spread out positions, but they still keep time. It's really amazing. But yeah, George Nelson's very well known for creating a lot of super fifties clocks.
Yeah, I don't think any of his clocks had numbers, if I'm not mistaken, because he was kind of like, you don't need a number if you know what o'clock looks like and how to read it. Yeah, And you know that's another reason this one's fun for us, because both of us love this stuff.
Yeah, So for George Nelson, go look up Nelson clocks, look up Nelson bubble lamps. Probably seen those before. The Nelson platform bench and then the swag leg desk. Those are some of his best designs. But in addition to being a designer himself, he also he was one of those A plus people who recruited other A plus people to work with him. Yeah, and one of the groups of A plus people he recruited were the emes, and they started working with George Nelson at Herman Miller essentially as like independent contractors, just probably exclusively sending their designs to Herman Miller to be produced.
That's right, And could you imagine if we didn't have little slip ups, we've never gotten to Charles Nilson, Riley sidebar.
Man you just found the silver lining to that thousand emails.
So and that's a good lesson to people to never stop the podcast right in the middle to email us a correction. Sometimes we catch things. So they're working together now they're working for Herman Miller. This is a sort of a match made in heaven because they had the smarts and the experience to like mass produce and pump out these great designs. On Herman Miller side, they had these amazing designers now working for them, and they, like you said, you know, from the beginning they were trying to create these sort of simple, stylish but you know, practical pieces and as we'll see, you know, things that would end up going in schools and bus stations and stuff like.
That and airports. So if you go to an airport today and you see like that long row of chairs that you just sit in while you're waiting at the gate, and they're all connected by metal. They have a leather back, a leather seat in two you know arms. That's that's an EMES design there the air I can't remember the sling Group chair is what they're called. And they're still in production. So if it's not an actual legitimate emes. Yeah, set of chairs, it's a knockoff of it. That's how ubiquitous there stuff is. It was like everywhere, like most of the stuff we're talking about. If you can't bring it to mine, I will bet that if you go look it up, yeah, probably seen it before.
Yeah. I mean their stuff is either literally all over the place or just in spirit in a lot of places. Just ubiquitous in America, yeah for sure. Maybe elsewhere, but I don't I don't get to travel much.
I know, I haven't traveled that much either. It's always for tour.
For Ray's side, she was an amazing artist, a great painter. She ended up working, you know, in adding a lot of fun and design elements to the things that were happening. If you watch a documentary, you definitely get the sense that she she's the one that kind of held it all together. She had a great attention to detail. So like as far as the company, you know, functioning as a as a company and not just a funhouse of like kids designing things. You know, as far as the staff goes, she kind of kept things on the rails and also provided a lot of fun and color and textural detail and you know, if you watch interviews you know with them over the years on YouTube, she's always standing behind Charles, of course, and she doesn't say much on camera. It's always him and his name is the one that's up there, and it gets a little frustrating, but it was the fact of the matter is it was just a time in the nineteen fifties where even though Charles would say things like anything I can do, Ray can do better than me. It's just how it was. Then she took a bit of a back seat unfortunately.
Yeah, and yeah, there's no other way to put it. It's just how it was. There's a very famous clip of them on an NBC show called Home that was hosted by the actress Arlene Francis, And in this clip, it's like I think nine or eleven minute like segment on the show. Yeah, they actually debuted, Yeah it is. They debuted one of their famous chairs, which we'll talk about in the second, the Eames lounge chair. But Arlene Francis is even like almost cattily dismissive of Ray, and Ray is just sitting there likes has to have a big smile on her face, because that's what you're expected to do. But she was just sidelined, just pushed to the side in this interview. Despite yeah, over the years, like Charles just being like, no, this this, this one's not behind me, she's right next to me, Like we're equals, we're partners where you do this together. The society was just like, that's that's not true stuff.
Yeah, she's kind of like I'm paraphrasing, but the overall vibe was in the brief time she was allowed to speak, was tell me how you support your husband that kind of thing exactly. Yeah. So they're making all kinds of things collapsible sofas, fiberglass shell chairs, those were very, very famous. If you look up there and I think this one wont to Design Award for moment as well. In nineteen fifty there molded fiberglass armchair. Look that thing up and you'll say, oh that chair.
Yeah, the one that I've sat in in every school cafeteria ever at the bus station. Like if you see like a seat that's plastic and kind of molded to fit your form, that was the Eames fiberglass armchair.
