In the Eames Era, these lessons begin with the revolutionary medium of the chair.ĭesign historians have recently cast “good design” - with its promise of happiness through consumption and democratic futurity in the American model - as a form of “soft power.” This mode of propaganda and information-handling persuades by attraction rather than coercion, “enlisting support through intangibles like culture, values, belief systems, and perceived moral authority.” 4 Model homes, like model families or model couples, become normalizing instruments, implementing “the lives of free individuals” in a Cold War pedagogy of democratic lifestyle. 3 So much depends upon what it means to domesticate media, to make it a lifestyle. 2 The new, airy domesticity of good-life modernism was theorized in manifestos for postwar living, such as George Nelson’s and Henry Wright’s Tomorrow’s House: A Complete Guide for the Homebuilder (1945), and promulgated through architectural schools, banking establishments, construction industries, museums, and influential lifestyle magazines like House & Home. Eamesian happiness, circulating through both images and objects, linked the “goodness” of the American good life to the “goodness” of so-called good design. Arguably the most influential American designers of the postwar period, the Eameses were a model happy couple whose iconic designed objects and design practice were exported globally as symbols of the cheery lifestyle afforded by U.S.-style democratic liberalism. Yet even as the chart gestures to midcentury happiness as a product of calculation and technique, Saarinen’s high rating of the Eameses was entirely in keeping with their public image. Saarinen’s approach may strike us as rather technical, perhaps overly quantitative or schematic. 1 At the top - with a whopping 90 percent score - are his dear friends Charles and Ray Eames. Īmong the personal papers of the architect and designer Eero Saarinen is a curious chart of the marriages of his friends, ranking their relative happiness on a scale from 0 to 100 percent. Ray and Charles Eames with one of their aluminum chairs for the Herman Miller Furniture Company, ca.
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