Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 103

ST. PETERSBURG TIMES SUNDAY, AUGUST 21. 1977 3F From obscure imagination comes the essence of knowledge By SARAH BOOTH CONROY Whtogion Pot WASHINGTON Charlet Eamet it deaiener of th molded plywood "potato chip" chair, the ubiquitous molded plastic chair and the $2,000 leather-and-plywood lounge chair; inventor, professor of "found education," movie maker, frontman, photographer, exhibits designer, architect, lecturer, philosopher, poet, husband, myth. Ray Eames is co-designer and inventor of the chairs and their methodology, exhibits designer, painter, sculptor, shop foreman, office manager, mover, shaker, joint venturer, equal partner, soother of ruffled feathers, wife. The thoughts of Charles Eames are deep and lonely.

It is as if he thought in a different language from yours and mine. He could have invented the saying, "If you don't know. I can't tell you." Ml When you talk with him, there is an overpowering desire for a blueprint to show you the right button to push to make him speak. 'Our powerful information carriers are short on substantial, nourishing content; and treasures of FOR ALL OF his 70 years, Eames seems to have sought a way of bringing WaihtngTon Poll Though only the Eameses know for sure, one suspects that Charles, and likely Ray, thinks not in words but in pictographs. short film whose real title is long: A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing With the Power of Ten and the Relative Sin of Thing! in the Universe.

It begins with a closeup of a man asleep in a park and zooms to the outer edge of space, still using the man as the nucleus with a digital clock ticking off "10 to the umpteenth," and then zooms back to the nucleus of a carbon atom inside him. (The Eameses are big on numbers ticking away on the screen.) THE FILM, originally made for the Commission on College Physics, is being reshot in Chicago. It is shown every day at the Smithsonian Museum of Air and Space in Washington. It is not that Charles Eames is not able to use words one of his assistants, a writer, passionately protests that he taught her more about the precise use of the English language than she ever knew. But Eames spplies to words the same spare-lined dictira that he does to design.

It is rather as if he designed his conversation in the International or Cranbrook style of "less is more." His interviews have that much in common with Alexander Calder, another famous person who communicated through his art, not through his conversation. It is an oft-told story that when the Eameses designed and made the famous lounge chair and ottoman, a sort of modernized barber's chair, as a gift to movie director Billy Wilder (who had given them a rare early modern chair), at the moment of presentation Eames said simply: "Take chair." And to meandering conversation he has said, "The question?" The country's curiosity about the Eameses is immense, because today Eames has become one of those larger-than-life cult figures about whom mythology develops. At least every two years, it seems, some major museum or someone in the media says, "Say, I've got a great idea, let's do a piece on Eames. IN 1973, there was the New York Museum of Modern Art's "Furniture by Charles Eames." In 1975, there was the Walke Art Center show in Minneapolis, "Nelson-Eames-Girad-Propst: The Design Process at Herman Mil-, ler" and the PBS-TV special, An Eamet Celebration: Several Worlds of Charles and Ray Eames. "Connections: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames" has just closed at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The careful reader will note the difference between 1973 and 1977: Before, most credit went to Charles, with Ray as a footnote. But times change and, as Hap Johnson, a longtime employee, said the other day: "I suppose a lot of us, myself included, realized that we hadn't been giving her credit She isn't doing any more than she's always done she's always been the partner, here ever day. But she's never been one to demand credit. He hasn't minimized what she does; he always credits her. It's just that there was a habit of overlooking her, like a lot of women.

She has always put herself down. He was always the one on the committees and giving the speeches." Ray Eames herself, in the interview, said, "It isn't the same when I talk. Charles has a way of putting things which people pay attention to." Ralph Caplan, an old friend, who wrote the "Connections" catalog, explained: "They are husband and wife and they are full collaborators This in itself is hardly remarkable: Design is rarely a solitary activity, and husband and wife teams are not uncommon. But the collaborative nature of the Eames work is easily obscured by the enormous public recognition of Charles as an individual designer and thinker. While he and Ray have justly shared many honors, many others have justly come to him alone.

He is the work I left back in California, piles of it, and the speech I have to write for tonight, and I just can't sort out an answer." Actually, Charles and Ray Eames are as active as ever in their design firm, with a total gross estimated at roughly a year collected and spent on the Robin Hood theory: The business clients pay for the work the Eameses want to do for themselves. CURRENTLY, THEIR major commissions are the exhibit center for IBM's new building in New York; films for Poloraid; variations on the chairs for Herman Miller. In between are their pet projects, usually films, including the revision of The Powers of Ten. According to Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley, the Eameses have been acting as consultants on proposed Public Broadcasting System series on the Smithsonian.

