constellations #101: the best for the most for the least
a recap, of sorts, from last month's event
Hi again.
Last month I held a reading to celebrate one hundred editions of constellations, featuring Madeline Zappala, Marianela D'Aprile, and CLAUDIA MORALES (whose name is all-caps like that because that’s how she styled it in her newsletter, fyi). It was a really nice time in a very full room filled with very sweet people — if you came, thank you so much for being part of it. If you couldn’t make it, you’re in luck: Shortly after the reading, Marianela shared the gorgeous prose poem she read about sparrows, the problem of mystery, and constellations; and Madeline shared the two poems they wrote for the event, which are so tender and thoughtful and marvelous.
I read a new essay about creativity and romance in the work of Charles and Ray Eames, which I’m sharing today. It’s quite a bit longer than what I usually publish here, so I apologize in advance if your email provider truncates it. And in case you miss the note at the very end of this email: I’ll be back in your inbox later this week (or early next) with my annual round-up of things that guided my year. I look forward to sharing that with you, too. Thanks, as always, for being here.
***
constellations: charles & ray eames
In 1945, the editor and owner of an architecture magazine wondered: How should houses be, now? He thought about the end of World War II and the aftermath of the Great Depression and the problem of housing shortages and a potential post-war building boom. So as an experiment, he commissioned eight architects to create Case Study Houses. In his words, they were meant to represent “‘good’ living conditions for eight American families” (with, yes, quotes around “good,” for some reason).
Case Study House #8, a glass and steel-frame home, was mainly created with standardized, mass-produced parts from builders’ catalogs. It was built in a meadow with an artist’s studio next door. It’s about 1500 square feet and it overlooks the ocean. Looking at it, you might think of a big Mondrian-style grid: black steel and glass and colorful accent panels in primary colors. You can see right into the house from the meadow. Downstairs there’s a double-height living room, and a kitchen, and a hallway with closets, and a spiral staircase. Upstairs there are two bedrooms and two bathrooms and a skylight. It’s beautiful, and functional — the kind of place you might actually want to do your living.
Each architect in the Case Study House project was to create their home for a real or a hypothetical client. Case Study House #8 was proposed for “a married couple working in design and graphic arts whose children no longer lived at home.” And wouldn’t you know it, the designers of the house — that would be Ray and Charles Eames — knew one such married couple working in design. It was themselves. They moved in on Christmas Eve of 1949.
~
Charles and Ray had met about a decade before, in 1940, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit. Ray was a student, a painter. After growing up in Sacramento, Ray had attended the Bennett School for Girls in Millbrook, NY — a progressive liberal arts college that took the arts seriously. Then she moved to Manhattan, where she studied painting under Hans Hofmann. There, she learned about form and color, about tension and abstraction. She was a founding member, in fact, of the American Abstract Artists group. After a brief move to Florida, to care for her mother, a friend convinced Ray to apply to Cranbrook.
When Ray arrived, Charles Eames was already the head of the department of industrial design. He had studied architecture at Washington University but got kicked out because — and this is true — he simply loved Frank Lloyd Wright too much. He was also in a rocky marriage at the time; technically, he and his first wife had separated that past summer. Soon, Charles and Ray fell in love. I can’t tell you how, exactly, this happened. To the public, they never talked about the exact circumstances of their meeting and the spark of their romance.
After a few months, Ray left Cranbrook, uncomfortable with her clandestine relationship. But Charles and Ray continued to write each other letters. Ray saved every letter Charles wrote her, many of them now archived in the Library of Congress. But you can’t read the letters Ray wrote Charles anymore, because Charles had to destroy them.
Charles got divorced later that year, after which he proposed to Ray in a letter. He wrote: “I am 34 (almost) years old, singel (again) and broke. I love you very much and would like to marry you very very soon.” I find it charming how he misspelled “single” because it reminds me of my partner, who is such a terrible speller he mentioned it in our wedding vows. We, too, wrote each other courtship letters, though at the time we didn’t recognize them as such, because we were teenagers. We still have most of them. The only reasons we’d have to destroy them are, like, the hot raw shame you get from seeing a profession of love you wrote before you even got your driver’s license: for me, it was mostly Dashboard Confessional lyrics; for him, it was mostly a plea to please go to the movies and make out with me this weekend. (Put that in the Library of Congress.)
