In 1956, the designers Charles and Ray Eames appeared briefly on the NBC television show Home – presented by the actor Arlene Francis – and introduced their new lounge chair and ottoman: probably their best known work. Charles, with his crew cut and bow tie, submits to Francis’s cooing description of his talents, but subtly reminds her that his wife and creative partner is waiting in the wings. “She is behind the man, but terribly important,” asserts the host awkwardly.

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It’s an embarrassing interlude from one of the great collaborations in 20th-century design. Charles had trained as an architect, and Ray as a painter. Their design career began in the 1940s with moulded plywood furniture and early plastic chairs. Based on a philosophy of “learning by doing”, born out of a busy and generous studio culture, their work expanded to include buildings, toys and exhibitions. The NBC television spot hints at other ambitions: a decade after their first celebrity, and on the occasion of unveiling a luxurious signature piece, the Eameses are eager to plug the film they have just made about their house in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. As a new exhibition at the Barbican in London shows, by the mid 1950s they were producing films and multimedia presentations that are as much part of their formal and intellectual legacy as their furniture or the glass-walled Eames house itself. Charles had taught himself wet-plate photography as a child, was in the habit of documenting his life and work obsessively, and encouraged studio employees to do the same: “I’ll do anything to give an excuse to take photographs.” He and Ray had met at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, married in 1941 and moved to California in the same year. Before they had set up their design studio proper, Charles got a job in the art department at MGM, where he made friends with Billy Wilder and took countless photographs of Hollywood stage sets. Making films, he would later say, was a “terrible, enjoyable bloody business”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charles Eames in the plywood lounge chair and ottoman, 1956

Despite their immersion in the west-coast image industry, the Eameses never conceived of the hundred or so films they made as movies per se, or even as experimental films. “They’re just attempts to get across an idea,” Charles claimed in an interview with Paul Schrader. They seem to have arrived at film as a medium via their experiments with text, slide and graphic presentations. Although they had been making moving images for a few years, in some ways the first Eames “film” is the playfully and seriously titled Rough Sketch for a Sample Lesson for a Hypothetical Course, from 1953: a multimedia lecture about communication and the structures of visual thinking. It included still and moving pictures, text, graphics, music and even smells pumped through the ventilation system. Rough Sketch was the first of many such multiscreen projects, combining pedagogy and public spectacle. In 1959 in Moscow Charles and Ray showed Glimpses of the USA: a seven-screen portrait of their country. It is supposed to demonstrate geopolitical kinship; there are shots, so a narrator tells us, of “the same stars that shine on Russia each night”. But it’s also a film, or seven films, in thrall to the patterns produced by city streets and suburbs seen from the air: a kind of abstract counter to the excessively humanist Family of Man exhibition four years earlier – more a precursor, in its depiction of modern America, to serial photography of the 1960s, or the New Topographics in the 1970s. Questions of scale, and about the place of the human in relation to present culture and knowledge, had begun to preoccupy the Eameses. In 1964 they designed a complex environment for the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair: an event dedicated to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe”.

Although works such as Rough Sketch and Glimpses of the USA were graphically arresting, they were also, like the Eameses’ more conventional single-screen films, essentially illustrations of ideas, or a single idea in each case. Charles and Ray maintained a regular output of educational shorts for the likes of IBM, MIT and the Smithsonian Institution. It was the era of cybernetics and communications theory, and it seemed that developments in electronic transfer of information might pass the design world by if they were not adequately explained and embodied. As Charles put it: “I had the feeling that in the world of architecture they were going to get nowhere unless the process of information was going to come and enter city planning in general.” In 1953, he and Ray made A Communications Primer, which explained current theories of information flow, and in 1960 they completed An Introduction to Feedback, illustrating this key concept in cybernetics via footage of boats being steered, children playing and clowns and actors adapting to the vagaries of a live audience.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch House: After Five Years of Living (1955)

As the last example suggests, the Eameses’ “idea films” are notably light and playful. Some examples from the 1950s are unashamedly lyrical, seemingly at odds with the technological complexity they were celebrating at the same time, but still rigorously dedicated to new ideas about scale and perception. You can see the lyric tendency clearly in House: After Five Years of Living. Charles and Ray had designed their home as part of the Case Studies programme instituted in 1945 by Arts and Architecture magazine; the Eames house was eighth in the series of experimental new buildings. The 1955 film shows the two parts of the structure – domestic and professional spaces – already considerably adapted to their eccentric inhabitants. The twin austere boxes, in glass and coloured panels over a steel frame, are merely support for a lot of pastoral detail: flowers and foliage soften the lines of the house, textures of wood and stone make it seem newly primitive – on TV with Ray in 1956, Charles would say the innovative structure has “gotten to be like an old cave for us”.

