Regionalism and globality

Revisiting the multitude of dimensions that constitute “The World of Charles and Ray Eames”, the exhibition curated by Catherine Ince at the Barbican Art Gallery in London allows the work of the two American designers to be located between two categories that, making use of terms now both well-used and abused, one could label regionalism and globality.  

Regionalism in the sense of the transversal dimension of the Eames’s work, a constant diachronic brilliantly summed up by Reyner Banham in 1971 as "The Style that Nearly...". It is the construction of a way of life, a representation of man in space that appears original and charged with “Californiality” and was constructed in the middle of the last century through the contribution of the arts in the widest sense – architecture, music, product design, figurative arts. California became the reference for a generation, and artistic practices elevated it to a mythical status, to promised land.

Globality, in the work of Charles and Ray, instead appears as the recording of an historic process that develops over time. The work of the Eameses captures the making of a global world through stages that formed the prelude to today. It began with design at the service of war practices: in 1942-43 the Eameses tested the possibilities offered by plywood, making prototypes for gliders for the US air force and producing thousands of items of rescue equipment for the Navy. These initial experiments were the prelude to the design of an extensive series of chairs – first in metal and plywood and then in fibreglass – that went on to leave an indelible mark on the domestic landscape of design. Objects awaiting a change in scale, that came punctually in 1949 with the design and rapid building of their own house in front of the ocean at Pacific Palisades.

The next phase of Charles and Ray’s work was defined around addressing the ideological division of the world into two blocks, captured perfectly in its most total rhetoric in the film Glimpses of the USA, a collage of several thousand photographs perfectly orchestrated by Charles and Ray as propaganda of the American spirit and screened at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959. A bombardment of images through which one arrives, finally, to the emergence of the dictatorship of the big corporations of information on a global scale, that promises new order inside a growing redundancy of information.

In a way, a parabola is drawn that transforms and elevates the search for a fusion between arts and crafts of early modernism into a total synthesis of science and art, finding in the Eameses film production the most effective representation. Powers of Ten, a film that was shown extensively in American schools, today seems like an impressive forerunner to the multi-scale experience of reality provided by Google Earth. The film Think, presented in the IBM pavilion during the World Fair in New York in 1964, perfected the attempt to capture a world on the brink of overdosing on information, promoting the redeeming capacities of the computer.

The Eames show in Britain is not so much just a re-run fifteen years on from the last exhibition. Rather, it is a possibility to reconsider the attention with which British architectural culture of the late twentieth century has observed, commented, and made its own, the work of the two American designers.

In 1966, Peter Smithson summed up the way in which the Eameses, at the end of the 1940s, had stamped for ever a new direction onto the culture of design: “a few chairs and a house”. A few years later, at the end of his eulogy to the urban ecologies of Los Angeles, Reyner Banham took the reader right into that house, built in just under a year amid the eucalyptus trees of Pacific Palisades as part of the Case Study Houses programme, launched by the Californian magazine Arts and Architecture in 1945.

It is precisely in the personal diaspora of the British critic – and the design culture that he brings with him – from the UK to the west coast of the US, that consumed the encounter between two strongly contrasting design cultures. A contrast made even more explicit by Banham via the officialisation of two “styles” one of which – the new brutalism – was fully realised while the other remained in a potential state. “The Style that Nearly...”

On the one hand there was Britain trying to invent a new life post modern-movement by “the rediscovery of the street” and the painful coexistence with the dictatorship of the automobile. A life that was increasingly built from exposed concrete and of which the Barbican, with its “streets in the air” – rhetorical promise of a new “human” dimension for the city – remains the most impressive legacy.

In contrast to a world of concrete, cast to heal the wounds of war in central London, Los Angeles promised the possibility of another way of life, imprinted in an urban form that took to the extreme the surpassing, and therefore reinvention, of the idea of a human dimension for the metropolis.

The key aspect became the total designability of this lifestyle - from the object to the subject. Its image was fixed in the picture of Charles and Ray trapped in the metal structure of their chairs but even more so in those that show them in their home, a refuge at the exit of an Los Angeles highway, compensation for a lost urbanity sought in the overdose of design that confuses the authors among their products. Products today superimposed on the streets in the air of the Barbican to renew, in the words of Alison Smithson, “a message of hope from another planet.”

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until 14 February 2016
The World of Charles and Ray Eames
Barbican Art Gallery
Silk St, London