Iconic mid-century Eames chairs take center stage at Richmond museum

On a recent weekday, Lisa Demetrios was showing a small group of design enthusiasts around a white brick warehouse in a neighborhood of white warehouses off of Interstate 580 in Richmond. 

She pointed out tiny figurines and simply, yet well-designed toys such as balls from Germany and Japanese fish on a string. Also on display: thousands of pieces of furniture, one-of-a-kind prototypes, personal ephemera and private correspondence. 

Demetrios was sharing the collection of Charles and Ray Eames, the husband-and-wife design duo known for some of modernism’s most iconic chairs. They also happen to be her grandparents. And, while this warehouse may seem an unlikely design destination, it is in fact nothing short of a shrine to mid-century modernism. 

The Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, which opened in February, is a museum and working archive that celebrates the work of the Eames, who created furniture for companies such as Herman Miller and Vitra. TIME magazine considered the Eames’ 1946 molded plywood chairs for Herman Miller so influential, in fact, that it named them the “Design of the Century” in 1999. 

Often using relatively inexpensive industrial materials crafted in biomorphic shapes, the couple designed mass-produced furniture that filled American homes during the postwar building boom. Their intentions were reflected in their mission statement: “We want to make the best for the most for the least.”  Ironically, some of those originally affordable pieces have since become precious commodities traded in the high-end design marketplace.

Though the couple is best known for classic chairs, their almost 40-year collaboration also resulted in graphics, textiles, short films, interiors and exhibitions. 

40,000 Eames artifacts, from furniture to private letters

The Eames Institute collection, housed in a brick building on South 51st Street designed by San Francisco architect Jim Jennings, includes some 40,000 artifacts, most of which were culled from the Eames Office in Venice, CA, which operated from 1943 to 1988. About a third of the items are on display — the rest are being photographed, conserved, preserved, cataloged and digitized behind the scenes. 

“It took 40 years to figure out what to do with everything,” said Demetrios. Still, she said, “the whole process has been exciting.”

The Richmond collection is the largest and most comprehensive of Eames’ works, and the only one that includes personal items from both Charles and Ray. Its goal is to shine a light on the prolific couple’s lives, creative process, and influential design philosophy. The Institute offers public tours, online exhibitions and printed publications.

The Institute operates independently of the Eames Office and Eames Foundation, though all three aim to preserve the Eames’ legacy. The office is responsible for Eames product development and intellectual property rights. The foundation operates the Eames House in Los Angeles, where the couple lived, as a museum. 

Why Richmond proved the ideal location for the Institute

The choice of Richmond for the new institute was the result of a decades-long search. The Eames lived and worked in Los Angeles, but Charles’ only child, Lucia, lived in Petaluma, where she began building a sustainable ranch in 1992. After her parents’ deaths (Charles in 1978 and Ray 10 years later to the day), some 75,000 items — a fraction of the office’s collection — were given to the Library of Congress, as per Ray’s request. 

“When my mother [Lucia] walked back into the Eames Office, it looked like nothing was taken,” Demetrios said. 

Lucia moved the remainder of the office into a barn-like building in Petaluma with 20,000-square-feet of storage space. But that didn’t prove to be enough. After Lucia’s death in 2014, the stewardship of the Eames’ vast holdings passed to Demetrios, Lucia’s only child. 

The exhibition “The World of Charles and Ray Eames,” which traveled to eight countries before closing at the Oakland Museum of Art in 2018, demonstrated that there was a local design public hungry to learn more about the Eames’ legacy.

“When the show closed, people said, ‘What are you doing next?’ ” Demetrios said. With the Bay Area being such a “hotbed of makers,” Demetrios considered other ways to share the collection locally. 

An exhibition set to open at the Petaluma ranch in 2020 was forced to move online when the pandemic hit. The Institute formed in March 2022 and has since done more online exhibitions as a way to bring the Eames work to a wider audience.

Lisa Demetrios considers Richmond “a dynamic, vibrant place,” and says the institute is building relationships with fellow Richmond-based nonprofits.

The Institute learned about the Richmond space from William Stout, who until recently stored inventory for his San Francisco architectural book store in the same building. Richmond was appealing because of its central location: easily accessible to San Francisco, the East Bay and Marin. 

“We realized that this was an exciting opportunity to create a new headquarters for our organization and bring together the collection from a number of different off-site storage locations under one roof,” Demetrios said. 

Demetrios considers Richmond “a dynamic, vibrant place,” and says the institute is building relationships with fellow Richmond-based nonprofits such as the Richmond Arts Center and Urban Tilth. 

“While we have a much longer history in Petaluma, we look forward to establishing our Richmond home and being a good neighbor and member of this community,” Demetrios said. 

The organization’s long-term goal is to create an Eames museum — perhaps as its own separate facility — within the next 10 to 15 years, while maintaining the Richmond site. Once renovations at the Eames Ranch in Petaluma are complete, it will draw on some of the artifacts in the Richmond archive that reflect the Eames’ interest in sustainability. 

A public tour with personal anecdotes

Demetrios has been leading public tours since the facility opened in February. Tickets have been selling out quickly, often snapped up within 15 minutes of going on sale, such is the appeal for design enthusiasts from all over the country, who often plan trips around their visit. 