House is full of elegant and meaningful things that can be held in the hand: seashells, toys, a selection of delicate wooden combs. The Eameses took to filming objects on a certain scale: spinning tops, miniature towns and model trains that may seem to exist at some remove from the world of cybernetic systems explained in films from the same period – until, that is, one notices that what the two strands of imagery and thought have in common is a genial but critical optimism, if not outright utopianism. This sense of wonder and adventure is ever present in the Eameses’ work. In 1949 Charles compiled a list of useful advice for design students. Alongside predictable instructions to read a lot and be curious and look afresh at the world, he recommends: “Always think of the next larger thing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch Powers of Ten (1977)

That is one way to describe Powers of Ten: the best known and most viewed of the Eames films, a study of knowledge and scale, human and technological visualisation and the wavering sense of where exactly you are while looking at the world. In fact it is not really a single film but a constellation of connected works, books and films, not all of which strictly belong to Charles and Ray Eames. The finally achieved film of 1977 is based initially on Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, a 1957 book by the Dutch educator Kees Boeke. In its first illustration, a girl sits outside her school holding a cat; the book zooms out, step by step, till it reaches the depths of space, then back in again vertiginously to the nucleus of a sodium atom. This is more or less the structure of all subsequent versions, printed or filmed; what differs is first the scene with which the process begins and, more important, the precise structuring principle of the movement itself.

In the early 1960s the Eameses filmed the illustrations from Cosmic View and began to experiment with camera setups. In 1968 the National Film Board of Canada released a mostly animated interpretation of Boeke’s work: a live-action boy in a boat on the Ottowa river gives way to drawings by Eva Szasz that track backwards to the wastes of space and then down again to the boy’s hand, where a mosquito is sucking his blood – we speed towards the nucleus of an atom in the insect’s proboscis before returning to the scene on the river. It’s a charming film, but lacks the main insight the Eameses now added. Also in 1968, they produced the first black-and-white “sketch” version of Powers of Ten. Over eight minutes, in scaled steps based on a factor of 10, the camera appears to move out from a man sleeping on a Miami golf course, and back into a carbon atom in his wrist – time, speed and distance are all indicated in a sort of dashboard to the left of the image. This version was later installed at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

The definitive Powers of Ten however, is the 1977 iteration. A man and woman are picnicking in a Chicago park; at first, we see one square metre of the scene, from one metre away: the man falls asleep on a rug strewn with food and drink and popular science magazines. A narrating voice – the physicist Philip Morrison – explains the scale, and the scene begins to expand: 10 metres across, 100, 1km, and so on. The lakeside appears, the nearby Soldier Field football stadium, the city, continent, planet, solar system and eventually the known universe. Even at that distance, we are still, so Morrison tells us, oriented perpendicularly to the square rug on the grass in Chicago. Now we begin to speed back towards the sleeping man, towards a point on his hand and thence via blood cells to a proton of a carbon atom.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eames house courtyard, Los Angeles

The final, nine-minute, version of Powers of Ten was assembled from live-action footage, photographs and drawings; most of its 14,000 frames were filmed individually. The movement feels stepped and seamless at the same time: there is less information about timing and distance than in the 1968 version, but the shifts in scale are just as clearly signalled by numbers on screen and Morrison’s narration. This makes for a curious viewing experience, every bit as complex in its way as the multiscreen works the Eameses had made for expos and museums. Writing about the first version in Film Quarterly in 1970, Schrader pointed out that it was pretty much impossible for the viewer to do just what Powers of Ten demanded: that is, to pay attention to both image and calculations at once. The film was a single-channel example of a phenomenon that had occupied the Eameses in all most of their film work to date: the sheer profusion of pictures and other stimuli was an argument in itself about the contemporary world of imagery and information technology. The films looked and spoke as if this new world were elegantly explicable, but they were structured so as to encourage doubt and difficulty.

Charles Eames died in 1978, Ray a decade later after sedulously cataloguing and preserving their studio and its outputs. In the last years of their life and work together, their non-design projects included films about Newton and Kepler, and a vast touring exhibition about Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. They continued to be exercised by relationships between part and whole, detail and ground, history and cosmos. As the Barbican exhibition reveals, one of the couple’s seemingly unlikely friends was Tony Benn. In August 1961, five years before he became minister of technology under Harold Wilson, Benn wrote to Charles, enclosing a limerick that seems to summarise both designers’ ambitions, as well as their intellectual and aesthetic interest in space and scale: “A dazzling designer called Eames / so excelled at a myriad schemes / that his rocketing mind / left the world far behind / now in orbit his genius gleams.”