Design Study No.4

A design study based on Eames House ( Case Study House No. 8 )

DESIGN: Serial Medium
PROJECT TYPE: Personal
MEDIUM: Vary
DIMENSION: /
DATE: Summer 2024

CATEGORY: Design Study
CODE: DS04

Eames House | Eames Foundation

Structures | Eames Foundation

In referring to the Eameses’ work, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of History blogged: “In all of their projects, color was a strategic tool; never did they apply hues indiscriminately. Rather, their brilliant palette spotlighted salient points of information that they wanted to convey, capturing both the eyes and minds of viewers.”

The Materials of the Eames House | Eames Foundation

Charles and Ray Eames set out to design and build the Eames House by utilizing materials in an “honest” manner. When looking at a structural element made of steel, the Eameses wanted that steel’s performance to be visible and recognized. If steel is holding up the entire structure, why cover it with wood to appear as if the wood is effortlessly bearing the load? That is architectural dishonesty in its highest form.

Glass
The placement of the different types of glass served a rigid purpose but was sometimes an additional aesthetic bonus.

Paint
Although painting a surface does perhaps defeat the “honest use of materials” policy of Charles and Ray, paint was necessary and vital to coat some surfaces of the home’s exterior for longevity.

In terms of aesthetics, which followed functionality for the Eameses, paint was the one area in which Charles and Ray felt the most leniency when it came to decisions. Charles, in the Arts & Architecture briefing, recalled, “Paint defines the surface in lines and relation to each other.” Ray, having studied abstract painting in New York City for the six years before meeting Charles, found the paint choices of the home to be of equal importance to its structural integrity.

Wall-tex
Wall-tex is the covering on all interior wall surfaces of the residence and studio that are not glass or Cemesto. The Eameses left the canvas unpainted. Charles and Ray noted, in various interviews, that the plain, white sections of wall acted as a visual resting point for your eyes as they traveled around the space.

Painting the Palette: How the Eames House got its Color | Eames Foundation (wpengine.com)

In the process of painting the house that became the duo’s home for the remainder of their lives (Charles’ for 29 years and Ray’s for 39 years), both Charles and Ray were intentional in finding a palette that harmonized the structure’s industrial materials with the surrounding meadowscape.

When one catches a glimpse at the facade, the vibrant cobalt hue above the entry door typically makes itself prominent first.

Charles and Ray made color a strategic tool for modernist living; the austere, factory-like nature of the steel framing was transformed into a warm frame for both viewing inward at their beloved collections and viewing outward at the undisturbed eucalyptus-adorned landscape.

Collections | Eames Foundation

The Eameses looked at life as being an act of design.

And as some might feel, the stuff that transmutes a structure into a home.

As Charles wrote in the 1945 issue of Arts & Architecture magazine: The living room is a “large unbroken area for pure enjoyment of space in which objects can be placed and taken away — driftwood, sculpture, mobiles, plants, constructions, etc.”

The Eames House: A Deep Dive into Case Study House 8 | ArchEyes

As Charles once said, “Just as a good host tries to anticipate the needs of his guest, so a good architect or a designer or a city planner tries to anticipate the needs of those who will live in or use the thing being designed.”

The Eames House is notable for its De Stijl influences, seen in the sliding walls and windows that allow for versatility and openness. It stands as a successful adaptation of European modernist principles within an American context.

Eames Storage Unit - Eames Office

It was Charles and Ray’s belief to always honor “the honest use of materials.” This allowed them to embrace designing and producing household furniture using industrial production techniques. As such, they strove to design their furniture in minimalist ways to keep the end cost as low as possible for the consumer. So, rather than disguise the off-the-shelf look of the storage unit’s components, they embraced its industrial roots.

Eames Shell Chair—Design Icon | Eames Institute

Twelve years passed between the initiation of the concept in 1940 and the production of the design in 1952—a remarkable period that also saw the Eameses realize some of their most enduring designs, including the plywood chairs and Case Study House. All throughout, they remained dedicated to their goal of creating a single-shell seat, driven by the notion that such a design could harness mass production capabilities (with fewer steps, fewer materials, and fewer connections) to deliver better value and service to the buyer.

That the Organic chairs never came to fruition offered Ray and Charles an invaluable lesson going forward: determining the technique and viability of manufacture was critical to the successful development of any design.

De Stijl Relatives

Neo-plasticism | Tate

From the Dutch ‘de nieuwe beelding’, neo-plasticism basically means new art (painting and sculpture are plastic arts). It is also applied to the work of the De Stijl circle of artists, at least up to Mondrian’s secession from the group in 1923.

In the first eleven issues of the journal De Stijl, Piet Mondrian published his long essay Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art in which among much else he wrote:

As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form. The new plastic idea cannot therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation – this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour.

Neo-plasticism was in fact an ideal art in which the basic elements of painting – colour, line form – were used only in their purest, most fundamental state: only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical lines.

Neo-Plasticism | MoMA

An artistic philosophy that called for the renunciation of naturalistic representation in favor of a stripped-down formal vocabulary principally consisting of straight lines, rectangular planes, and primary colors. First articulated by Piet Mondrian in the journal De Stijl (The Style), Neo-plasticism (the new plastic art) was a response to the devastation wreaked by World War I, offering a way to achieve a visual harmony in art that could provide a blueprint for restoring order and balance to everyday life.

