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10 Things You Didn’t Know About Charles and Ray Eames

Article

Dwell

April 23, 2014

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Clowns, churches, and an aquarium: Find out how far the boundless curiosity of Ray and Charles Eames stretched.

 

“It makes me feel guilty that anybody should have such a good time doing what they are supposed to do.” It’s easy to imagine Charles Eames laughing with joy after uttering those words, a precinct summary of the way he and his wife and collaborator Ray viewed work. Their incredible accomplishments—spirited, human-centered design unbound by medium—seem like the byproduct of a state where work is play and vice versa.

And while their work in furniture, filmmaking and exhibition design is well-documented, there’s even more to their restless creativity than you might imagine. Dwell spoke with Daniel Ostroff, film producer, design historian, and editor of the forthcoming An Eames Anthology: Articles, Film Scripts, Interviews, Letters, Notes and Speeches by Charles and Ray Eames (Yale University Press), and Eames Demetrios, artist, principal of Eames Office, and grandson of the famous couple, to uncover underappreciated and relatively unknown stories about the design icons.

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Sustainable Design at Auburn’s Rural Studio

Interview

Dwell

May 28, 2014

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A bold experiment in demystifying and democratizing architecture, Auburn University’s Rural Studio, founded by Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth in 1993, has overseen the construction of a menagerie of modernist structures in rural Hale County, Alabama, including the affordable 20K House. And while the work of generations of students stands as a testament to the commuity benefits of sustainable, human-centered design, the program’s influence in the field of architecture and its important role in the community suggest that its role building doesn’t end with just structures. Dwell spoke with director Andrew Freear and Elena Barthel, a professor who oversees the Rural Studio Farm, both co-authors of the new book Rural Studio at Twenty: Designing and Building in Hale County, about current and future projects, and the expanding role of farming and agriculture within the program.

Where do you see the program heading in the future, especially considering how sustainability becomes more and more relevant?

Andrew Freear: We’ve been here for 20 years. Instead of seeking survival, the program can say it’s not what we can do, it’s what we should do. I think that our community projects are always either educationally based or based on community welfare, such as the Boys & Girls clubs. Our challenge isn’t just to create those buildings and hope organizations survive, it’s how we help them survive. We built a new volunteer fire department in Newbern, and them not having to worry about their building allowed them to go gangbusters in supporting their organization. Our student’s expectations are to build, and that’s not always the answer. How do architects get involved in helping organizations sustain themselves? How do we keep going in the next 20 years supporting these organizations?

To be sustainable, you only want to build it once.

Andrew Freear: We don’t have to build for the sake of it. We tell our students, you have a privileged opportunity here. But just because it’s a design program, it doesn’t mean you’re going to build something. You have to prove that it’s needed.

Elena Barthel: The way our studio works with the community, it’s like osmosis, it’s empathetic. Twenty years is a lot of time to build up this relationship. You need to maintain your empathy with the surroundings. It’s not something you can design sitting at a table — it’s what happened when you live in the same place, experience the same weather.

Andrew Freear: The program is very proud that it’s Alabama kids doing work in the backyard of their university. Sometimes it can take an outsider to say what’s beautiful about the place. The insiders are in the weeds. The danger for us is that we’ve been here too long, and you’ve been here too long and you’ve become too familiar. The program is open year round, the office is always open. Students stay here for years and really start to put down roots. We’ve had kids stay here and get married. I have access to all of the local politicians by cell phone directly. Were we in, say, Chicago, the firewall in front of the people who make decisions is immense. And that fact that I can call them, or they can call me, that’s a big deal. They’re started to recognize us as a resource.

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The Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club Rides Again

Feature

Chicago Reader

April 24, 2014

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Documentary photographer Danny Lyon’s 1968 chronicle of a Chicago biker gang helped inspire Easy Rider. Now The Bikeriders revs up for a long-overdue reissue.

Danny Lyon, Route 12, Wisconsin from The<br /> Bikeriders (Aperture, 2014)

Danny Lyon, Route 12, Wisconsin from The Bikeriders (Aperture, 2014)© Danny Lyon, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery

Danny Lyon doesn’t want to talk about the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. The legendary documentary photographer won’t say much about riding alongside Cal, Funny Sonny, Johnny, and the rest of the leather-clad gang in the 1960s, on an old Triumph cobbled together in a Hyde Park garage out of parts kept in coffee cans. He won’t go into great detail about the photos he took with his trusty Nikon: Benny, leaning back in the saddle, a silhouette lit up from streetlights and neon signs at Grand and Division; Big Barbara, with eyes you could get lost in, staring into a jukebox; or Andy, drinking Hamm’s longnecks off a pool table at the Stoplight bar in Cicero.

