Three Designers
Designers Paola Antonelli
Charles Eames
Achille Castiglioni
Philippe Starck
Charles Eames
Not only did CHARLES EAMES (1907-78) and his wife, RAY (1912-88) design some of the most important examples of 20th century furniture, they also applied their talents to devising ingenious children’s toys, puzzles, films, exhibitions and such iconic mid-20th century Los Angeles buildings as the Eames House and Entenza House in Pacific Palisades. The last thing the landlord expected when he rented a modest Richard Neutra-designed apartment on Strathmore Avenue in the Los Angeles suburb of Westwood to a newly married couple in 1941 was for the spare bedroom to be turned into a workshop. The combination of visionary design and ingenuity that had prompted Charles and Ray Eames prototype a mass-manufactured product in their spare room was to characterize their work over the next four d‑‑ecades. Together they not only designed some of the most influential and innovative furniture of the late 20th century, but through their films, teaching, and their life together in the house they designed in Pacific Palisades, they defined an organic, emotionally expressive approach to design and lifestyle. Both Charles and Ray were the youngest of two children in middle-class families and gifted students with a flair for art: otherwise their backgrounds were very different. Born in 1907, Charles Ormand Eames grew up in St Louis, Missouri where his father, a keen amateur photographer, worked in railway security. When Charles was eight, his father was injured in a robbery and died four years later. Charles helped to support the family with part-time jobs, but still excelled at school. His class yearbook described him as “a man with ideals, courage to stand up for them and ability to live up to them.”
After high school, he won an architecture scholarship to Washington University in St Louis where he met a fellow student, Catherine Woermann, whom he married in 1929. Her father paid for them to honeymooon in Europe where they saw the work of Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Back in St Louis, Charles opened an architectural office which won commissions for houses only to fold in the depression. He sought the advice of the architect Eliel Saarinen who offered him a fellowship to study architecture and design at Cranbrook Academy. There, Charles deepened his friendship with Eliel and his son Eero - with whom he
won the 1940 Museum of Modern Art Organic Furniture Competition - and found new collaborators notably Harry Bertoia and, later, Ray Kaiser. Born in Sacramento, California in 1912 as Bernice Alexandra Kaiser, Ray came from a close, creative family. Ray enrolled at the Art Students League and studied painting under Hans Hoffman. When her mother died in 1940, Ray moved to Cranbrook, where she met and fell in love with Charles. He divorced Catherine in May, 1941 and married Ray in Chicago a month later. They set off for a long honeymoon drive to their new home in Los Angeles. On the journey, they picked up a tumbleweed from the road which still hangs from the ceiling of the Eames House today.
In LA, Charles found work at MGM and Ray created covers for California Art & Architecture magazine. At night, they conducted plywood experiments in their apartment. With their experiments, they produced sculpture, chairs, screens, tables and even toy animals in plywood. Herman Miller, the US furniture group, was persuaded to put some of these pieces into production. All the Eames’ plywood combined an elegant organic aesthetic with a love of materials and technical ingenuity. These qualities were also apparent in the showroom they designed for Herman Miller in 1949 and the Case Study Houses, a low cost housing project sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine which included the Eames House, a steel structure with sliding walls and windows. Charles and Ray sustained this spirit in the way they dressed: he in open-necked shirts and loose pants, she in a bohemian version of a conventionally feminine wardrobe of short-sleeved blouses and full skirts. The film director Billy Wilder and his wife Audrey, who befriended the Eames after commissioning a sadly unbuilt house from them, remarked that Ray’s idea of formal dress was to put on a clean blouse and his idea of black tie was literally to wear a black tie. Ray’s self-consciously feminine guise under scored the role she adopted within their relationship of Charles’ younger, adoring protege and underplaying her contribution to their work, which contrasts with the picture of painted by Charles himself of a gifted, energetic woman. After plywood, the Eames focused on equally zealous experiments with other materials by creating furniture in fiberglass, plastic, aluminum. The Lounge became an icon of the 1960s and 1970s but Charles always expressed a preference for his earlier, less expensive plywood designs.