Yeah. Absolutely, And again songs upholstery, they would end up using leather, as we'll see here in a second. But most of this early stuff was like aluminum molded fiberglass and don't forget plywood, plastic, plywood, wire mesh stuff like that.
Yeah, which, to me, that's what I don't like about their design. It has too much of an industrial flavor, which is exactly what they're going for. They were trying to show like, you can you can come up with beautiful design that's affordable using mass produced, you know, materials, and so that's what they were doing. But it just looks a little industrial to me. And then it has that veneer of like fifty years, which makes industrial products like somehow creepy. So some of their actual vintage stuff I'm not crazy about. But there's a really cute segment on Antique's road Show if you want to see one of the EMES storage units, one of their earliest ones, if you look up Herman Miller storage unit Fort Worth, there's like a five or six minute segment where this woman is told that something she paid fifteen dollars for is worth like twenty thousand dollars. Oh wow, I love Antiques Roadshow.
Yeah, that's a great show. And another thing that was great about their designs with these chairs in particulars that they were stackable. I think they may have learned from that egg splint that if you make something stackable, that that's very handy if you have to clear a cafeteria for a school play or dodgeball.
Right exactly. So that was their their genuinely affordable breakthrough, and they actually kind of, from what I can tell, left molded plywood largely behind. That's not entirely true, but they really went, you know, full bore on molded fiberglass and then plastic because it really did fulfill a lot of the service their purposes they wanted, including affordability. Like that first chair of theirs, Time magazine named it the chair of the century. Before the century, it was even halfway through, Like that's how much of a splash it made. And they were making it for like the average person to be able to buy. But it was still in today's dollars, like a five hundred and twenty five dollars like single chair, you know what I mean, So it wasn't exactly affordable. When they started to get into fiberglass and plastic, then they were making chairs that the average person could afford.
I wonder if like when they made that announcement. How many chair designers and builders were just like, well, what's the point and just threw their chair into the fireplace.
Like I guess I'll go into toys. Damn it. They're into toys too.
So you said they moved away from plywood, but not before this iconic chair that you mentioned briefly earlier.
That's why I corrected myself.
The Eames lounge, which was molded plywood. It was fabric. The very first one that was introduced on that show was rosewood, plywood and black leather. And this is the one that made them famous. It came with an ottoman or I guess. I don't even know if you had to buy it separately back then, but it was. It's a gorgeous chair. I mean, they're the ones they sit on on Shark Tank. They are copied heavily. I imagine the knockoffs are not nearly as good. But I don't own one, but I've always wonted one, and I think one day I might have to splash down for one.
There's this one that I covet that was owned by orvile Reddenbacher, which just somehow makes it even more like mid century. Amazing.
Do you imagine eating popcorn in that thing? Watching a movie?
So yeah, there's this guy who is, like, you know, he refurbished an Atomic Ranch, or it's on the magazine, the internet magazine Atomic Ranch. But that kind of like mid century space age house he refurbished, and he has that orval Reddenbocker knockoff. It's actually a knockoff of the Eames lounge. He has it, and he said they eat popcorn in it.
Amazing.
I think so too, And I don't know why. I don't even know how I first heard about it, but I covet that particular chair. It's great.
You know, one day, Josh, I'm gonna really roode for you to get that chair.
Thank you. I can't wait till that day starts. Let's talk about that chair a little bit. Oh sure, okay, well here I go. So the chair itself was different. It was multiplied with like you said, but it was upholstered in leather like I think also you said. But it was meant to be exceedingly comfortable. And the way that Charles Putt is supposed to have the warm, receptive look of a well used first Baseman's Myt, which definitely gets that across. No, they're super duper comfortable, especially if you remind yourself like I'm actually sitting on polster plywood here, right. They have become so iconic and so associated with the mid century modern aesthetic, and in particular it's almost like a signal or a code for someone who is powerful captain of industry. Like it's like a mover and a shaker of that era if you're doing like a period piece, so much so that when is it. Matthew Wiener, who is the showrunner for mad Men Winer weinerslov He said, We're not using the Eames lounge in our show. It's just such a cliche. It shows up everywhere, and mad Men is like, of course it's going to show up in mad Men. So was he very wisely was like, Nope, we're not doing that. But he went with a different Eam set, the Emes Aluminum group, which is equally cool.
But in a different way.
Yeah.
Yeah, I definitely like the other one better. But this was more of an office chair. You've seen it before as well, no padding on the arms, but it was it's like a ribbed, ribbed leather. I promise you look this thing up and you'll go, oh, that thing exactly that held Don Draper's butt for however many years.
