Photo: Herman Miller Eames Aluminum Group Lounge Chair 2011

Is Modern Design Relevant?
by Eames Demetrios

As originally published in Art Ltd. magazine, January 2012, reprinted with kind permission of the author

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair streaks through New York City each spring. Buyers, fans, designers, journalists, and even the public descend--literally, you'll agree, if you know the layout of the Javits Center--to see the latest in good design. Young internationals are showcased, the most cutting-edge products celebrated, and a few pieces even arrive still packed in Italian fish wraps, fresh from their unveiling in Milan. All with one goal--to unseat the old.

So, considering how of-the-moment the fair is perceived, a surprising thing happened in May 2011, when they announced the ICFF Editors awards: first prize in new outdoor seating went to the Eames Aluminum Group (Herman Miller, manufacturer)--for a chair designed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1958.

This is not the story of a scandal--the rules were scrupulously followed. This is, instead, about the real meaning of design, of what it takes for a design to stay in the moment, and why labels like Modernism may matter less than process. But first, let me close the loop on that chair.

The chair most of us know as the Aluminum Group was originally conceived as indoor-outdoor seating for Eero Saarinen's Irwin Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, but never really went in production as such. Instead, it became the office chair par excellence (I am sitting on mine as I write this). Then, a few years ago, Herman Miller--who makes authentic Eames furniture in the US, Asia and most of the world; Vitra-- who makes it in Europe and the Middle East; and we at the Eames Office began to look at the early meshes and finishes of the outdoor iteration and asked ourselves: do these fill a need today? The end result of those explorations was the re-editions we have today.

So how can a 53-year old design look so fresh? Is an Eames chair the triumph of Modernism?

Well, it is true that Charles and Ray Eames were often classified as modernists, and they certainly never eschewed that label. Before meeting Charles, Ray wrote "modern architecture, not a style, a way of life." For his part, Charles admired the thinking of Mies van der Rohe and he and Ray both had great sympathy with many of the goals of Modernism. And they insisted on not romanticizing the past and instead embracing the materiality of the present on many levels.

But they never really seized that label either. Style was not an acceptable core to a practice--not even a modern style of approach. Ray often said, "What works good is better than what looks good, because what looks good can change, but works good will still work." Charles was a little more brutal: "The extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem." In other words, if you always say, "less is more" no matter the situation, then you are not truly responding to the situation. After all, you may some day find yourself in a place where "more is more," but you will still answer the same way--with less.

In the great photographer Julius Schulman's collection, there is a pair of pictures he took of a Neutra House. The legendary architect had asked Shulman to photograph a living room after the family had moved in and wanted the room to be photographed as it should look--without all the family's stuff, but rather with the intended furniture and proper accoutrements. So Shulman took that picture and it does look beautiful. But Shulman also took another picture--of the way it was really used. I often think of that pair of pictures; I suspect Charles and Ray were always a good deal more interested in how the room was used. Indeed, Charles said, "We long ago decided to concern ourselves with the problem of how people do sit, as opposed to how they should sit."

And if one looks still closer, Charles and Ray never really had a form-follows-function ideology in the center of their practice. In another context, Charles spoke about Henry Dreyfuss' design of the telephone: "The ultimate performance of a building or product is a measure of the way it has functioned; how could we damn a work because it has served mankind too well? If the telephone on our desk is a pleasure to look at and if it feels good and if it smells good and if it tastes good, and when you put it down on the receiver, it sounds good, if it adds to the sort of enrichment of our life, isn't that the way in which it is functioning for us? Isn't it serving us better?"

In other words, what we often relegate to aesthetics can be part of the function of an object. This makes sense if one gives up on a limited definition of function and approaches it more broadly. Charles and Ray called this approach "The Guest/Host Relationship," and said that the role of the designer was essentially that of a good host, anticipating the needs of the guest. This puts the human being at the center of the design, not an ideology. And it makes every aspect of the design--longevity, price, aesthetics, material--in play in a manner that makes the word "function" as it is usually used seem inadequate.

