With More Than 40,000 Objects, the New Eames Institute Will Show Much More Than Just Chairs

You don’t have to look hard to find the work of Charles and Ray Eames. The famous design couple’s molded plastic chairs and low-slung lounges appear in open houses, offices, and your friends’ homes, whether they’re die-hard fans or simply like how the pieces communicate good taste. Reebok released sneakers with Ray’s dot pattern, skate brand Globe put the Eameses’ graphics on a few of their boards, and there was even a loungewear line. These days, their legacy is a little bit here, a little bit there.

But you no longer have to take it in piecemeal. Starting February 14, the Eames Institute will host tours of its brand new headquarters, a converted warehouse in the East Bay town of Richmond, California, that serves as a one-stop shop for all things Eames: a gallery, archive, and workspace with rows of open shelving and flat-file drawers holding a revolving set of the more than 40,000-piece collection owned by the institute. It includes first drafts, polished ideas, and everything in between.

"My mom [Lucia Eames] felt their most important work was the process: how they got to the solution," explains the gallery’s chief curator and Charles’s granddaughter, Llisa Demetrios. "It’s really important to see the iterations and prototyping to understand that they really cared about what a chair would do, as opposed to what a chair would look like. That was a totally different trajectory for design ideas at that time."

Previously, these pieces were scattered between storage facilities and the homes of Charles’s five grandchildren, who come by way of his first wife, Catherine Woermann. The Eames Archives marks the first time these objects—from prototypes of aluminum group office furniture, to the Kazam machine that formed molded plywood chairs, to assemblages of seashells that were referenced in the creation of La Chaise, a sinuous lounge—are being hosted, documented, and considered together. Demetrios will personally guide tours of rotating exhibits on the Eameses’ approach to problem-solving in design, featuring many pieces that have never been shown publicly.

Before the opening of the Richmond facility, the best place to step into the Eameses’ world was by touring their family home in Los Angeles, Case Study House No. 8. In 2019, as it celebrated its 70th birthday, the Eames Institute became a nonprofit with financial backing from Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, with a goal to expand the Eameses reach. In 2022, Demetrios began hosting small, private tours of her mother’s collection of Eames designs and artifacts at her family home, the Eames Ranch, a 72-acre parcel in Petaluma, California, with a farmhouse designed by William Turnbull in 1992. The Eames Archives plans to co-host shows with the ranch , which is undergoing a renovation to create a restorative agriculture program that aligns with the couple’s vision for environmentally conscious design.

The Richmond warehouse was originally designed by San Francisco architect Jim Jennings and previously owned by William Stout of William Stout Architectural Books, a San Francisco brick and mortar acquired by the Eames Institute in 2022. Its internal design team collaborated with Bay Area firm Everywhere Architecture, New York–based Standard Issue, and EHDD, also an architecture firm, to turn the cinderblock-and-concrete industrial space into a flexible gallery, open-shelved archive, and lofted, open-plan offices with a full kitchen and meeting spaces. The institute will use the grounds to host and plan exhibitions, and catalogue every item in the vast collection for the first time.

"We're always thinking about how [the insitute’s] work can help inform and inspire the next generation of designers and current ones," says Demetrios. Presenting the Eameses oeuvre holistically is one of the best ways to do that, she says. "When I visited their office growing up, there was always this density of objects around them," she says. At the Eames Archives, "we can create more of that kind of experience that was a catalyst and inspiration for designing a chair, as they said, in a 30-year flash."

The Eames Archives plans to regularly change out the objects on display, pulling from an off-site storage facility in Oakland. In the meantime, the institute is working in phases to acquire adjacent warehouses to create space for in-house conservation, photography, and more initiatives that support cataloguing and digitizing efforts. 

"I like that everything isn’t in one place because there are different stories to tell " explains Demetrios, who says she’s currently documenting the contents of a drawer from Ray and Charles’s office that has not been opened since Ray’s death nearly 40 years ago. "When people come here, they can finally see the boundless curiosity and deep sense of discovery that Ray and Charles had in their personal lives and in their work."

You can make reservations for guided tours of the archives beginning February 1 at the Eames Institute website.

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