And also, I mean, depending on how hip your workplaces, you might have a knockoff of this in your office. Like it's really that's something that happens in design a lot. Somebody comes up with an iconic design and then everybody rips it off. That's just the part of the industry.
Yeah, all right, I feel like that's another breakpoint. Yeah yeah, all right, hepcat. We're going to be right back at this and josh will pick up after the break with toys, learn and stuff with Joshua John stuff.
You shine up, all right, Chuck.
Let's talk toys, because, like I said, they considered play serious business because of what it could do to unlock you. And they were playful people for sure. Yeah, before we talk about toys, let's put that on the back burner for a second and talk about their architecture work, because remember Charles was a crypto pseudo architect for a while, an outlaw architect, I guess, yeah, And this was an age where you could work with other amazing designers in architects. And remember they were friends already with aerosaranin So they worked with him on at least one house called case Study House number nine, and that's a pretty famous house, but it is nothing compared to Case Study House number eight, which is in fact the house that Ray and Charles Eames designed and ended up living in.
Yeah, the case Study Houses. We'll say what it is. But I've had this on my list for like ten years to do.
Oh it's so neat.
Took it in.
It's beautiful, But what to that house?
Yeah, it's really neat.
But the Case Study program was a program sponsored by Art and Architecture magazine where they built these houses. I think there were thirty six designs, not just the Eames, all sorts of architects. Right over the course of like twenty one years, they built twenty six of these houses, and eighteen of them are still as is a handful of being destroyed, which is awful. Yea, and maybe more awful a handful of them when you look up, like the list says something like, you know, renovated. I'm paraphrasing to a country renovated so much that you can't even tell it's what it was.
Gotcha, Yeah, for sure, But we're going.
To do one on the case study houses in that program. It was pretty amazing. But out of this came case Study eight, where like you said, the Ames lived in the Pacific Palisades. It was initially called the Bridge House because it was going to be cantilevered out over this big grassy meadow toward the sea because you could see the ocean there. And Charles at one point reconsidered along with Ray, and they said, hey, we're doing that thing that you're not supposed to do an architecture, which is take this beautiful area and just like plunk a house down in the middle of it. And he fell in love with that meadow and he decided to change the complete design of it instead of cantilevering it out over this meadow, make the meadow this big beautiful front yard basically, and they came up with they scrapped the Ridge House and came up with the design for number eight, which was this very beautiful, square, flat roofed, colorful, amazing house.
Yeah. So apparently Ray was a fan of Mandria. And you can tell because these are two giant squares made of glass and steel, and then they have panels in some places where you might have a window, and those panels would be colored like yellow or blue or red or white like a Mandria painting. But they were the ones. I don't know if this house is the one that introduced it. It's possible. The idea of like soaring ceilings, of huge open space floor plans, it was like a it's a modernist masterpiece. But one of the things that's so great about it is that Ray decorated it to the hilt with art objects, gifts from friends, paintings, sculptures, folk art, weavings, everything you can think of. It was just such a busy room. There's like leopard skin rugs and just weird stuff everywhere. And this was entirely counter to the trend at the time, which was if you were modernist, you're also minimalist. There in yeah, you can't extract one from the other, and she did, and that was a huge contribution to modernism because a lot of people are turned off, including me, are turned off by minimalism, like, can't stand it. It's an awful, awful way to live, I think, And she was like, hey, you can be modernists and not be minimalist, you know. So she's credited with that as being probably her greatest contribution, solo contribution to modernism is the design choices she made in that house.
Yeah, whimsical and warm. I love it. It's pretty amazing. Like you said, they all did case study house number nine on the same lot as number eight. Intinda himself would live in number nine, and he also designed his old buddy Billy Wilder's house. He said, Hey, I love that that flat board that you gussied up for me. Can you make me a flat house? And he said sure. And so this house in Beverly Hills, where Billy Wilder and his wife Audrey Young lived, is another gorgeous, you know, flat roofed, sort of square, boxy, brilliant design.
Yeah, it's very cool. And they also planned eucalyptus trees all around it, and I think at least on one of them, there's swings that you can swing on when you're there. When we went, we didn't we just showed up. We didn't make reservations and there was no one there, so we had the place to ourselves. We weren't able to go inside, but you know, we peeked in the windows and all that.
It's all windows, pretty the whole thing.
I know, you really could, he think though, it's definitely worth visiting, Chuck, I think you'd love it.