Together, Charles and Ray Eames went on to become some of the most celebrated designers of their lifetimes, a major influence on modern architecture and furniture. Their shared design practice began in earnest in 1941, after they married and moved to LA; the road trip out there was their honeymoon. They started to experiment with molding plywood into complex furniture forms. To do this, they made a machine out of heating coils and a bicycle pump and named it the Kazam!, and started working on plywood chairs. During World War II they got some funding from the U.S. Navy and started applying their plywood knowledge to manufacturing leg splits for soldiers. Ray said they did this so they could “aid in the war efforts without hurting anyone.” But then after that ended, they got back to the Kazam!, back to their work on the chairs. A few years later, the Dining Chair Wood was the big breakthrough for their studio. Then there was the lounge chair, another breakthrough, about a decade later. But really, chairs were just part of it. They made tons of short films and built houses. They made museum exhibitions about math and computers, and one for the American bicentennial about The World of Franklin and Jefferson — that one got panned in the New York Times.
I don’t usually spend a lot of time thinking about chair designers. I learned what I know of Charles and Ray because the person I love idolizes them, and so now they’re my heroes too. Isn’t that the way it always goes? But as I’ve learned about Charles and Ray, they have come to represent, to me, the pinnacle of something very special, which is what it means to share both romantic love and a creative practice with someone. I believe that a commitment to romantic love teaches us to extend our capacities beyond what we know possible, to be selfless in pursuit of something greater than ourselves, to care so desperately about another perspective that we learn to inhabit it. I believe it makes our lives richer and sweeter and filled with meaning, or maybe what I mean is that romantic love makes me believe that it is worth it to create meaning, even out of nothing, even when things feel meaningless. And aren’t those things true, too, of commitment to a creative practice? Aren’t those the reasons people make art, dedicate their lives to it? We get told, often, that these relationships are in conflict — that being committed to love and being dedicated to art get in the way of one another. But when I think about the Eameses, I think: Maybe there’s the answer. Or maybe: There’s one answer. I think: Maybe these commitments could magnify each other. I think: How much richer and bigger and sweeter could life get?
~
Many years ago, when we were fresh out of college, barely into our 20s and mostly stupid, my love and I went to see part of the Eames archive in Weil am Rhein, Germany, at the Vitra Design Museum. “Huge exhibition on an architect Matt loves,” I wrote in my journal at the end of the day. We had taken a tram and then a bus from Basel, Switzerland — we were on a backpacking trip together, just the two of us. I had overplanned and overpacked, setting a travel pace that served neither of us. This was one of the final days of the trip and perhaps the first excursion I had specifically planned with Matt in mind. Matt, gamely, had underpacked and planned not at all. He spent most of the trip carrying around a record in his backpack that he’d gotten on the first day of the trip, in Berlin. It was a copy of Loveless by My Bloody Valentine (which was, at the time, very out of print and very hard to find. He’d actually never seen it in real life before). It was the only souvenir he bought. He packed it into the laptop slot in his backpack and carried it like precious cargo over the next three weeks. When we got home he realized it was a bootleg. We were both annoyed at first but there was something about it being a fake that made it feel all the more special to him. “I think Matt was really happy about it,” I wrote in my journal after our visit to Vitra. When we left it was pouring rain.
~
I don’t know much about design but luckily the Eameses also had a knack for something I do know about, which is words. They were always being quoted with these pithy, witty descriptions of their work. Perhaps most famous is the couples’ assertion that the point of their work was to make “the best for the most for the least” — as in, high-quality mass-produced products that were meant to be accessible to everyone, with little waste. What a turn of phrase. “The best for the most for the least.” An economy of words that matches the economy of their design strategy, naturally.
Ray also said, “What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts.” Charles once said, “We don’t do ‘art’ — we solve problems.” He said every object had a “way-it-should-be-ness.” He also said, “Anything I can do, Ray can do better.” That’s cute, but obviously no one believed him. In a 1973 profile in The New York Times titled “Casual Giant of Design,” Charles described their relationship as “an equal and total alliance.” But people still acted like Charles was in charge and Ray was just, I don’t know, his secretary. In 1969, the PBS show Public Broadcast Laboratory visited Charles and Ray in their studio for an episode about their work. The host described Ray like this: “Her warm but quiet conversation shrank to total silence before the camera. But her impact on Eames’ work spoke for her. She sat like a delicious dumpling in a doll’s dress, concentrating on a sweep of subjects which would seemingly choke a computer.” Hearing her described like this made me want to choke my computer.
