Stuff You Should Know - Ray and Charles Eames: More than Chairs

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Charles 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 know. That's right. I'm pretty excited about this one. Yeah, this is your pick, right? 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 I should say were, a married couple who kind of, I don't know if they changed the face of design, but they were certainly very influential in design and, you know, 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 what's 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 2011, filmmakers Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey. I've seen it twice now.

That's an American master's one, isn't it? I don't know. PBS may have picked it up, but I don't think it originally was, but I'm not sure. I got to. But I saw it back in 2011, I guess, and then watched it again yesterday and today. But they said that it was definitely sort of middle to upper middle class people 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, some stuff was. Okay. So, um, I, you said that they didn't necessarily change the face of design. I don't know. I'm not a hundred percent sure. I guess looking back, um, 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 Aero Saranin. He was a hugely influential architect and designer. They worked with Charles Nelson, a hugely influential designer. They were part of like this Vanguard, I guess, of

new 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. artistically 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 probably could. One of her dogs was 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, Gin X is the low end of that joke.

Did you see his one man show? No. They did a documentary of his one man show that he did before his death, and it's good. Very touching poignant. Like, you know. Charles Nelson Riley with a little bit of his guard down. Mm, 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 Alex J. Andra Kaiser. And we were like, who the heck is that? Her family called her Ray Ray. And that eventually just got shortened to Ray.

Sure. Everybody got sick of that hyphen. Yeah. She was born in Sacramento in 1912 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 Hoffman, a 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 picket 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 are 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 de Kooning.

Is it de Kooning or Kooning? I think it's de Kooning. Yeah. Before those guys even, like a decade before those guys came into it, she was part of like that first wave. So she was legit abstract artists. And then her husband was born five years previously, I think in 1907,

in St. Louis, Missouri, just missed the World's Fair. Oh, when was that? 1904. Oh, he might have gone. Have you ever seen Meet Me in St. Louis? Oh, wait, four 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.

No, no, they tried. I guess. And technically, I guess they did, if that sperm had just stayed in the same place and that was the same egg and they just were frozen in time, essentially, reproductively. Oh, boy. Yeah, at any rate, he was born in St. Louis in 1907

and he wanted to be an architect essentially out of the gate. He studied architecture at Washington University in St. 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. That's how it described as bozar. And it was not modernist at

all. And they were like, get out of here, you hippie. Bozo. Right. So he did. He got out. That 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. It seems so reckless. When you're designing 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.

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 Lloyd Wright. Oh, okay. 1929, he got married for the first time to a woman named Catherine Warman. They were college sweethearts, I guess, and had a daughter who had ended up being

the only sired child for Charles Themes. 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, Aro, Sarenin earlier, but the architect, the father, I guess, Alile Sarenin, 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 Hills? Hills, Hills. And why don't you become, well, first of all, come out for a fellowship,

but 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 gonna go there and take it easy and kind of re-gather, 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 Ray Ray ended up. Yeah, 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 gonna start making things out of plywood, just watch. And I think at the time plywood doesn't have quite the connotation that it 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 Museum

of Modern Arts 1941 Organic Design and Home Purnishings Competition. And they won even though this chair was technically a failure. They realized the reason they'll apply wood 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.

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 in fabric to hide that, and they won the competition. But the chair 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 before. They were just what they were doing throughout like the late 20s and through the whole 30s and into the 40s. They were experimenting with bending plywood to their will.

Yeah. Essentially. Come here plywood. Yeah. 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 11 or 12 years of marriage, and he went after Ray pretty much immediately after and they got married in 1941. And right after they got married in 1941, they did what any self-respecting artist was doing at the time, they looked westward and got into some jalopy 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 appreciate it. Like the Beverly Hillbillies. Charles is on top in a rocking chair. Right, Ray had the shotgun in her lap. Yeah, can you imagine? I mean, that setup was very insane.

There's a gun in the lap, there's an elderly woman in a rocking chair on top of a truck. Exactly, yeah. Good lord. But that's the Hillbilly way, they don't care. 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 26 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 60 issues over that five years. And if they did 26, it's almost half of them. As soon as I said, was it monthly, I immediately panicked that the name that I had just said was Arts and Architecture Monthly. No, you didn't, it's just Arts and Architecture Quarterly. All right, oh, Quarterly? So they designed a bunch of those covers.