Oh totally. Is there so many things in LA that I was either unaware of or too broke to do that. I try to do those things when I go back now.
Nice.
So Ray is busy also working on side gigs, designing textiles and fabrics and patterns. A couple of her most famous ones that Waverley Products picked up is called c Things Sea Things, which is whimsical and fun, just like she was a little starfish and sort of amba like things. And then she was very famous for something you still see a lot today called the Emes Dots, which is this design that are dots with interconnected lines. It's simple stuff, but iconic.
Yes, if you're into west Elm stuff, you have seen this design before or some version of it for sure. Yeah. So toys, toys, I think it's time to talk about toys in particular. They had one called the Toy Yeah, and it was a set of like these vinyl panels that you would frame with dowels and then connect to other panels with other dowels, and they were either square or triangle. I think they're about three feet across, and the whole point of it was you can build all sorts of structures out of it. You can use it to build the wings of a theater and pretend you're on a stage like it was. You were intended to use your imagination, even though in the instructions it shows you some ideas and how to build some stuff. But it was a toy for everybody, like for all ages. And that was I think the first one they came up with.
Yeah, that was in fifty one. They had the House of Cards as well, which is produced in fifty two. It's a deck of cards. The patterns on them are beautiful. All the cards are different things. It's not like just a single pattern deck. But they had notches. It's a house, you build it, so they had notcha so you could build it into these very emsy looking square structures the way the nachas are built. And I was like, I'm gonna buy one of those from myle pal Josh, oh thanks. I went to It's not coming Dowork. Okay, I went to Etsy. That original back is thirty two hundred bucks. So amen, that's a lot of money for a deck of cards.
Well, yeah, it so okay, well, then you can get me one of their musical towers instead.
Ah. Yes, they were very well known for this being in their office. Is still there today. It is a vertical xylophone. Yeah, and you drop a ball down it, yeah, like plink and yeah, and it just sort of bounces its way down, hitting different notes on the way down, which is just super fun.
Yeah. And all the notes are rearrangeable too, which is just sweet. There's only three of them in existence, so I presume it might even be more than a House of cards toy.
You can buy me that.
So in addition to toys to furniture, the Emes were they were just creative, creative people through and through, and they saw design everywhere. They had a collection of almost a quarter of a million slides, and they would create these slide show or multimedia presentations juxtaposing like a shell with like a an interstate overpass and be like, look at how similar this is. They were just into all that kind of stuff. And so they've found a lot of full film in like another phase, kind of like the end phase of their career together, which was coming up with movies, exhibits and presentations essentially.
Yeah, so they found work in a few different ways. They ended up being sponsored or I guess hired by corporations. Notably IBM was one of them to create you know, kind of industrial films here and there, multi media projects. It wasn't like, you know, how you can get your hand caught in a printer or anything like that. All kinds of different stuff, very creative things. One of the most famous films they made, probably the most famous, it's called Powers of Ten. I did a prototype film in nineteen sixty eight called a rough sketch for a proposed film dealing with the powers of ten and the relative size of things in the universe, shot at Miami in black and white, and then made a final version. They worked on this thing for a long time. It's based on a book by a Dutch Dutch teacher named Keys Boca called Cosmic View, Colan the Universe and forty Jumps. But the final version they shot on the shores of Lake Erie. I'm sorry, boy, I almost screwed that one up Lake Michigan in Chicago. The final version was in seventy seven. It was in color. It was called Powers of Ten colon a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe. And what that all means is they start with a simple overhead shot of this couple next to Lake Michigan having a picnic, and then it just keeps zooming back by Powers of ten, narrated the whole time by a gentleman MIT physics professor named Philip Morrison and Cameron Crow, the director very much inspired by Billy Wilder. He opens Jerry Maguire with a very similar thing. And I guarantee you he took this from the EMES project.
Oh yeah, I'm sure like it was. Yeah, it's just neat and if you think of it, you're like, yeah, of course, it's like somebody was going to stumble on this sooner or later. But I don't know how much that is just because they put it out there initially. But they would zoom out, I think, all the way until it was like ten to the tenth power, fifteenth power something like that. That is, so the entire known universe was encompassed and then zoomed all the way in back to that guy laying on a picnic blanket in Chicago and then threw his skin into like a proton and a carbon atom.
I think, yeah, super cool. It's nine minutes on YouTube. It's very very much worth watching it.
