 Hi everyone, my name is Lisa Demetrius and I'm Daniel Ostroff. Lisa and I have worked together for 15 years on the collection of archival material that came from designer Ray and Charles Eames office in Venice, California, where they worked for 40 years. So we have a lot of material. We do. Let me see if I can share screen now. We're going to answer questions after this short video where we wanted to share some particular pieces. This is Charles and Ray Eames. You may know them from this famous photo when they posed a stride of balance at motorcycle. Charles and Ray had so many accomplishments in their lifetime, making toys, films, graphics, furniture, exhibitions and architecture that it took the U.S. Postal Service 16 stamps to have knowledge of their work. As prolific as they were as designers, they were even more amazing as grandparents, sharing whatever they were working on when spending time with them, like a three-screen slideshow or scale model for an exhibit or putting us in their short films. Charles came to design from architecture and Ray from painting. They thought of design not so much as a creative endeavor, but rather as problem-solving. They were practical and hands-on throughout the design process, and we believe that we've been invited to participate in this conference because they made extensive use of 3D models. This is Charles and Ray Eames' first contract-based chair, a chair made famous when Ice Cube posed for this classic poster sitting on one of these chairs. Charles and Ray modeled even the smallest part of the chair, the foot rests. First they made it in wood, then they made it in cast plaster, but the modeling process wasn't finished until they modeled it in aluminum, which is how the final product is made. They didn't delegate model making to others, but more early experiments and multiply with, they observed that how something is made influences its design, so they made the models themselves in their own shop. To make the best finished product, they found that they needed to make not only the prototypes, but the machines that produced the prototypes, and then scale up the production. They worked directly with material, many of them knew at the time, molded plywood, molded plastic, and steel wire. In addition to wood, plastic, and steel wire, Charles and Ray Eames also made a classic chair out of aluminum, and we're going to talk about the modeling process that led to this successful design today. Actually, we're going to talk about three of their projects. One a success that was also in some ways a failure, and then two successes. Our story of a successful failure begins in 1941, when the team of Charles Eames and his close friend, Aero Saranen, won two first place awards in the Museum of Modern Arts Organic Design Competition. One for seating, one for case goods. Ray Eames and a graduate student at the Cranbrook Academy worked on the drawings for the competition entries. We were focusing on their award-winning seating. This competition was an opportunity to bring new blood into the furniture industry. The Museum of Modern Art provided this opportunity for those who had never made furniture before. And then the winning designers would be paired with the company to manufacture and retail the designs. At that time, most comfortable chairs were heavy and costly and relied upon steel springs and thick padding. Charles and Aero had a new concept for furniture to make a lightweight sturdy chair that instead depended on its form to be made at molded plywood for comfort. They won with these drawings and models that were three inches high made out of shaped metal. So far, so good. As winners of the competition, Charles and Aero were paired up with a manufacturer, Haskellite, and at the company's factory they were met with failure. They learned that the technology to turn their small-scale metal models and drawings into full-size wood furniture did not yet exist. There was a lot of pain and angst involved in getting the chairs ready for the exhibition. They had hoped that the chair shells, seat back and arms, would be one-piece molded wood shells that wouldn't need padding or upholstery. But their chair forms came out splintered and cracked from the molding process. Ultimately, they had to cover each cracked and splintered shell with some light foam and a textile. Here's a photo of the display of their winning chairs and case goods at the Museum of Modern Art. The concept was good and the chair forms so innovative that they even got some good reviews. The case goods and the chairs were sold at Bloomingdale's and a few other high-end department stores. But winning a competition wasn't enough for Charles and Ray. They wanted to make the best for the most for the least amount of money and they knew they could do better. After they married and moved to Los Angeles, Charles and Ray dedicated themselves to continuing the work to make low-cost, high-performance furniture by molding shells from wood. But with a firm lesson in mind, make 3D models. They resolved forevermore to model at the same scale that the finished product would be made of and using the same materials that would be used for the finished design and to be very hands-on with the process of molding. They made countless models and spent many weeks developing the technology to mold plywood with compound curves. When World War II broke out, they temporarily put aside furniture work and used this technology to make strong, lightweight splints and other projects for the U.S. Navy. Charles' own leg served as a template for the mold. When the war ended, they had so much experience molding plywood that by December 1945 they introduced their two-piece molded plywood chairs, a design still made today and one heralded in 1999 by Time Magazine as the design of the century. They did this with what we now call the EAM secret. Make three-dimensional models of the product at the same scale and from the same material as will be used in the finished design. Here is an array of models they made in the process of designing their most famous chair, the molded plywood chair. And this is the finished product. It's been in production since 1946. The method of making this chair hasn't changed over the years. The chair is still made using the techniques the EAMS has developed during the model making phase. In 1958, they introduced the EAMS aluminum group and we have many models from this design process to share with you today. Here are two model stages of the design. For the backstretcher alone, they carved many different versions. Ultimately they went with the first version they made, but when questioned on this point, Charles noted that if they hadn't made so many versions, they wouldn't have known the first one was best. For me, some of my favorite cases of the collection are these