Intensa 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 Westwood, the Strathmore apartments. And you should live in one of them because Orson Welles will live there too. Yeah, Strathmore makes me think of like some new skyscraper, but it was like a two-story

house-ish structure, 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 converted 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 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 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. 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 looks almost like a teak lounge chair

that hasn't been finished yet. Exactly, exactly. It's dancing right along the line of a wicker wheel chair. 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 got your chair. But they called that the Kazam machine as a reference to Ale Kazam because you would put in like plywood and glue and something magically different would appear. Kazam with a exclamation point. Yeah, for 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. 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 and me find out what 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 the- Just great. Yeah, Billy Wilder, isn't he Chad, our director from the stuff you should know TV shows, 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 Ockerman shows for Movie Crush. Okay. Yeah, there you go. One of the great movies. And Billy Wilder did all kinds of great movies. You had me at Sunset Boulevard. 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 Eameshays, the reason Billy Wilder figures into it aside from like, wow, there's the name drop right there. The Eameshays, which is a very famous, well, Shays Lounge, decked out in leather with like a pillow to go under your calves and everything. It's to me, it looks like what your psychologist would use while they gave you a gynecological exam. It's like a cross between a couch in your shrink's office and an exam table in your doctor's office. Oh, well, just a word of advice. If your psychologist is trying to give you a kind of logical exam that's a little good.

Exit, stage left quickly. Yeah. So, yes, thank you for taking my joke and turning it really dark. Well, you know, just want to make sure everyone understood clearly. But the reason Billy Wilder inspired the AIMS Shays is that he would take naps on sets. And apparently there was one that Charles Eames witnessed where Billy Wilder was taking a nap on a six by 12 inch plank that 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 got Billy Wilder asleep in the corner. I'm one of those curvy, psychologist shazes. No, this one's straight. It's not the other one. The curvy one's the lush shaze. Oh, really? Because I saw the shaze was the curvy one. No?

There's two. One, the curvy one is called lush shaze. eam shades, the original eam shades is like, it looks like one of their like aluminum group, leather, upholstered chairs, but laid out essentially flat. Oh, Billy Wildress has stuck around. I'm telling you, my description of it was like spot on. In my head though, it made more sense for the curvy one, your description. Yeah, I guess so.

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All right, so World War II 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. 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 They created a wooden splint for the US Navy. That was lightweight. It had strategic holes in it that made it extra lightweight,

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 leg splint.

It was called the transportation egg splint. Egg splint, my Lord. Transportation eggs Benedict. Leg splint, they made 5,000. The Navy ordered 5,000 of these things. So all of a sudden they had a little money coming in. Yeah, cause at $10 per, that's what they charged. Which 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 meant. Oh, okay, I was about to say, boy, here we go. 5,000 times 10 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 on 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 1943 when they opened up what they called 901, which was their office. It's still there today at 901. Now it's Abbot Kinney Boulevard. Back then it was West Washington Boulevard in Venice. Got you. 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 contacts, 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 and office. Yeah, I mean, they got equipment too and materials. They were pretty set up there at 901. For sure.

And if you watch the documentary or just know about 901, 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. Man, I love Skittles. They had a sort of a classy version of that in 1943, 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 sync 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 like that, because that's just

what they seem 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 greatest 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 that's the thing like when you hear the word eems like almost Probably 80% 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 1943. By 1946, 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 legs producers. Maybe you guys should talk to Herman Miller.

And that's what they did. They came up with the Eames chairwood, the ECW. We're more of the legs splint producers. Maybe you guys should talk to Herman Miller. Yeah. And that's what they did. They came up with the Eames chairwood, the ECW. Nowadays it's called the LCW, the lounge chairwood. 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 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, 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 assume 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, you said, okay, I didn't get the joke.

