Eames in Name and in Spirit

Imagine inheriting a legacy that helped define the look of the 20th century. Imagine owning a house known as one of the great masterpieces of Modernist architecture. Imagine being asked to keep alive the spirit of invention that engendered all of this.

This is the responsibility that befell Lucia Eames and her offspring on Aug. 21, 1988, the day her stepmother, Ray Eames, died, 10 years to the day after the death of Lucia’s father--Ray’s design partner and husband--Charles Eames.

Famous for their classically simple furniture--the familiar sling seating in airports; the once ubiquitous plastic, wire and bentwood chairs; the comfy, high-end, leather-and-wood lounge and ottoman--the Eameses bequeathed to their daughter innumerable valuable objects they had designed, along with a vast array of prototypes. They also left her a still-thriving relationship with manufacturers worldwide.

But that’s not all there was. Their archive included a million photographs and dozens of films--educational and documentary--displaying the Eameses’ experimental sensibility. And perhaps most important--and most vulnerable--was their Pacific Palisades house, which had been built for almost nothing in 1949 as part of Art & Architecture magazine’s Case Study experiment in developing new kinds of housing. Always a magnet for architectural enthusiasts, the two-story, two-building residence and studio were filled with a mix of high- and low-end treasures amassed by a pair of inveterate collectors.

Lucia Eames inherited the intellectual rights to everything produced by the Eames Office, which has remained in operation since it was established in the early 1940s. And as she took the helm of the family holdings, Lucia Eames and her five children agreed that they should maintain and preserve not only what existed materially, but also the prodigiously adventurous attitude of Charles and Ray.

“I grew up thinking this is natural,” Eames says of the philosophy of “rigor and joy” she inherited from her parents. “This is the way one lives one’s life. A bird isn’t conscious of the currents in air. It’s only later that one realizes that those uplifting currents are missing in so many people’s lives. And that’s part of our mission, to make it available so other people can embrace it.”

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Nearly 12 years after Ray’s death, Lucia Eames, 69, and her fourth child, Eames Demetrios, 38, now head up a lively new incarnation of the Eames Office, with the son acting as day-to-day director and the mother as a sort of chairman of the board.

In a conversation at the famous house, which now serves as an L.A. pied-a-terre for the Bay Area-based Eames and daily workplace for Demetrios and the current staff, the pair return repeatedly to their mission of “communicating, preserving and extending the work of Charles and Ray Eames.”

“We are a family business, we’re not a [nonprofit] foundation,” Demetrios says in his characteristic matter-of-fact manner. “We decided that we preferred the entrepreneurial model, because we felt that it gave us the flexibility of control to do all the interesting things that we felt we could do.

“I think that it energizes the whole operation to have that be part of the equation. And if we want to take care of this house, we have to go out and earn it.”

The business is as varied as ever: The Eames Office works with manufacturers--Vitra in Europe and Herman Miller everywhere else--to keep its vintage furniture designs in production. It maintains the landmark house both for family use and for its historical significance (it can be seen, for free, by appointment). It operates an active Web site (https://www.eamesoffice.com) and the recently opened Eames Office Gallery & Store on Main Street in Santa Monica, which presents exhibitions and sells new and familiar Eames products.

Additionally, the family has donated more than a million objects from Ray and Charles Eames’ holdings to museums--a large portion to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Vitra Museum in Basel, Switzerland. All the Eames films are being transferred to video for commercial sale, and a number of educational exhibitions organized by the office are currently either circulating or in the works.

Income comes from royalties on the furniture still in production, as well as new products, such as fabrics based on Ray’s textile designs, and reissues of designs such as the playful, build-it-yourself House of Cards. The revenue--Demetrios won’t reveal how much--supports additional new enterprises as well as the historical preservation side of the operation.

“Most people come to the Eames work through the door of the furniture. And that’s cool, it’s wonderful furniture,” Demetrios says. “But as important as any one object is the process, the way they looked at the world, their sensibility, and above all their design approach and philosophy. And that’s what we really felt we both had an obligation to share and wanted to share. It would also become the beginning of brand-new enterprises.”

Probably the most ambitious project to date is a CD-ROM designed and developed by Demetrios that extends the vision of “Powers of Ten,” the 1968 Eames film that uses a couple picnicking as the starting point for an exploration of space--both enormous and minute. The CD-ROM expands the film, exploring history, science, culture and personalities. Demetrios began the project in 1993 in collaboration with a Japanese corporation and spent four years working with a small staff to develop it. The disc contains the original film alongside the new material, and it probably best represents how the office aims to use the Ray and Charles Eames’ work as a springboard to new media.

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The value of the vintage Eames designs has waxed and waned over the years according to the vagaries of the market, but critical interest in the work has always been strong, and the Eames bibliography is enormous. The latest surge in everything Eames is getting a push from “The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention,” an exhibition that has been circulating internationally since 1997 and is currently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show’s arrival here is a homecoming of sorts, since the Eames Office has always been located in Los Angeles, for most of its history at 901 Washington Blvd., Venice.

For Eames Demetrios, in particular, the show represents the mix of business, family obligation and creative output that has come to characterize his life in recent years. As head of the Eames Office, he clearly is interested in maximizing opportunities for the business; as a family member, he has become a spokesman for his grandparents’ history; as a filmmaker, he oversaw all of the media elements for the exhibition. Lucia Eames, a designer of functional art objects in her own right, also played more than a ceremonial role in the show, lending crucial work by her parents from her personal collection.

