Charles and Ray Eames’s Overlooked Final Decade Takes Center Stage in San Francisco

By the 1960s, Charles and Ray Eames had chalked up decades’ worth of designs that revolutionized modern living. The husband-and-wife team reimagined the storage unit as a modular system in eye-popping color, reenvisioned the humble table, and, of course, created chairs upon chairs—in wire, plastic, molded plywood, and curved fiberglass. It was work that ranked them among the midcentury’s most sought-after industrial designers, ones who dared to fuse function with experimentation.

What’s lesser known, though, is the couple’s last 10 years of collaboration. From 1968 to 1978, they set out to refine their previous designs to meet new production realities and ergonomic demands. This refreshing of their oeuvre to align with contemporary tastes echoes the Eames ethos. “Most people aren’t trained to face the process of re-understanding a subject they already know,” Charles once reflected. “One must obtain not just literacy, but deep involvement and re-understanding.”

The Eameses’ final decade is now under the spotlight at “Past as Prologue: The Last Decade of Furniture Design by Ray and Charles Eames,” an exhibition opening on June 7 at the Transamerica Pyramid Center during San Francisco Design Week.

The show surfaces key objects from the collection of the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. On view are some of the Eameses’ most recognizable inventions—from their side chair and executive chair to their chess stool and chaise—as well as other rarely seen designs. They’re joined by models and materials that shed light on the couple’s design processes.

“As an often-overlooked era of my grandparents’ designs, it felt imperative to uncover some ephemera that isn’t always highlighted hence [our] choosing some of their lesser-known pieces,” Llisa Demetrios, the Institute’s chief curator and the Eameses’ granddaughter, said in a statement. “It was exhilarating bringing out pieces that were created within my lifetime.”

Charles and Ray Eames met in the 1940s at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he was a teacher and she a student. While both had carved individual creative paths—Charles in architecture and Ray in abstract art—they found kindred spirits in each other. By 1950, their Los Angeles-based company, the Eames Office, had unveiled its earliest design, the molded Fiberglass Chair, on which it would make its name. (The couple would also go on to leave their mark on architecture, graphic design, and film.)

The Eameses’ creations, however, never sat still. Changing tastes, new materials, and shifts in production methods drove them to revisit their designs, even decades on. The Fiberglass Chair, for one, was created at a time of postwar shortage—hence the choice of fiberglass over the designers’ initial proposal of a stamped metal shell. The material would eventually be supplanted by injection-molded plastics and polyurethane.

Similarly, as manufacturers Herman Miller and Vitra increasingly turned their focus to office markets, the Eameses adapted their home icons for use in professional environments by rethinking their durability, modularity, and ergonomics. Eames work chairs are now available in myriad shapes and sizes, from the soft-padded executive chair to simple task chair (yet another reimagining of the Fiberglass Chair, this time with a four-star base).

“Past as Prologue” marks the Eames Institute’s first public outing beyond the Eames Archives. The organization, which was formed to preserve and steward the couple’s legacy, has hosted a series of online exhibitions on the Eameses and most recently found itself a permanent home in Richmond, California.

“Past as Prologue” is on view at the Transamerica Pyramid Center, 600 Montgomery St, San Francisco, California, June 7–July 7.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com