Lyon, now 72, doesn’t want the gang in which he embedded himself sensationalized the way he feels “the straight press” of his day did with headlines such as “Cycle Hoods Watched by Cops 2 Years.” Ever an iconoclast when it comes to the media, Lyon once wrote that his goal was to “create photographs that would be stronger, more truthful, and more powerful than LIFE magazine,” so that “LIFE magazine would be destroyed.” A 1966 Chicago Tribune article set the scene at the Cork—an Outlaws clubhouse in suburban Lyons that the cops sought to close—in strangely detached, almost anthropological terms: “As Cousin Joe told a brief history of the Cork, a tall, Beatle-haired waitress wearing a large ‘I Like Sex’ button served drinks to some of the pierced-eared outlaws who were ‘cooling their pipes.’ That means resting their ‘wheels’ or ‘getting a drink.'”

Lyon doesn’t feel the need to say much in part because he already said enough in The Bikeriders, a raw, compelling touchstone of New Journalism and Chicago counterculture history that documents four years spent with the Chicago Outlaws at races, runs, club meetings, loose social gatherings, and even a funeral. First published in 1968 and set for a long-overdue reissue by Aperture Press in June, the book reportedly served as inspiration for Easy Rider, with Lyon’s black-and-white photos and candid interviews painting an unvarnished portrait of the fast, furious, and sometimes fatal biker lifestyle. In a shot of a member’s scrapbook that shows a clip from a newspaper ad plugging the CBS 2 premiere of Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Lyon slyly points out the difference between the idealized vision of biker culture and the reality he believed he was capturing.

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Design in Detroit: A New Frontier?

Interview/Feature

Design Bureau

March 7, 2014

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Many things conspired to bring 23-year-old designer Lyse Cook to live and work in Detroit last June. She cops to having drunk the Kool-Aid she’s heard the stories about “the Brooklyn of her generation,” the chance to make her mark in the Wild West atmosphere of a rebuilding metropolis. Someone in love with architecture, and the life and death of the American city, couldn’t pick a better place.

“I’m excited to see what’s happening in the next five years,” she says, “and I’m excited to be around for it. Think of a pot boiling: Detroit is really hot, but it hasn’t boiled yet.”

Cook has found a welcoming environment—“people are so much warmer here than they are in Portland,” her hometown— and a promising job situation. The BYU graduate was accepted into Challenge Detroit, an urban-development and leadership program. She currently works four days a week as a graphic designer and marketing coordinator for Sachse Construction downtown, then spends the rest of her time working for many of the city’s myriad nonprofits (she recently finished a project about bike parking). Excitement and potential come up dozens of times in our conversation—“I already feel like part of the change”—and her experience isn’t unique. Developments are conspiring to make Motown appealing to Cook’s peers, even as the reality of Detroit’s financial situation persists.

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Phloem Furniture

Interview

Forma

Issue 3

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You could call furniture maker Benjamin Klebba a craftsman. The 36-year-old looks the part—beard, Portland address, can probably plane a board in the time it takes you to finish this sentence, and will debate the pros and cons of walnut versus ash with the fervor music fans reserve for end-of-year album lists.

But it’s more than a craft. Take his Peninsula Chair, an example of his crisp, minimalist aesthetic which debuted at last year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York. A tight web of angles and joints supports two strips of tanned leather, inviting someone to settle down amidst earth tones and grain. It’s a parabola breaking a thin plane between two armrests—geometry that sings. And ideally, it’s more than a design object.

“People have a chair that they sit in, read in, are comfortable in, and feel a sense of attachment to. When someone tells me ‘we read a book in your chair every night,’ that’s really awesome.”

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Behind the Scenes: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Interview

Dwell

March 5, 2014

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Behind the Scenes: The Grand Budapest Hotel

When we first see the Grand Budapest Hotel in Wes Anderson’s visually stunning new film of the same name, she appears a withered beauty during a flashback to the 1960s. The garish green and orange lobby sticks out like a dye job crying for attention. But then, as the film’s narrator, Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), recalls the grand dame’s glory days in the ‘30s, when he worked as a hotel lobby boy, the camera races across a resplendent red carpets as if panning across the profile of a starlet.

In a film filled with stars like Ralph Fiennes and Jude Law, this magnificent room plays a leading role. As production designer Adam Stockhausen explains, it’s by design, since the built-from-scratch interior pulls inspiration from the world’s best hotels, both real and cinematic. “We realized pretty quickly there was no way we could do what we needed to do in a real hotel,” says Stockhausen, who worked with Anderson before on Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Limited. “A real hotel has its own guests, its own thing going on, and there’s no way we can take it over for the amount of time we need to. We couldn’t build the whole thing from scratch, either, we’ll never be able to afford it.”

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An Oral History of the Green Mill

Article/Interview

Chicago Reader

March 20, 2014

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“Three shots closed Texas Guinan’s show at the Green Mill cafe, Lawrence avenue and Broadway, at 4 o’clock yesterday morning. The internationally known night club hostess was asking the suckers to give the little girl a big hand.”—Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1930

An Oral History of the Green Mill

It’s not uncommon to walk into a bar in Chicago these days and feel like the present is the past: drinkers belly up to polished wood, sipping drinks concocted from small-batch whiskies and admiring each other in the soft glow of exposed Edison lightbulbs. We’re living in a cocktail renaissance, a period when authenticity and history, even if the bar only opened last month, mean something. And that’s a good thing.