Their collaboration with Herman Miller continued and extended to Vitra, its European partner. The Eames also began a long-lasting relationship with IBM for which they made films and designed exhibitions. Like all important designers, the Eames were blessed with good timing. There were no shortage of empathetic corporate partners in the expanding US post-war economy at a time of rapid advances in materials and production processes and their democratic view of design struck a chord in an era of growing affluence. Throughout the 1950s, their furniture was exhibited in the Good Design shows with which MoMA, New York sought to raise the public’s awareness of design. The Eames’ furniture, especially elegant office chairs such as the Lounge and Aluminium Series, now seem synonymous with mid-20th century Corporate America, but Charles and Ray equally influential at making respectable the then-neglected folkcrafts not only in the US but in
India, for which they produced the 1950s Eames Report on raising standards of design training. These concerns dominated their later work in the 1970s when, able to live comfortably on their Herman Miller and Vitra royalties, they concentrated their creative energy on propagating their ideas in exhibitions, books and films. Work remained the centre of their lives - with working days running from 9am to 10pm and a full-time cook on hand so they needn’t leave the studio to eat until Charles’ death in 1978. Ray then worked hard to complete any unfinished projects but, having done so, did not seek new ones. She devoted the rest of her life to communicating their ideas through talks and writing. Ray Eames died of cancer on 21 August 1988, ten years to the day after Charles.
It is not easy to do something good, but it it extremely difficult to do something bad. - Charles Eames
Achille Castiglioni
One of the most important industrial designers of the 20th century, ACHILLE CASTIGLIONI (1918-2002) produced more than 150 products during his career and forged enduring relationships with Italian manufacturers such as Flos in lighting, Zanotta in furniture and Alessi in home products. When Paola Antonelli, design curator of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was an architecture student at Milan Polytechnic in the 1980s, one of the most popular tutors was Achille Castiglioni. For his lectures on industrial design, he would arrive with what Antonelli described as: “a large Mary Poppins-like black bag from which he would extract and line up on the table that day’s chosen pieces from his stupendous collection of found objects: toys made from beer cans that he had bought in Teheran, odd eyeglasses…. wooden stools from Aspen, Colorado… small suction cups strong enough to lift a table. These were the most effective tools of design instruction.” Brandishing each object in turn Castiglioni would show his students how they worked. Antonelli recalled how at one lecture he jumped up on a table to demonstrate the ingenuity of a small wooden milking stool by miming the milking of an invisible cow. Thus he would show how an apparently humble object could constitute intelligent, inspiring design if it fulfilled its function with humour and verve by using the resources available to its designer or maker. Castiglioni applied those criteria to his own work and urged his students to do the same. ”Start from scratch,” he told them. “Stick to common sense. Know your goals and means.” His contention was that to design a new product or to improve an existing one, the desig-
ner had a responsibility first to analyse whether it was necessary to do so and then to investigate what sort of “means”, or resources such as technologies and materials, were available to develop and produce it. The “Principal Design Component”, like the early analytical phase, was intended to ensure that the designer invested his or her energy in refining their approach to design, rather than a style. “What you need is a constant and consistent way of designing,” he opined. Achille Castiglioni was born in Milan in 1918 and studied architecture there at the Polytechnic from which he graduated in 1944. As there was so little work for young Italian architects immediately after World War II, Castiglioni joined his elder brothers – Livio (1911-1979) and Pier Giacomo (1913-1968) – in the industrial design studio they had established on Piazza Castello in Milan
with the architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni. Even before graduating, he had worked with them on commercial projects such as the 1938 Caccia set of cutlery, still used in Italian homes today, and the strikingly light, svelte 1939 five valve radio receiver they developed for Phonola. Throughout Castiglioni’s career he formed close and enduring relationships with a small group of carefully selected manufacturers with which he felt empathetic. Younger industrial designers, notably Jasper Morrison, have adopted the same policy with similar success. By working together for so long, they established a level of mutual trust thereby ensuring that both sides felt confident enough to experiment and take risks which often proved fruitful. Among the most productive of these relationships was Castiglioni’s work with Flos, the Italian lighting
manufacturer. He and Pier Giacomo (Livio had left the studio in 1952 to work independently) developed dozens of extraordinarily inventive lights for Flos. The 1962 Arco floorlamp was modeled on a streetlight to project the light source eight feet from its heavy marble base and the Toio floorlamp of the same year was inspired by a car reflector. Castiglioni also enjoyed the chance to develop gentler forms of reinvention by subtly redefining and improving familiar objects. One example was the 1979 Cumano circular folding table he designed for Zanotta based on café terrace tables. Another was the 1969 Leonardo desk standing on a pair of wooden trestles also manufactured by Zanotta and a third the pretty oval glass 1992 Brera hanging lamp developed for Flos. As well as pursuing his own career as a product designer, Castiglioni also enjoyed collaborative projects with fellow designers. He taught for many years – first at Turin Polytechnic then Milan – and played a central role in
the design community by supporting many of the networks that would enable his and future generations of Italian designers to benefit from their collective strength. As early as 1947, only three years after joining his brothers in their Piazza Castello studio, Castiglioni joined the organizing committee of the Milan Triennial. He also helped to establish the prestigious Compasso d’Oro design awards (which his products won in 1955, 1960, 1962, 1964, 1967, 1979, 1984 and 1989) as well as the Italian ADI or Association of Industrial Design. For all his honors and achievements, Castiglioni remained as curious, challenging and inventive as ever until his death in 2002. Superbly resolved as his work was in terms of its formal qualities, he never lost his wit or his delight in paradox. “There has to be irony both in design and in the objects,” he said. “I see around me a professional disease of taking everything too seriously. One of my secrets is to joke all the time.”