Tours begin and end at a small shop where visitors can buy books, Vitra miniature Eames chairs ($325) and objects such as five spinning tops ($30 )are intended to encourage visitors to begin their own collections. Charles and Ray were notorious collectors of objects to decorate their home and offices, and to serve as design inspiration.

Demetrios began the recent tour by shaking hands and introducing herself to all 10 participants. As the group walked around, she peppered her descriptions with personal anecdotes. 

The first room on the tour answers the questions visitors ask most frequently about the couple: What they were doing before they met and what was their first collaboration?

Before they met, Ray, who grew up in Sacramento, was a painter and fashion designer in New York. Charles, from Saint Louis, MO., was an architect who never received a degree. Poking fun at that fact is a fake diploma in gibberish created by The New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg, part of the personal keepsakes in the collection that include the couple’s early drawings. 

Charles and Ray met while attending the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and married in 1941 — the same year Charles and Eero Saarinen were part of a Cranbrook team that created an upholstered chair with a molded plywood base that won the 1941 MOMA Organic Design Competition. Winning the competition was supposed to result in the chairs being mass-produced, but there was a problem with the design. The molded plywood seat kept cracking.

Because Ray had worked on drawings for the submission and was familiar with the project, her first collaboration with Charles was to solve that problem. This time, their goal was to create a chair as comfortable as an upholstered chair — but without the upholstery. 

The birth of a design philosophy

The Eameses’ design philosophy was based on “understanding what the material can and cannot do,” Demetrios said, as well as process: how something is made influences the design, which is why they often ended up creating their own machines, like the Kazam! that molded plywood. 

Prototypes of their molded plywood seats reveal how the couple eventually ended up with a split-back, which didn’t crack. They created the first mass-produced molded plywood seat in 1942.

Ray and Charles Eames thrived on challenges. In fact, one of their mottos was, “We don’t do art; we solve problems.”

Also on display are molded plywood products that the Eames created for wartime use, most notably a splint and an aerodynamic airplane stabilizer for U.S. Navy planes. 

As the molded plywood chair illustrated, the couple thrived on challenges. In fact, one of their mottos was, “We don’t do art; we solve problems.” They never saw failures as negatives. In fact, the Eameses kept broken pieces, which are part of the archive, “to see how to do better the next time,” Demetrios said. 

Demetrios said her grandparents often made changes in their designs to make their products last longer, the antidote to planned obsolescence and a reflection of their early interest in sustainability. The couple even handed out copies of The Whole Earth Catalog to friends and colleagues and eventually abandoned the use of plastic to make some of their chairs, Demetrios said.

Over the years, as their furnishings became more ubiquitous, the couple would ask those who owned them, “‘How are they doing?’” Demetrios said. “They were always curious about how a piece of furniture was holding up.”

Charles and Ray illustrated their approach to product design with a venn diagram, which is projected on a wall in Charles’ handwriting. One section represents what they wanted to accomplish; a second, what their client wanted; a third, how the resulting product would benefit society. The overlapping sections of the three categories was the goal.

“That means when you’re making a chair for Herman Miller, you’re also making a sustainable chair,” Demetrios said. “When people would ask me, what was success for your grandparents, it’s when they could find these areas in common.”

Eames chairs in every iteration

Since the classic chairs are how most people connect to the legendary designers, the collection showcases such pieces in a mind-boggling array of iterations. Part II of the tour takes visitors into a cavernous warehouse room, where shelves of chairs rise almost as high as the 25-foot ceilings. 

Every conceivable version of the iconic chairs are on display, including the Molded Side Chair, which in 1949 became the first mass-produced furniture made in fiberglass; the Molded Shell Chair, with and without upholstery; the molded plywood dining and lounge chairs created for Herman Miller, as well as the iconic Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman for Herman Miller, inspired by a first baseman’s mitt; and a cast steel version of that pairing, part of a limited edition of five created in 2007 by Cheryl Ekstrom.

The shelves also include different versions of tables and chair bases, including the so-called Eiffel base, a collectors’ favorite, in various materials.

Besides chairs for the home and office, Charles and Ray also designed tandem seating for large public spaces. In 1962 the couple began the design process for such seating at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago by interviewing maintenance workers. The workers complained that most upholstered seating had parts that could not be easily replaced and required more than one person to repair. 

To solve those problems, the Eameses created a cast aluminum frame to hold so-called “sling seating,” a vinyl seat and back that could be changed out easily by one person using a screwdriver. Such seating was so successful, it was installed at Washington D.C.’s Dulles airport a year later. 

Sitting in those famous seats

The tour ends in a room with 14 Eames chairs, among them the highly coveted La Chaise, an icon of organic design, which the couple created for Vitra in 1948 and now sells for more than $15,000 new. Visitors are encouraged to sample all the seating before settling in to watch a six-minute film, a Q&A with Charles Eames for a 1972 exhibition in France. 

If Charles and Ray were great designers, they were even better grandparents, Demetrios said. As a child she beta-tested the children’s furniture they designed, dipped into their art supplies and even appeared in their short films. Growing up, she took for granted many of their idiosyncrasies.

“I thought everyone’s grandparents made little foil metal hearts that lead you to your plate so you’ll eat your veggies,” she said. 

“I just loved watching them work together,” she said. “Staff have told us that they never asked you if you were done with a project. They asked what you found interesting.”