In recent years, the office has changed its emphasis from products to concepts, especially educational materials produced for business, teaching institutions and "the category of institutions which are not committed to teaching, but whose stock in trade is a great amount of cogent information and whose customers are the public at large." For these, Eames believes in what he calls "found one that is come upon, not prescribed. When he tries to explain it in more detail, Eames trails off, on his way again to those far-flown reaches of the imagination where few can follow except of course Ray, who may well be one and the same as he. the spokesman for the two, the public figure, and that fact dictates the use of masculine singular pronouns at times. Ray Eames, however, plays a personal and essential role in every design decision. They design together, and with their staff." WHEN YOU ASK them who does what and when, they have no answer, though Ray Eames admits that a friend once said, "I put things in and Charles takes them out." Other people say she's also good at stripping down nonessentials.

They seem as unable to explain how they work as other people are unable to explain how they breathe. And you gather they are a little afraid to think about it too much, lest they be unable to do it anymore like the man who stayed awake wondering if he slept with his beard in or out of the covers. For a while, they produced the Eames chair themselves in their own workshop. In 1946 George Nelson talked the Herman Miller Co. into hiring them, and producing and marketing their furniture.

Later came: the 1956 lounge chair, the 1958 aluminum furniture, the 1960 Time-Life lobby chairs and the furniture for La Fonda in New York, the 1962 tandem seating for Dulles and O'Hare airports, and upholstery and other variations on the chairs. A question that struck him speechless was: "What projects are you currently working on?" His mind that day was even more than ordinarily distant because of the pressure of the speech to be given that night. He is a man that gives all his attention to the task at hand. Finally, he said, "I'm sorry, but when you say I think immediately of all knowledge back from that knowledge, on every land of the far future where his thoughts dwell. Only level, are locked up in Ray Eames, who married forms where only a him in 1941, seems to be minority will ever able to reach him in that distant place, and watching coma UDOn them' or the two, you gather that recognize them as their communications is not ave.

with words. Though only the Eames- Charles Eames es- really know, you might suspect that he, and likely she, thinks not in words but in pictographs. They use a camera the way Thomas Jefferson (a hero of theirs) used a pen, or perhaps the way Socrates used the tongue. Some people, when you ask them a question, tell you a story. The Eames-es show you a picture.

Clients who ask for a proposal receive a movie. After the Eameses shake hands with you, they take your picture. Somehow, it seems as if they use a camera as a pair of magic eyeglasses to bring the world into focus. Their archives contain an uncountable number of photographs of everything from toy boats to computers. Their work and their pleasure are meticulously recorded on film.

Eames started taking pictures as a boy after his father died, leaving him a cache of equipment He's fond of saying that it was years before he realized roll film had been invented and he didn't need to use wet emulsion anymore. He also likes to say he started making movies in the late '50s because a friend left a movie projector with the couple when he went on vacation, and they wanted something to show in it One of their old friends, Corita Kent (formerly Sister Corita), once said that to be an artist "you must become as a little child." The Eames movies have all the simplicity and Complexity of childhood. Film critic and screenwriter Paul Schrader divides them into "toy" and "idea" films. Tocatta for Toy Train (1957), for instance, their first big hit, was a short art film entirely devoted to toy trains going around on tracks as sort of a "dance" to the commissioned musical score. Powers of Ten, probably their best-known movie, is a lii OS $ii(or CASH DOWN FOR VETERANS MONTHLY PAYMENT (Includes Mad money from 1-F ONE YEAR'S MEMBERSHIP TO BARDMOOR COUNTRY CLUB I $1,500 VALUE PLUS THIS SPECIAL AUGUST BONUS jf- I I MODEL HOMES OPEN -J- i 3 Sunday Nowl 'M dork fK LL r10e talking about ways to reduce the interest on their loans.

The answer, he says, was "as simple as pie." He put the computer program for the mortgages on the Realtron computer, and now for $2 an amount that covers the cost of the printout 26 cents in stamps he'll produce a loan amortization schedule for anybody who wants one. All a person has to tell him is the amount and the term of the mortgage, the interest rate, and how much of an extra payment the person might want to make each year. Send that information and the two bucks to him in care of Chuck Yeoman Realty at St. Petersburg Beach, where he has his own small computer set up for his condominium project. "I'll send an amortization schedule back to 'em the same day," Poston says.

"People can do this themselves," he says, "but they won't do it. They won't sit down and take the time to analyze it." WHY DOES Poston do this if he's not making any money off of it? For one thing, he just wants to help out people who are working hard the people, he says, "who made this country" and could have "a ton of money sitting there" in their homes. "Maybe I'm hollow or something, but I don't think there's enough emphasis on buying a home." But there's another reason. "I love this type of work, these little projects," he says. "This is just a hobby for me.

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