But if real is what you’re looking for, there’s no better place to find it than at the corner of Broadway and Lawrence. For longtime Chicago residents the Green Mill is so well-known it’s almost an afterthought. But the bar’s story—its place in Prohibition lore, its importance to Uptown and the local music scene, and more dramatically, its own rebirth after decades of neglect—make it a singular piece of Chicago history.

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Sound of the City: Wallace Detroit Guitars

Article/Interview

Nothing Major

October 3, 2013

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Detroit boasts a history of legendary axmen—Jack White, Ted Nugent, Robert White, Wayne Kramer and Dennis Coffey to name a few. And now, thanks to the passion project of commercial real estate director and woodworker Mark Wallace, the next great musician on that list may kick out the jams with a guitar made from a chunk of the city itself.

Built in a Corktown workshop, Wallace Detroit Guitars are fashioned from wood salvaged from the city’s recently demolished buildings. Each instrument will be branded with the address of the home that provided the wood, reinforcing the local heritage of the material.

So far, Wallace has created two prototypes that need to be tested, but a recent $8,000 matching grant from the Knight Foundation should allow him to expand production. Eventually, he wants the finished product to include more salvaged material from other local companies, like a strap made out of leftovers auto parts.

“One of the great things about Detroit is the collaboration,” he says. “Everyone wants to work together because they know they’re making the city a better place.”

Wallace’s project is currently getting off the ground thanks to a grant from theKnight Foundation.

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Interview: Karim Rashid

Article/Interview

Nothing Major

August 20, 2013

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When Bata Shoe Museum Senior Curator Elizabeth Semmelhack first began assembling the exhibit that would become Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture (on display in Toronto through March 30, 2014), she hit up the right contacts. Erik Blam, manager of Run-D.M.C., and Bobbito Garcia, author of the sneaker bible Where’d You Get Those? both lent their expertise. But it may have been the choice of industrial designer Karim Rashid as exhibit designer that helped articulate just how forward-thinking footwear can be.

Rashid’s exhibit layout, heavy on digital themes and shades of neon, is another in a long series of curvy, colorful argument for the primacy of technology in design. For decades, the award-winning designer has been making a similar statement in his work for clients as wide-ranging as Umbra and Method to Veuve Clicquot and Artemide.

The history on display at the Bata Museum would thrill any sneaker freak—plastic domes encase rare and colorful kicks, like shoes from the 1860s, a replica of Jesse Owens Adidas from the 1936 Olympics, and the 1986 Puma Computer shoe, a Nike+ precursor that plugs into a Apple IIe and tells you how many calories you’ve burned. Nike designer Tinker Hatfield’s sketches of the iconic Air Jordan XI grace a back wall.

But it’s the focus on technology’s role in pushing sneaker design forward that makes Rashid, himself an avid runner, a fitting choice. When we spoke to Rashid from his office in New York, he explained why progressive advances make shoes so fascinating, why trends shouldn’t trump technology, and how custom pink shoes tend to get weird looks on the street.

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Visionary Cities and the Phantom City App

Article/Interview

Nothing Major

August 2013

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History—and city skylines—tend to be constructed by the winners, but that’s never the whole story. Alexander Eisenshmidt, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, discovered the truth of this maxim while researching unfinished Chicago building projects and collecting a dossier of grandiose proposals, eccentric dreams, and impossible ideas that form an alternate skyline, a city that “exists in our architectural consciousness.”

“Visionary Cities”, now on display at Chicago’s Expo 72 Gallery, fuses this fantastical landscape with the city of today. A 160-foot panorama showcases incomplete projects superimposed onto the current street grid, such as a recreated Sears Tower from Greg Lynn, a massive, 1,500-foot-high lakefront obelisk proposed for the Columbian Expedition and Adolf Loos’ alternate Tribune Tower. The companion Phantom City iPhone app, which focuses on the same lost projects, lets you pull up images of the buildings while touring the city.

Chicago’s not the only city with this handheld view of speculative proposals.CHENG+SNYDER designers Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder previously created theMuseum of the Phantom City app for New York in 2009, showcasing unrealized projects such as a Midtown dome dreamed up by Buckminster Fuller and an alternate World Trade Center site.

 

The outlandishness and provocation of these types of conceptual constructions helps push architecture forward, says Eisenshmidt, an important lesson for today.

“I’m more interested in releasing those visionary projects into the public ether to steer a kind of discussion about visionary thinking within architecture and urbanism,” said Eisenshmidt. “It’s also a critique of the city at its current state. It’s not that I want those buildings built, but you have relatively little vision now. Decision makers and high-stakes players are less fascinated about them. It’s very much a city that gets excited about planters on the street sidewalks, and as nice as it is, I think Chicago can aim much higher than it currently does. It’s about thinking back to a time when Chicago was a city that was doing it. Chicago is only what it is today because risk was taken.”

“Visionary Cities” can be found in the “City Works: Provocations for Chicago’s Urban Future” exhibit at Expo 72 in Chicago’s Loop through September 29. The Phantom City app, produced in collaboration with Cheng+Snyder, can be downloaded here, along with their app for New York architecture.

 

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