Yeah, you could watch it ten times in an hour and a half if you wanted to. Yeah, but it is very cool and it is YouTube, and it is definitely worth watching. And that's definitely what they were known for. But they made I think one hundred and twenty five films, and like I said, they made exhibits for museums, some of which are still around right now. They just did all sorts of really cool things, like if they had an idea, they would explore any medium that they thought best got it across. They were just not afraid of taking risks. And I didn't realize that about them. I didn't know anything about until I met you mean, then I started to learn about, you know, furniture design and all that, and then from researching this, I got to know them better. And I just I just think there I admire them a lot more than I did before I started researching this, just because they were so varied in their pursuits. I just think they're neat.
Yeah, absolutely, And you know, it was a great love story on one hand, but we do need to just sort of mention kind of the darker side, which is when I was talking to you about this, you made a joke about like people buried in their basement or something not that dark. Okay, but you know, when you run a design concern, your name is the one that's on it. Sometimes it was Charles and Ray, usually just Charles, but there they had a whole team of people that worked on this stuff, these young designers that work for them that you know, they never got any credit, and they kind of talked about that. Some people felt exploited. Some were like, yeah, we were exploited, but we also exploited their name because we worked for the hottest design firm. And it was sort of a give and take. And that's just sort of the deal. Your name doesn't go up there if you're on the team that creates the thing that the person whose name is on the you know, the placard on the office door, they're they're going to get the credit still happens a lot. People are better these days about giving credit down to staff. Back then, not so much. And then the other thing is Charles very very sadly had some affairs. Notably had a pretty pretty heavy love affair with a woman named Judith Wexler, who he you know, he was so far into it that he was like, I want to sell nine oh one, I want to get divorced, I want to move to New York, I want to marry you. I want to have a baby. And she broke it off because she said, you couldn't do that to Ray, because they were friends as well.
Man the Middle century.
Yeah, you know, Ray knew about the stuff. It was a time where divorce wasn't as popular and it was tough for her. She apparently dealt with it very privately. But you know they stuck together until the end.
Yeah, man, Yeah, wow, I didn't know about that either.
Yeah, but worth mentioning until you know. Charles died in nineteen seventy eight.
Yeah. Something sweet about that is Ray died exactly a decade later, on August twenty first, nineteen eighty eight. And she spent that decade basically archiving in or organizing and documenting all the work they did together. And then I guess she realized or felt like her work was done and said, Ray out.
Yeah. She passed from cancer. He died of a heart attack on a consulting trip in Saint Louis. And you know, they were very beloved. The people. He didn't have any employees. It sounded like they didn't absolutely love them. I think some of them were a little salty about credit here and there, But to a person, they were all like it was a magical time. They were magical people, and it was just a great thing all the way around.
Well, I'm definitely I'm glad we included the dark side.
Then you can't white watch that stuff.
You know, it's true. You got anything else, Chuck.
I got nothing else. Look forward to case study House podcasts.
Okay, podcasts are short stuff.
I think I think we could probably stretch that one out to a full no problem, because hey, what's better than sitting around and listening to a show described the way something looks?
Do it? And since Chuck and I just negotiated whether that episode would be a short stuff or a full length episode, it's time for listener mail.
All right, I'm going to call this a reminder to Sandwich. This is from Aaron Burke. Hey, guys, recently found your show. I've gotten into it. I started to listen to the most recent and then I thought, well, maybe I should have the whole experience and start at the beginning. These early episodes are a little unsatisfying because I know the finely tuned show that you've achieved after fifteen hundred episodes. My question is, what would you recommend for new listeners. Start at the beginning, work backwards, go to episode one seventy seven as of now, I'm starting at day one, and that is from Aaron Burke and Erin. I let Aaron know which episode this is going to be on so he could hear it. But what we recommend is sandwiching. That is, listen to the latest one and then listen to the earliest one, and then work forwards and backwards until you meet in the middle. For the reasons of compare and contrast. It's fun to hear the show now and how much has changed, but also you don't want to miss out on announcements and live show stuff and you know changes that happen, although there's really not many.
No, no, there's no changes whatsoever these days.
But we think the sandwich method is pretty fun.
Yeah, it's been the recommended version or method for the whole time, I think.
Essentially, right, yeah, but you know, do it how you want. That's what we think.
Sure, Yeah, each their own, right.
Yeah, So who is that Aaron Burke.
Aaron, however, you listen to the entire catalog of Stuff you Should Know, we hope you enjoy every single minute of it. And if you want to be like Aaron and get in touch with us and ask us for some advice of some sort, do it. You can send it in an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more, podcast to my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
