A “terrible, enjoyable bloody business”: the influential films of Charles and Ray Eames

2015-10-16T18:40:00-04:00

As a new exhibition at the Barbican in London shows, by the mid 1950s [Charles and Ray Eames] were producing films and multimedia presentations that are as much part of their formal and intellectual legacy as their furniture or the glass-walled Eames house itself. [...] the Eameses never conceived of the hundred or so films they made as movies per se, or even as experimental films. “They’re just attempts to get across an idea,” Charles claimed

Watch a select few of the Eames' "hundred or so" films below:

"House" (1955):

"Tops" (1969):

"Powers of 10" (1977):

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Andrés Jaque's "Superpowers of Ten" performance

2015-10-12T18:45:00-04:00

A sausage as tall as you are. A skin cell the size of a dinner plate. The universe, in a glittery fan. These are a few of the props used by Andrés Jaque, founding architect of the Office for Political Innovation, in his "Superpowers of Ten" performance – a play staged on the ground floor of the Chicago Athletic Association during the opening weekend of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Inspired by the Eames’ 1977 “Powers of Ten” film (the same year the Biennial’s namesake conference was held), the under-an-hour performance investigates the power of design to scale up, or down, into historic social and cultural sea changes.

Initially developed for the Lisbon Architecture Triennial in 2013, “Superpowers” is staged like a super-polemical elementary school play: a narrator guides actors, dressed in cartoonish cardboard or papier-mâché costumes, through stories of 20th century design history. The opening act plays direct homage to the Eames’ film, recreating the zooming in and out on the...

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A “terrible, enjoyable bloody business”: the influential films of Charles and Ray Eames

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Andrés Jaque's "Superpowers of Ten" performance