wood ambers and the strikers for this aluminum group chair. Because in order to have a aluminum piece, you need to have something so they have to look. But to get the form correctly in wood, you can see here that they were constantly making adjustments and slicing something off and then adding a new detail or something probably about the patients that were walking in. And now over here, you can see the finished one is the castle down there. Over here is another example of what the wood then becomes the middle version and some of the other versions that took you guys back. But there's such a delicacy in the wood that leads up to the finished aluminum part which is just so special to me. These are over 60 years old. This chair has stood the test of time. Today, workers at Herman Miller and Vitra make these chairs using the techniques developed by Charles and Ray in 1958. The same design they introduced in 1958 can be found in many 21st century homes and offices. The design consultant and author Ralph Kaplan knew Charles and Ray well and even worked with them directly for a couple of years. In his words. I do not believe that any chair however elegant contributes significantly to life or solves problems that can seriously be considered major. However, the aims approach to chairs and anything else is an approach we can bring to activities more important than taking the weight off one's feet. To illustrate this point. We're going to conclude with how model making applies to international diplomacy. At the end of World War two and throughout the late 1940s to late 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a dark cold war. The threat of World War three was very real. In 1959, there was a thaw in relations. President Eisenhower and the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev reached an agreement to do a cultural exchange for six weeks. The Russians would do an exhibition showing off their accomplishments at a venue in New York City. Afterwards, the US would present what became known as the American National Exhibition and Moscow's Sokolnyki Park. I have a personal connection to this story. It was always a point of pride for my family and my father, that my father, a lawyer with the US Commerce Department, negotiated the contracts with the Russians for this exhibition. The exhibition displays were in a way from the top American manufacturing companies, from Whirlpool kitchens to RCA radios and TVs, and the latest in American fashion. Charles and Reims were selected to make a movie to welcome visitors to the exhibition. Since Stalin's regime had begun in 1924, Russian citizens were largely cut off from news about the rest of the world. It was Charles and Ray's job to introduce the men and women in Russia to the men and women of America with one movie. Quoting Charles, the problem was not simply to make a film, but rather to decide what kind of statement a government like ours should make to the Russian people after several years of cold war. The ultimate objective was to create a relationship of understanding that might aid in bypassing a nuclear war. To do this, it was necessary to show life in the USA truthfully and at the same time not flex our muscles. We had to get credibility to a simple statement. We knew that a conventional film showing one scene at a time could not produce the desired immensity of scope. It was then that we began to think in terms of simultaneous multiple images. Their next followed experiments, models, to determine how many images a person could see and digest at one time. The object was to present a group of images that an audience could be aware of, but not overly involved in each subject. In such a presentation, the panorama of our way of life would be so general that an audience would assume it had seen more than it actually had. For example, in one 12-second sequence of the finished film, 90 separate scenes of freeway overpasses flash on the screens. No one could possibly count them, but the impression is that of an infinite number. Some of the photos used for the film were licensed from magazines and newspapers, and others were taken by the Eames office staff. My mother shot many of the freeway overpass photographs from a helicopter. Charles and Ray made multiple models, including a variety of rays with mine screens. Finally, it was decided that they would mount seven 20 by 30 foot screens, four above and three below, along one side of the 200 foot wide geodesic dome, which was designed to house the main exhibition. In the process of deciding on seven screens, they modeled it in such a small size that Charles could fit his head into the model. As soon as they were confident that seven screens were the right number, they made this near full-size model in the warehouse that was their office. In the final 10 weeks of work on this production, Charles and Ray and their staff worked without a single day off. They never left the studio before one in the morning. When it was complete, Charles and Ray carried the film cans themselves to the airport, pausing briefly to have this picture taken before departure. They were holding the magnetic reels containing the soundtrack. Altogether, they flew to Moscow with 250 pounds of film. In Moscow, seven huge screens had been mounted in the dome of the exhibition hall. Projection was accomplished by means of seven simplex projectors set up side by side in the single booth. Synchronization was affected by interlock motors linking all of the machines together. On these seven screens was flashed in precise continuity, 2200 individual scenes, completely encompassing many facets of America. There was a dynamic musical score by Eames Friend Academy Award-winning music composer, Elmer Bernstein. Charles and Ray together wrote the narration. The narration itself is eloquent, and its opening statements reflect the Eames heartfelt sentiment for the universality of mankind. Quote from opening of the narration. When we look at the night sky, these are the stars we see, the same stars that shine down upon Russia each night. We see the same clusters, the same nebula, and from the sky it would be difficult to distinguish the Russian city from the American city. At the end, there's not a single roaring jet plane, nor any other indication of American might that the State Department thought surely would be there. Instead, the movie ends with a touch that Charles attributed to his partner Indis and all of the work, Ray Eames. The final scenes simply show quiet evening scenes. Children are kissing their parents goodnight. The last shot of all shown singly on the lower middle screen is a bowl of flowers. Charles and Ray were surprised and delighted to learn from their Russian translator that the name of these flowers had the same meaning in Russia as in America. Forget me, knots.