The Eames House Analysis
Drive down the congested coast highway, past the Santa Monica Pier. Take a right at Chautauqua Boulevard and for the first time you are finally driving at the speed limit uphill on a winding bourgeois road. Walk to the end of an unsuspecting alleyway, past all the gated post-modern mansions that seem to each exist in their own worlds behind lines of lush green foliage and stark white concrete walls. At the end of the road is The Eames House, Case Study House #8—the archetypal symbol of post-modernism. The moment you walk onto the grounds of the house, the world changes—removed from the bustling traffic of Pacific Coast Highway, away from the beachgoers indulging in the California summer in the middle of winter. The birds chirp, sing, and flutter
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They yield themselves to a bigger picture—life. In his book Art as Existence: The Artist's Monograph and its Project, Gabriele Guerico uses the life-and-work model as a mode of looking at artworks in relation to their makers. This model presents “the artist both as an individual empirically linked to a body of work through historical facts and as a personality created solely by that body of work.” Although the object within the house were not all exclusively created by Charles and Ray Eames, they connect these objects to one another and give them new meaning by imprinting their life experiences onto them. The artists’ labor lies in the meaning and function that they give to these objects, not necessarily in the making of them. Guerico further extends the life-and-work model by referencing Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, which claims that the artist maintains the role of the protagonist of a narrative, while simultaneously casting himself as “an identity existing in his own works, either by making attributions or by defining his achievements, mode of representation, and stylistic evolution” (Guerico 14). The objects at The Eames House come into being for the spectator when they place these objects in relationship to a constructed life narrative of Charles and Ray Eames. The Eames’s physical presence from 1949 to 1958 influences environment and the integrity of the house. The linear narrative is told through material object, but makes the Eames’s the main protagonists. Their story visually plays on an infinite loop that only retells the events occurring within the 39 years that they lived
They yield themselves to a bigger picture—life. In his book Art as Existence: The Artist's Monograph and its Project, Gabriele Guerico uses the life-and-work model as a mode of looking at artworks in relation to their makers. This model presents “the artist both as an individual empirically linked to a body of work through historical facts and as a personality created solely by that body of work.” Although the object within the house were not all exclusively created by Charles and Ray Eames, they connect these objects to one another and give them new meaning by imprinting their life experiences onto them. The artists’ labor lies in the meaning and function that they give to these objects, not necessarily in the making of them. Guerico further extends the life-and-work model by referencing Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, which claims that the artist maintains the role of the protagonist of a narrative, while simultaneously casting himself as “an identity existing in his own works, either by making attributions or by defining his achievements, mode of representation, and stylistic evolution” (Guerico 14). The objects at The Eames House come into being for the spectator when they place these objects in relationship to a constructed life narrative of Charles and Ray Eames. The Eames’s physical presence from 1949 to 1958 influences environment and the integrity of the house. The linear narrative is told through material object, but makes the Eames’s the main protagonists. Their story visually plays on an infinite loop that only retells the events occurring within the 39 years that they lived