Always enthusiastic and outgoing, Demetrios seems almost to overflow with information about his grandparents as he walks a visitor through the exhibition at LACMA. Speaking in layers of anecdotes and asides, his approach mixes a kind of academic interest in the topic, with an almost boyish personal pride.

“I believe that they thought that the ultimate luxury was to be able to work on things that they believed in,” he says, speaking in particular of the films. “There was no division between work and play for them.”

In all of their business dealings, with corporate sponsors for the films such as IBM or the furniture manufacturers, the Eameses maintained artistic independence, often by financing much of the development themselves, Demetrios explained. “They were very clear that by always being the Eames Office, they were working for themselves. There are costs to that, and not just economic ones. But they preferred to have the control.”

As he walks through the show, he points proudly to the slide presentation “Glimpses of the U.S.A.” as a model for the kind of multimedia extravaganzas that have become commonplace today. Created by the Eames Office in 1959, it was part of the first cultural exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union since the Russian Revolution. Thousands of photographs were assembled for the multiscreen display--in addition to archival images, every friend, colleague and relative was enlisted to take pictures for the effort. Among them was the young Lucia, who shot photos from a helicopter. The Soviets were stunned by the imagery, much of which still seems fresh today.

Famously, and typical of the Eameses, despite its propagandistic intentions, this display was created without oversight from the U.S. government sponsors, who only saw the show as it was being installed.

Demetrios’ involvement with the media side of the Eameses’ work began with the at-home film festivals his grandparents staged on holiday visits. He later developed his own documentaries, most of them before he took on the Eames imprimatur.

Demetrios studied biology and filmmaking at Harvard, but, he admits laughingly, he “was thrown out of both. They said my thesis stood outside the river of life.” He became more involved with the Eames legacy after Ray’s death, when he made a film documenting the dissembling of the original Venice office.

“When I did the 901 film, I felt like I was able to share my feelings about the place. Then I started doing oral histories with people. The turning point for me was the ‘Powers of Ten’ CD-ROM project. I found myself increasingly intrigued by the work, but I put in a lot of things that were my expressions.”

“It’s really what made it possible for me to explore the Eameses’ world on my own terms, to run the Eames Office on my own terms. What people like about that disc is mine, what people don’t like about that disc is mine. And that’s important.”

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It is an unusual situation. Many now-famous designers who worked for the Eameses and were defined by the office have gone on to pursue their own careers, while the much younger Demetrios, who was only 15 when Charles died and the height of the office’s activity ended, now carries the professional banner.

There are those who have criticized the family for continuing to use the name, though only in off-the-record comments, saying that some of the new projects are not true to the spirit of the original office. To such remarks, Demetrios replies: “My feeling is, we’re really lucky to be responsible for a legacy that people care that much about.”

Eames points out that some devotees have criticized them for making T-shirts bearing images of Eames chairs to sell in conjunction with the current retrospective exhibition.

“There’s the question,” she admits, “is that appropriate? To me, it seemed very appropriate as the show was going around.”

Demetrios says they try to balance larger projects with small ones, while attempting to keep perspective on the integrity of each endeavor. He points as an example to a series of five textile patterns based on designs by the Eameses that the office has just begun to produce for the interior design market in partnership with New York-based Maharam Design Studio.

“Charles and Ray did a number of textile designs, a couple of which were mass-produced in their lifetimes. They weren’t really crazy about how they turned out in terms of printing, so it was not something that they pursued. But the designs are lovely.”

The first step into fabrics were ties and scarves with Eames designs, a joint venture with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Approached by Maharam to go further, they took some of Ray’s original designs and created new palettes, developing the colors based on the objects that decorate the Eameses’ residence.

“There’s no formula,” Lucia Eames says of such experiments, “we just have to make these kinds of choices every day.”

“We have never seen what we’re doing as that they laid out some rules, and we’re going to follow them because they aren’t here to do it,” Demetrios says. “They didn’t really have the rules in that sense, and we wouldn’t want to do that. It wouldn’t be appealing.”

“I’m often asked, ‘Are you trying to do what they would have done?’ Speaking for myself, I am not. I have no desire to, and it’s not a matter of whether it would be as good as, or not as good as, it’s just an area that’s desirable to enter. I do hope that I do things well. And I try really hard to do things well. And perhaps they would respect my line of reasoning. But I have to trust my instinct, working with the Eames Office to achieve these goals. And it’s up to other people to decide what they want. I think that so far at least, we’ve come out with a great mix of things.”

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Both Eames and Demetrios laugh when asked whether they live surrounded by Eames furniture in their lives outside the Pacific Palisades residence. They admit that they do to a large extent, and that they’ve even been known to pick up items at garage sales, just like any other collector.

“I will see things at auction that I would love to have,” Eames says, “and I have collected things, and Charles and Ray would give things, but I never wanted to mention anything to them, because then they would just give it to me. I didn’t want to push that.”

Demetrios insists that his connection to the furniture comes not just from his personal interest, or even his professional concerns. Be it through choice or family responsibility, he recognizes that at least with the furniture he has become the keeper of a flame that has a life of its own.

“People sometimes ask, ‘Why has [the furniture] endured?’ ” Demetrios adds. “The bottom line is, it’s comfortable.” *

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“The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention” continues at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Sept. 10. (323) 857-6000.

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Information about the Eames Office and the Eames House can be obtained through the Eames Office Gallery & Store, 2665 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5991 or https://www.eamesoffice.com.