Even those who wished to give Ray credit, at the time, found ways to feminize her impact: to say she was responsible for light touches and delicate finishes and a general sense of warmth in the studio. People are more keen now, in retrospect, to acknowledge her actual, tactile impact. “Ray knew what was art and what was not,” a member of the Eames studio said in a documentary I watched recently. Ray was better than Charles at thinking about color, for example. Plus her background as an abstract painter gave her a particular skill for thinking about form and tension, for knowing how to deconstruct and reconstruct shapes. It doesn’t shock me that she didn’t receive the recognition she deserved in her lifetime, though I think there’s a lesson in that, too. Combining romance and creativity might in fact intensify certain routine problems in both domains, bring out classic gendered inequality or expectations. Women get mistaken for muses, or men are given too much credit, or normative assumptions get mapped onto queer collaborations. There are a lot of ways for this to go wrong. Love and art don’t magically fix everything.
~
Case Study House #8 is surrounded by Eucalyptus trees. The original plans for the house would have required cutting down a good number of them. But then there were shipping delays for some of the building materials, and in the long time of waiting, Ray and Charles started to rethink things. So instead of putting the house in the middle of the meadow, with the studio building behind it, they decided to rotate the direction of the house and put it in line with the studio. It saved the trees, which, in the end, cast incredible shadows along the glass panes of the house, a constant parade of changing organic shapes along their walls.
It makes sense to me that Charles and Ray wound up moving the house in line with the studio. Their lives together, their domestic lives especially, revolved around their art, not the other way around. There’s a film they made in 1955 called House after five years of living. It’s 11 minutes long and contains hundreds of still images that Charles shot as 35mm transparencies between 1949 and 1955 — all of them from inside and outside and around Case Study House #8. The Eameses believed that the best people to choose furnishings and décor for a house were its inhabitants, rather than professional decorators. Watching the film, their philosophy bears out. There’s photos of their combs and seashells and trinkets; there’s closeups of chairs and stairs and the angles of their walls. It shows the paintings that Ray picked out for the ceilings, so you could lay on your back and look up at them. It looks like the kind of place where people are actually living, and working, and making things: There are stacks of books, and plants that need to be watered, and dishes in the sink.
One snapshot shows a tumbleweed, which Ray and Charles picked up on their honeymoon, their road trip out to LA. I find it touching that they kept it all those years, that it was such a prized possession. It makes me think of Matt’s bootleg Loveless, and also the giant pinecone in our kitchen that we took from a national forest on a road trip a decade ago. It’s the biggest pinecone I’ve ever seen. It was illegal to take it with us, so don’t tell anyone.
There are no people in the film — Charles is behind the camera, and Ray is, I assume, off looking like a dumpling somewhere — but it’s unmistakably an intimate, personal glimpse. I love the film because it seems, to me, to magnify the way their work upends stale binaries. The domestic sphere is a space of creation; the studio is home; both of these belong to both husband and wife. It is love and art that reside in the same place, a physical representation of what it means to carve both of these things from the same elements. How much richer and bigger and sweeter could life get?
***
***
Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: the Kassie Krut EP; two albums I reviewed last month: Katie Gavin’s What a Relief and Haley Heynderickx’s Seed of a Seed; Francesca D’Uva’s really strange and wonderful performance This Is My Favorite Song; a re-read of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and a lovely book club conversation about it; Bisexual Night With Free Tableside Guacamole at Singer’s in Bed-Stuy — a really elite combination; a conversation between Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor at Pioneer Works about writing harsh book reviews; the Christmas lights in Dyker Heights; an EP release show for my friends in the band Carrying; after-hours bread from Mazzola in Carroll Gardens; our annual Christmastime open mic with friends at home in Massachusetts; the final batch of apple cider doughnuts from a sadly now-defunct farm stand in my hometown
***
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in your inbox very soon with my personal year-end list. In the meantime, I hope you have a lovely holiday season.
xoxo,
M
^___^