A throne for Charles Eames

Charles Eames, who designed one of the world’s most iconic chairs
and was intimately connected to the National Institute of Design and to the world of Indian subaltern culture, considered the low-class lota an epitome of Indian design, says H Y Sharada Prasad

Charles Eames was a designer of extraordinary creativity and influence. He was an architect, inventor, communicator, historian of science, filmmaker, innovator of new styles in the exhibition craft, consultant to the Smithsonian Institution, sometime professor of poetry at Harvard, visual lyricist of everyday things, interpreter of cultures to one another, friend of scientists, musicians, presidents and prime ministers, and a person with a daVincian range of interests and wholeness of vision.

Sometime during the Second World War, Eames discovered a new way of moulding sheets of wood and getting a material almost as tough as aluminium and steel for use in aircraft. He made a mark as a furniture designer–Eames Chairs became a status symbol and made him a millionaire.

His little films are gems of the film medium. People who have seen his films on toy trains and tops and Mexican funerals find that their colours and their rhythm and, above all, their compassion, lingers in their memories for years. They are art not for art’s sake but for life’s sake and for meaning’s sake.

Eames made a series of films for IBM on mathematical ideas which combine great imagination, great compression, and great intelligibility. He claimed that they were not films at all but “attempts to get across an idea”. He was a visual populariser non-pareil of science, except that scientists also found that they had much to learn from him. One of his masterpieces in visual communication is a 20-ft long chart on the history of mathematics.

When the US government wanted to establish a National Aquarium, the project report that Charles Eames prepared was not a volume with charts and diagrams but a 10-minute film. Visitors to the New York World’s Fair queued up to get into the “egg” that he had designed, which seated 300 people and told the story of science through multiple projection. His Franklin-Jefferson exhibition was one of the highlights of the US Bicentennial programme.

Eames had many close links with India. The National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad owes its origin to a report of his. Jawaharlal Nehru was attracted to him the same way he was attracted to Le Corbusier. Within a few months of the establishment of the Design Institute, Nehru died, and Charles Eames was invited to produce the memorial exhibition for him. It was my privilege to work closely with Eames on the Nehru exhibition as well as at the NID.

The Nehru exhibition was shown in New York, London, Washington, and at UNESCO’s headquarters, and was recognised as a classic of the art of biographical exhibition. When an exhibition on Churchill and this exhibition on Nehru were held side by side, the Nehru display drew crowds many times larger than the Churchill one did. This particular exhibition brought into vogue the intensive use of text and marked a turning away from the advertising idiom in exhibition design.

To those of us who worked closely with Eames, his fastidiousness, his concentration, and his insistence on getting a point right even if it took hours and days, his humility in finding out the facts of the national experience of another people, the relentlessness with which he pursued the search for a particular photograph or quotation, his ability to piece 10,000 things together into a telling scheme, and the utter calm he maintained under pressure–all these were an education. So were his sense of beauty, the depth and comprehensiveness of his perception and statement, his choice of–and reverence for–Indian materials such as teak and sheesham and handmade paper and white khadi and rich Indian prints. Eames also had far-reaching influence on the revival of our handloom designs.

The secret of design, Eames used to say, is to care. The more you care, the more you find within yourself and outside. Discovery leads to discussion and discussion to a greater crystallisation of the pattern. And if the designer is skilful, according to Eames, he can make a viewer notice a postage stamp in an acre of exhibition space.
Eames famous little essay on the Indian pitcher (lota) is a fine insight into how a designer sees the world in a grain of sand. It is an answer to those who think that beauty and function are separate.

Of all the objects we have seen and admired during our visit to India, the Lota, that simple vessel of everyday use, stands out as perhaps the greatest, the most beautiful. The village women have a process which, with the use of tamarind and ash, each day turns this brass into gold.

n But how would one go about designing a Lota? First, one would have to shut out all preconceived ideas on the subject and then begin to consider factor after factor:
n The optimum amount of liquid to be fetched, carried, poured and stored in a prescribed set of circumstances.

> The size and strength and gender of the hands (if hands) that would manipulate it.
> The way it is to be transported–head, hip, hand, basket or cart.
> The balance, the centre of gravity, when empty, when full, its balance when rotated for pouring.
> The fluid dynamics of the problem not only when pouring but when filling and cleaning, and under the complicated motions of head-carrying–slow and fast.
> Its sculpture as it fits the palm of the hand, the curve of the hip.
> Its sculpture as complement to the rhythmic motion of walking or a static pose at the well.
> The relation of opening to volume in terms of storage uses–and objects other than liquid.
> The size of the opening and inner contour in terms of cleaning.
> The texture inside and out in terms of cleaning and filling.
> Heat transfer–can it be grasped if the liquid is hot?
> How pleasant does it feel, eyes closed, eyes open?
> How pleasant does it sound, when it strikes another vessel, is set down on ground or stone, empty or full–or being poured into?
> What is the possible material?
> What is its cost in terms of working?
> What is its cost in terms of ultimate service?
> What kind of an investment does the material provide as product, as
sal vage?
> How will the material affect the con tents, etc, etc?
> How will it look as the sun reflects off its surface?
> How does it feel to possess it, to sell it, to give it?
The months spent in India–in particular on the Nehru exhibition–added a new layer of inwardness to Eames’s philosophical mind. When he was in Delhi a few months before his death in 1978, he told me he was going to Varanasi and to the villages to find out what lessons they could give to industrial societies to help them unwind themselves. He was doing preliminary work on a series of films on the history of technology. In his characteristic drawl, he said to me that Archimedes would not have found himself a stranger in Faraday’s workshop but that Faraday would be totally confused if he were to visit a computer centre, just as Bhaskaracharya would be if he went to the atomic centre in Trombay. In India, where several ages existed together, it might be possible to find new paths of technological advance other than the ones that the West had adopted.

I recall how impressed he was by his first visit to Moscow. What had set him thinking deeply was the fact that Russian toy stores did not sell pistols and swords to children.
In spite of his wide circle of distinguished friends, Charles Eames was something of a hermit. His sprawling workshop in a rundown suburb of Los Angeles was like an Alladin’s cave for designers. There, Charles and his wife Ray dreamed together and worked together on widely disparate projects, setting a tyrannically exacting pace for their assistants and acolytes–Charles, tall, with twinkling eyes in a contemplative face, a man of rare magnetism, and Ray, like a doll which has escaped from a children’s nursery and has suddenly grown up while doing so.

In Charles, the weaver, the dyer, and the block-printer in our villages had a friend whom they did not know–but whom he knew well.