Design for the masses. Make the best for the most for the least.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit the home of Charles & Ray Eames, also known as Case Study House No. 8, this house is a living & breathing machine of design! It’s the perfect compliment of work and play. It’s humbly set on the site, proportionally sized for its needs, honestly detailed, and innovatively responsive to the cultural changes of its time. When you walk onto the site, the building takes you by surprise; you don’t even know its there until the single panel of Eames red pops out from the landscape. A few walks around the site and you can literally feel why it’s amazing. The experience taps into all your senses, you can smell the line of eucalyptus trees, feel the salt water air, experience the subtle breeze, and grasp the scale of this building in relation to you. There is clearly a narrative to this building and the elements on site really do all the speaking, you’re simply the participant.

One of the most commendable characteristics about the way the Eames’ worked was their approach to receiving inspiration. They never let style dictate the end product. While they were designing their house they were exploring free form concepts for chairs, two incredibly different styles with a shared common interest of addressing purpose. Their ability to innovate what materials could be & redefine stereotypical understanding of those materials is rather relentless and impressive. I love their fascination with toys, photography, and film…all used to discover and showcase ways to see the world differently. They simplified design and made it incredibly easy to understand. What really stuck with me was their commitment to iteration, to build and test over and over again until the final design was complete in all spatial facets. When you do this and tangibly feel the design process, you start to see details that never would have surfaced in drawing or biased perspective renders. That same idea can apply for most encounters of our current modern day to day. When I now encounter any problem that I want to fix, I test it, over and over again, changing up the variables to see if what I conclude is in fact as accurate as I know. 

In Eames: The Architect and The Painter, Charles & Ray noted that they saw life as work as life as work. That’s a beautiful thing. I consistently think of a time when I came into the office on a Sunday morning, pumped about getting to my desk and cranking some ideas out. I dropped by my usual spot for coffee, rang up the bill and the girl behind the counter said to me “are you going in to work?” I said “yes”. She looked at me with sympathy and said “that sucks” and I thought that really sucks you feel that way. I remind myself of this experience whenever I feel burnt out because it gives me a point of reference, where I’m going and why I want to get there. I’ve always told myself if I begin to feel the way she does for too many days in a row, it’s time to switch gears. 

When you can achieve that sense of harmony in what you do, you never want to stop. It’s addictive and more then ever, it makes you feel alive. Isn’t that really what we’re all trying to do anyways? Do things that we love so much such that it doesn’t even feel like work. If you are one of those people who feel the way I feel, make the time to watch the movie and then go check out the house for yourself. 

It is incredibly humbling.

*Note: None of these images were edited. 
Yes, the house is this beautiful. Yes, the light does really hit the house that way :)