An Eames Primer at Interieur Kortrijk on 20 October
“Remember that part of authenticity is taking your pleasure seriously“ wrote Eames Demetrios in the ‘An Eames Primer’ book first published in 2001 by Thames & Hudson (UK).
Vitra Belgium organized with the Stichting Interieur an exceptional conference by inviting Eames Demetrios, the grandson of Charles and Ray Eames, the icons of 20th century American design. Demetrios sketched how his grandparents shared experiences in the design and artistic process. “Authenticity is in nature, in the desire for a real experience at one moment in one particular place” stated Demetrios, whose grandfather will be celebrated next year for the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Couple in life and in creation, Charles and Ray Eames offered us the elegance and beauty of their happy authenticity. There are so many possible connections to be made between their photographic work and philosophy and all the design icons that they achieved to conceive with time, a rich energy and their unique perspective on furniture, architecture to exhibition design and filmmaking. The collection of 800,000 photographs of the Eames collection kept by the Library Congress in the US can attest of the powerful personalities that are kept behind the secret of images.
The Eames Office is still active, working closely with VITRA, by achieving to keep the level of authenticity on the production of Eames’ pieces as close as possible from the original pieces. The vintage market is not always source of goodness! Documenting and preserving this family heritage is one of the main activity that Eames Demetrios is defending.
Seating on an Eames’ chair, experiencing ‘La Chaise’ as a design piece of furniture or a sculpture, looking at toys, sketches and videos imagined in Charles and Ray Eames workshop and charming house of steel allow each of us to enter by the main entrance of 20th-century creativity. Visual thinking and the long-lasting research process come back today as a working methodology, looking at the different scales: the house, the city, the world, the space, the human being. In that sense, the Eames were pioneers when they imagined at the 1958 Brussels Universal Exhibition the ‘Information machine’ exhibition. They were showing computers that were only used for generating images and not just anonymous data.
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.