I 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 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 Mm-hmm, 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 looks like an eye and the Like the numbers it doesn't have numbers But you know like the 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 is very well known for creating a lot of super 50s 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 a 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 was one of those A plus people who recruited other A plus people to work with him. And one of the groups of A plus people he recruited was the Eames, 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 can you imagine if we didn't have little slip-ups, we would have never gotten a Charles Nelson Riley sidebar. Man, you just found the silver lining to that, 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's side. They had these amazing designers now working for them. And they, like you said, that, 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 and two arms. That's an Eames design.

They're, 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 Eames set of chairs, it's a knockoff of it. That's how ubiquitous their stuff is. It was like everywhere. Like most of the stuff we're talking about, if you can't bring it to mind,

I will bet that if you go look it up, you've 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 Be elsewhere, but 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 a amazing artist a great painter. She ended up working and 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's the one that kind of held it all together. She had a great attention to detail. So like, as far as the company, functioning as a company and not just a fun house of like kids designing things, 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 if you watch interviews 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 the fact of the matter is it was just a time in the 1950s 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. That's just how it was. There's a very famous clip of them

on a NBC show called Home, that was hosted by the actor Sarlene Francis. And in this clip, it's like, I think nine or 11 minute like segment on the show. They actually debuted. Yeah, it is. They debuted one of their famous chairs, which we'll talk about in a second, the Eames lounge chair.

But Sarlene Francis is even like, almost cataly dismissive of Ray. And Ray is just sitting there like, has to have a big smile on her face because that's what you're expected to do But she was just sideline just pushed to the side in this interview It despite yeah over the years like Charles was being like no this this this woman's not behind me She's right next to me like we're equals. We're partners. We do this together

Society was just like that's that's not true. 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. Oh, 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 won a design award for MoMA as well, in 1950, their molded fiberglass armchair

looked 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 come up with beautiful design that's affordable using mass produced 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 50 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 Antiques Roadshow, if you wanna see one of the Eames 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 $15 for is worth like $20,000. I love Antiques Roadshow. Yeah, it's a great show. And another thing that was great about their designs with these chairs in Particular's that they were stackable. I think they may have learned from that egg splint Mm-hmm 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 Exactly. So that was their genuinely affordable breakthrough. And they actually kind of, what I can tell, left molded plywood largely behind. That's not entirely true, but they really went full bore on molded fiberglass and then plastic, because it really did fulfill a lot of the purposes they wanted, including affordability. Like that first chair of theirs, Time Magazine named it the chair of the century before the century 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 $525 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. They're like, I guess I'll go into toys. Damn it, they're into toys too. into the fireplace. They're 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 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 wanted 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 Orville Redenbacher,

which just somehow makes it even more like mid-century amazing. Do you imagine eating popcorn and 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 Orville Redenbacher 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 root 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 put it is supposed to have the warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman's mitt.

Which definitely gets that across. No, they're super duper comfortable, especially if you remind yourself like, I'm actually sitting on upholstered plywood here. Right. But history. 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 a powerful captain of industry, 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 was the showrunner for Mad Men? Wiener.

Wiener? Weiner Slav? 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 he very wisely was like, nope, we're not doing that. But he went with a different Eames set, the Eames 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 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 workplace is, 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 break point, yay? Oh, yeah. All right, Hepcat, we're gonna be right back after this and Josh will pick up after the break with toys. My name is Rachel and this is my new podcast, Rachel Goes Rogue. You think you know me because you've seen and heard the stories. I was most recently involved in one of the biggest reality TV scandals, Coined Scandival.

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podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadioApp, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck, let's talk toys. Because like I said, they considered play a 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 and architects. And remember, they were friends already with Aero Saranen. 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 House is, we'll say what it is, but I've had this on my list for like 10 years to do. Oh, it's so neat. You me took it there. It is. 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 36 designs, not just the aims, all sorts of architects over the course of like 21 years. They built 26 of these houses and 18 of them are still as is, a handful of them destroyed,

which is awful and maybe more awful, a handful of them when you look up, like the list says something like, renovated, I'm paraphrasing, but basically renovated so much that you can't even tell it's what it was. Gotcha, yeah, for sure. But we're gonna 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 Eames lived in the Pacific Palisades. houses in that program. It was pretty amazing. But out of this came case study eight, where like you said, the Eames 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 in 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 Mondrian. 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 Mondrian painting But they're they 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 through 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 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 a modernist, you're also minimalist. They're in, 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 modernist 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 also did case study house number nine on the same lot as number eight. Intended 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 planted 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 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 good, I know you really could. It was neat though.