This form of design has been going on for thousands of year. It is called vernacular design or folk design. And it happens very slowly--and unselfconsciously. In a community, iteration after iteration is made of a design object--a house, a pot, a chair. No one thinks of it preciously, though they value it very much; so much that they use it until it works no more. And then they make another, naturally--because why wouldn't you?--making it a better. Fixing the weak link, using an easier material to find locally (but one that is still worthy). And so on. So over time, it becomes better and better--new definitions of function are teased out by use.

In Charles and Ray's studio, the design process was also one of iteration. In a sense, they recreated that vernacular process. They kept the visionary and the pragmatic in constant balance. And they admired both the beauty and the practicality of such everyday objects.

The Eames House living room is filled with such humble but magnificent things. And thanks to the Getty's Pacific Standard Time initiative, we have a chance in the next few months to see that interplay clearly. The contents of the Eames House living room have been loaned to the LA County Museum of Art, where they are on display in a replica of the Eames Living Room space. Meanwhile, you can take a tour (interior or exterior--both by appointment only) of the Eames House structure and see the space without its full complement of objects.

Though the objects and space belong together, two things in particular become clear. That the collections are beautiful in their own right and are in no way limited by an austere modern taste. And that the Eames House structure itself, even without its objects, has a deep sensitivity to the relationship of the indoor and outdoor realms--something that was enhanced rather than created by its objects. These objects of myriad cultures--some ornate, some deeply simple--share something with the classic Eames furniture. They have a quality that Charles and Ray valued as a worthy goal of design--wayit-should-be-ness. In other words, that if something was really well designed then the idea of it having been designed at all would never come up. (One is reminded of Robert Irwin's definition, "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.")

How does one achieve way-it-should-be-ness? Not by fetishizing a limited definition of function, but focusing relentlessly on need. Perhaps a clue is at the JF Chen Gallery and the show "Collecting Eames." There, among the 450 pieces of Eames furniture collected from the perspective of production, you will see the chair Ice Cube is sitting on, in one of the iconic pictures from the PST Initiative. If you look at that chair, it is called the DAT-1 and it is from 1952. Then, as you walk across the gallery, you see another chair, also labeled DAT-1 and it is from 1958. And it looks, at first blush, very different.

But then you realize that the need the chair is addressing is the same. The fenders (each in separate pieces) over the wheels in 1952 have now been made one with the base in 1958. And the tilt mechanism is very different. BUT, the idea of this chair is the same. And that is one of the key distinctions of the Eames Design process. The core idea has continuity, but it is poked and teased at until its secrets are revealed by iteration after iteration.

So if we return to our award-winning 53-year old cutting-edge chair and view it in this context, it makes perfect sense that an object like this is still relevant. It was born as a pure need--Charles and Ray's friend Eero Saarinen designing the Irwin Miller house and lamenting the lack of good outdoor furniture. It was not a marketing opportunity; it was a fact. It went through the crucible of iteration and process, ending with a profile so simple and elegant it still inspires.

This iterative process was guided by Charles and Ray's deep understanding of making--of what it takes to physically make an object. In fact, you could not design this particular chair without pre-envisioning the task of each worker (and how the seat tension is created, for example). This commitment to process was so extreme that Charles and Ray left behind the original outdoor intent and focused on what the design had become. Released into the marketplace, Charles and Ray made it better and better. Improving tilt mechanisms (as they did with the DAT-1) and the like until it had its mature form. And then, still embedded in its design, was the potential to last and be a good host in the out-of-doors--reawakened with the development of new finishes to protect the metal and a new outdoor mesh to survive the heat and cold.

This is how you make contemporary designs 50 years before their time. Designs made this way will take a long time to lose their relevance. In that phrase of Ray's, "not a style, a way of life." Or as former staff member Bill Lacey put it, there was "no house style, just a legacy of problems well-solved."

Eames Demetrios is best known in the design world for his work as director of the Eames Office, spearheading the successful re-discovery of the Charles and Ray Eames design heritage by new generations. The mission of the Eames Office is communicating, preserving and extending the work of Charles and Ray Eames. He has also written a book about Charles and Ray Eames--"An Eames Primer," intended as a thematic biography of their life, work, process and philosophy.