If you are not curious, forget it. - Achille Castiglioni
Philippe Stark
STARCK recalls spending his childhood underneath his father’s drawing boards; hours spent sawing, cutting, gluing, sanding, dismantling bikes, motor cycles and other objects. Endless hours, a whole lifetime spent taking apart and putting back together whatever comes to hand, remaking the world around him. Several years and several prototypes later, the Italians have made him responsible for their furniture, President Mitterand asked him to change life at the Elysées Palace, the Café Costes has become Le Café, he has turned the Royalton and Paramount in New York into the new classics of the hotel world and scattered Japan with architectural tours de force that have made him the leading exponent of expressionist architecture. His respect for the environment and for humankind has also been recognized in France, where he was commissioned to design the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in
Paris, the control tower at Bordeaux airport, and a waste recycling plant in Paris metropolitan area. Abroad, he continues to shake up both the traditions and cultures of the major cities around the world, with the decoration of the Peninsula Hotel restaurant in Hong Kong, the Teatron in Mexico, the Hotel Delano in Miami, the Mondrian in Los Angeles, the Asia de Cuba restaurant in New York, and a whole clutch of projects under way in London and elsewhere. His gift is to turn the object of his commission instantly into a place of charm, pleasure and encounters. An honest and enthusiastic citizen of today’s world, he considers it his duty to share with us his subversive vision of a better world which is his alone and yet which fits up like a glove. He is tireless in changing the realities of our daily life, sublimating our roots and the deepest wellsprings of our being into his changes. He captures
the essential spirit of the sea for Béneteau, turns the toothbrush into a noble object, squeezes lemons but the “ wrong “ way, and even makes our TV sets more fun to be with when he brings his “ emotional style “ into Thomson’s electronic world. He also takes time out to change our pasta, our ash-trays, lamps, toothbrushes, door handles, cutlery, candlesticks, kettles, knives, vases, clocks, scooters, motorcycles, desks, beds, taps, baths, toilets … in short, our whole life. A life that he finds increasingly fascinating, which has brought him now closer to the human body with clothes, underwear, shoes, glasses, watches, food, toiletries et al., still determined that his designs shall, as ever, respect the nature and the future of mankind. The world’s museums are unerring. Paris, New York, Munich, London, Chicago, Kyoto, Barcelona - all exhibit his work as that of a master. Prizes and awards are showered on him: designer of the year, Grand Prix for Industrial Design, the Oscar for Design, Officier des Arts et des Lettres, and many more. Always and everywhere, he seems to understand better than any other our dreams, our desires, our needs, and our responsibility to the future, as well the overriding need to respect his fellow citizens by making his work a political and a civic act. Crazy, warm yet terribly lucid, he draws without respite, out of necessity, driven by a sense of urgency, for himself and for others. He touches us through his work, which is fine and intelligent indeed, but most of all touches us because he puts his heart into that work, creating objects that are good even before they are beautiful.
I have this mental sickness called creativity. - Philippe Starck
Ana G. Hurtado Ernesto Aparicio Book Design Spring 2016