Design
Woven Pinnacles
By KENNETH J. ROBINSON THE American designer Charles Eames recently flew in—as they say—and told us how to make the most of the philosophies of great architects like Mies van der Rohe and form a platform upon which we can stand and from which we could reach out.' For Mr. Eames this was a coherent remark. It stood out like a sore thumb .in a naughty world. At any other time we might have had some difficulty in getting the right picture of these woven pinnacles, But coming, as they did, in the middle of Mr. Eames's contribution to the annual discourses at the Royal Institute of British Architects, they seemed solid and reassuring. It was nice to think of these secure. webbed platforms, as .we heard how the world is `so threaded with high-frequency inter- dependence that it acts as one great nervous system and requires all the feed-back controls man has devised to keep it from oscillating itself out of existence.'
Mr. Eames's .subject was the fashionable one of communications. This was ironic because, like most American designers, he can communicate in designs but not in words. The chairs he is famous for are pleasant enough, until he de- scribes them as `anti-gravitational devices.' And then, for me at any rate, they take on a new form. I shall never sit in an Eames chair with- out having the uncomfortable feeling that it is stopping me from falling to the ground. For some doubtless deep-rooted reason I like to think of a chair as something that holds me up. I have a nasty feeling that this jargon is all part of a subliminal sales technique. I suspect that it is an essential part of Eames's designs, just as the colour and appearance of coffee labels are now an essential part of coffee. Do more people buy moulded plastic chairs because their designer has said : 'Our object was to make this high-perform- ance material accessible to the consumer in a chair that would ultimately give it a high per- formance per dollar'? (To save you translating, . this means that what was wanted was a tough chair that was comparatively cheap.) If the jargon isn't simply the brand image, why does Eames use it? Is he just fooling?
The answer is that he is fooling everyone except himself. He has the honesty and humility to break through his helter-welter of words, his megalo-jumbo of ideas, and admit that his theories are 'very foggy indeed.' And like Buck- minSter Fuller, the American dome designer who calls himself 'a protagonist of the Design Initiative,' he fr evently interrupts himself to explain that he is merely 'thinking aloud.' Like Mr. Fuller, who gave last year's RIBA discourse, we forgive him for not preparing what he says —but for a different reason. We forgive Mr.
Fuller because it is such a relief when he leaves off, and we feel that his nightmare high-speed soliloquies (I'm an exploratory prober into anticipatory design science') must hurt him more than they butt us. We forgive Mr. Eames because of his little-boy-lost look, and because he some- times makes us feel there is a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel, as when he says that `The best example of industrial design in Britain is the London taxi-cab.'
But we really must stop being so forgiving to these importers of American design propaganda. If we don't we shall be overwhelmed by their loud thinking. Will Mr. Eames please regard this as an open letter, begging him to do a little home- work before he comes back in the autumn to give the Lethaby lectures at the Royal College of Art? I would have suggested that he might bring a public relations officer with him. But I've recently suffered rather badly from the pen of a PRO who works for Ernest J. Kump. Mr. Kump has been practising architecture in Cali- fornia for many years, though he likes to think he has spent those years on 'research into space environment.' When his PRO steps in to clarify this claim, things get much worse and we read that 'Man spends his life on earth moving stuff from here to there, combining this with that and piling it up in different forms to suit different purposes.' You may wonder what this has to do with Ernest J. The PRO hastens to explain that `Mr. Kump has given us hope for the day after tomorrow.'
Good. But in the meantime, what? I thought hope was less than two days away when I came across the design philosophy of another Ameri- can, Raymond Spilman. His use of words is astoundingly simple. But the words add up to something beyond one's wildest Eames. The public don't want bad designs, he says, but they buy them because they are so unsure of them- selves. Apparently the American male is 'easily and completely dominated by the haberdashery clerk, the head waiter and the automobile sales- man, none of whom is a real design authority.' While I was pondering on the role of the head waiter in the design world, I was completely thrown off my woven pinnacle by Mr. Spilman's pay-off line. The visual aspects of a country's products,' he writes, 'are far more important than whether they are good or bad design.'
Mr.. Eames is one up on his tongue-twisted contemporaries. He expresses himself in films as well as in words, thus proving that incoherence should be seen and not heard. He uses film sequences as he uses sentences. His own grammar of the cinema was particularly well demonstrated in Two Baroque Churches, which was shown here the other day for the first time and is now in the hands of the British Film Institute. This is a collection of coloured stills, edited to match an organ toccata. The images—some of them are very beautiful in themselves—form a patch- work that is interesting and infuriating. At the end of the film you have the impression that you've seen some baroque churches, just as at the end of an Eames talk you feel that something has been said. But it is a tourist's-eye view of the buildings. Now I come to think of it, Mr. Eames gives us a tourist's-eye view of the English language. After hearing him you feel he has only had time, in a short visit, to 'do' the more im- portant words, and that one day he'll come back to turn impressions of landmarks and beauty spots into knowledge of the landscape as a whole.
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