De Stijl Movement Overview | TheArtStory

1923

Red and Blue Chair

Artist: Gerrit Rietveld

Originally designed in 1918 but not fully realized until 1923, when it incorporated the characteristic De Stijl scheme of primary colors, Red and Blue Chair is one of the canonical works of the movement. Rietveld envisioned a chair that played with and transformed the space around it, consisting of rectilinear volumes, planes, and lines that interact in unique ways, yet manage to avoid intersection. Every color, line, and plane is clearly defined, as if each comprised its own work that just happened to be used for a piece of furniture. The simple assembly Rietveld deployed was quite intentional as well; he built the chair out of standard lumber sizes available at the time, reflecting his goal of realizing a piece of furniture that could be mass-produced as opposed to hand-crafted. Emphasizing its manmade quality, Red and Blue Chair also notably avoids the use of natural form, which furniture designers tend to favor in order to emphasize the idea of physical comfort and convenience.

Painted wood - Auckland Museum, New Zealand

1924

Counter Composition V

Artist: Theo van Doesburg

First introduced in 1924, van Doesburg's Counter Compositions - his signature works - embody the artist's wish to move beyond the confines of De Stijl with his introduction of Elementarism. While van Doesburg continued to make use of horizontal and vertical lines, he now prioritized the diagonal line; he described Elementarism as "based on the neutralization of positive and negative directions by the diagonal and, as far as color is concerned, by the dissonant. Equilibrated relations are not an ultimate result." The titles of his Counter Compositions refer to the fact that the lines of the compositions are at a 45-degree angle to the sides of the picture rather than parallel to them, resulting in a newly energized relationship between the composition and format of the canvas. As in the present example, he repeatedly ventured beyond the three primary colors, including a triangle of grey in addition to the primary colors, white, and black. At the time he painted this composition, De Stijl was finding its own unique voice; paintings, furniture designs, and buildings produced by those associated with the movement communicated how lines and colors should interact, and how a work's appearance is just as essential as its function.

Oil on canvas - Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Beginnings of De Stijl

The De Stijl aesthetic and vision was formulated in large response to the unprecedented devastation of World War I, with the movement's members seeking a means of expressing a sense of order and harmony in the new society that was to emerge in the wake of the war.

De Stijl: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

adopted what they perceived to be a purer form of geometry, consisting of forms made up of straight lines and basic geometric shapes (largely rendered in the three primary colors); these motifs provided the fundamental elements of compositions that avoided symmetry and strove for a balanced relationship between surfaces and the distribution of colors.

In Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art, Mondrian explained: "As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form. The new plastic idea cannot, therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation."

Neo-Plasticism

Neo-Plasticism refers to the painting style and ideas developed by Piet Mondrian in 1917, promoted by De Stijl. Denoting the "new plastic art," or simply "new art," the term embodies Mondrian's vision of an ideal, abstract art form he felt was suited to the modern era.

Mondrian envisioned that the principles of Neo-Plasticism would be transplanted from the medium of painting to other art forms, including architecture and design, providing the basis of the transformation of the human environment sought by De Stijl artists. In Mondrian's words, a "pure plastic vision should build a new society, in the same way that in art it has built a new plasticism."

The concept of Neo-Plasticism was largely inspired by M. H. J. Schoenmaekers's treatise Beginselen der Beeldende Wiskunde (The Principles of Plastic Mathematics), which proposed that reality is composed of a series of opposing forces - among them the formal polarity of horizontal and vertical axes and the juxtaposition of primary colors.

Elementarism

While only horizontal and vertical lines were to be utilized in Neo-Plasticism, in 1925, van Doesburg developed Elementarism, which attempted to modify the dogmatic nature of the style by introducing the diagonal, a form that for him connoted dynamism - "a state of continuous development."

In "Painting and Sculpture: Elementarism (Fragment of a Manifesto)," published in De Stijl in 1927, he wrote: "If all our physical movements are already based upon Horizontal and Vertical, it is only an emphasis of our physical nature, of the natural structure and functions of organisms if the work of art strengthens - although in an 'artistic manner' - this natural duality in our consciousness."

in Mondrian's view, the Elementarist diagonal repudiated De Stijl's efforts to fully integrate all the elements of the painting by creating tension between the composition and the picture plane.

Insights

Eames在考虑color palette之前对于结构，空间使用，各种对于建筑的功能性的指标都做了设计，并且以aesthetic follow functionality的原则使建筑本身成为能经得住推敲的存在。

同理，此次study和后续设计也会在考虑功能性的前提下参照，以及创作与其环境和材料匹配的设计（美学&功能性）。例如，如果是一张桌子，考虑桌子的站立可替换性（拆掉一个桌腿，桌子仍然稳固，同时可以替换其他桌腿，etc），桌子的可拆卸性（桌子在某一个形态下必须可以通过一个US Standard的门），主要功能性（作业功能桌，咖啡桌，操作台等），可拓展性（面板可替换，支架可替换，层高可替换等）