It's definitely worth visiting Chuck, I think you'd love it. Oh, totally. There's 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 Waverly products picked up is called SeaThings, S-E-A things, which is whimsical and fun, just like she was, little starfish and sort of amoeba-like things. And then she was very famous for something you still see a lot today called the Eames 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 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 51. They had the House of Cards as well, which is produced in 52. 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, it's you build it. So they had notches, so you could build it into these very emzy looking square structures the way the notches are built. And I was like, I'm gonna buy one of those from my old pal, Josh. Oh, thanks. You know, I went to, it's not coming, don't worry. Okay.

I went to Etsy and an original pack is 3,200 bucks. So? Amen. That's a lot of money for a deck of cards. Yeah, 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, it's still there today. It is a vertical xylophone.

And you drop a ball down it. Yeah, like Plinko. 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 Eames 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 slideshow or multimedia presentations juxtaposing like a shell with like a interstate overpass and be like, look at how similar this is. They were just into all that kind of stuff. And so they found a lot of fulfillment 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, in a few different ways. They ended up being sponsored, or I guess hired by corporations, notably IBM was one of them, to create kind of industrial films here and there, or multimedia projects. It wasn't like 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 films they made, probably the most famous, is called Powers of Tin. They did a prototype film in 1968 called A Rough Sketch for a proposed film dealing with the powers of tin 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 teacher named Keys Boca,

called Cosmic View, Colin, 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. Man. Lake Michigan in Chicago. The final version was in 77, it was in color, it was called Powers of 10, Colin.

Colin. 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 10, narrated the whole time by a gentleman,

MIT physics professor named Philip Morrison. And Cameron Crowe, 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 Eames 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 gonna 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 10 to the 10th power, 15th power, something like that. 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. Yeah, you could watch it 10 times in an hour and a half if you wanted to.

Yeah. But it is very cool. And it is on YouTube and it is definitely worth watching. And that's definitely what they were known for, but they made, I think, 125 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 them till I met Yumi. And then I started to learn about, you know, to furniture design and all that.

And then from researching this, I got to know them better. And I just think they're, I admire them a lot more than I did before I from researching this, I got to know them better. And I just think they're, I admire them a lot more than I did before I started researching this just because they were so varied in their pursuits. I think they're neat. Yeah, absolutely. And 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 was, they had a whole team of people that worked on this stuff, these young designers that worked for them that, you know, they never got any credit and they, 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 going to get the

credit. It 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 heavy love affair with a woman named Judith Wexler who he was so far into it that he was like, I want to sell 901. I want to get divorced. I want to move to New York. 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 she 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 they stuck together until the end. Yeah, man. Yeah, wow, I didn't know about that either.

Yeah, but worth mentioning, until Charles died in 1978. Yeah, something sweet about that is, Ray died exactly a decade later, on August 21st, 1988. And she spent that decade basically archiving and 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. Yes, she passed from cancer. He died of a heart attack on a consulting trip in St. Louis. And, uh, you know, they were very beloved. The people, he didn't have any employees that 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 watch that stuff. It's true. Um, you got anything else, Chuck? I got nothing else. Look forward to a case study house podcast. Okay.

Podcast or 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 describe the way something looks? It's right. Let's 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 1,500 episodes. My question is, what would you recommend for new listeners? Start at the beginning, work backwards, go to episode 177. As of now, I'm starting at day one and that is from Aaron Burke and Aaron, I let Aaron know which episode this is gonna 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 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 wanna miss out on announcements and live show stuff and changes that happen, although there's really not many.

No, no, 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, to each their own, right? Yeah. So, who was 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 stuffpodcast.HeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. A small town with secrets hidden for centuries. You turn up in Danville just as the town sees its first real crime in decades? And a curious stranger who may be their only chance for survival.

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