Name: Constant Curiosity
Uploaded: 2025-12-03
Duration: 17 min 54 s

Charles and Ray Eames, famed for their iconic furniture, believed in constant prototyping to improve and refine their designs. They insisted that well-made products should be functional and accessible for all. Their granddaughter and the president of their institute, who keep their legacy alive, introduce their plans for a new art and design museum and describe their mission to cultivate curiosity that inspires positive problem-solving for our world.

Constant Curiosity

Conferences

Hello, everybody. It's wonderful to be here to share about the work of Ray and Charles Eames and the work that we're doing today at the institute. I think I'm pushing the right button. M Ah, we're gonna go, can we go back? You can go back. Here we are. Ray and Charles Eames were a husband and wife team that worked together for over 30 years. Some of you might recognize their iconic lounge chair and Ottoman. When they were designing this chair, they actually said they were designing seating, not chairs. They said if you call it designing a chair, you're eliminating the ottoman before you've even thought of it. And this is part of what we love to share with the work of Ray and Charles is not just the objects themselves, but the questions Ray and Charles were asking while working on the projects. These are 3 etchings that Charles did. He trained as an architect and then also taught himself photography, working with his father's wet plate prints and also as a painter. When he traveled, he liked to do sketches that he turned into etchings when he got back home. Now Ray grew up in California. She studied fashion in New York and then also painting at Hans Hoffman's studio in New York and became one of the co-founders of the American Abstract Artists in 1937. This is one of her paintings from the Hans Hoffman era. Now, because so many of us were traveling here today, we thought you might like a glimpse of their passports for all the many travels that they did around the world. What we do is we love to compare and add the itineraries that they have with their passports, and it helps us show how they went around the world doing everything from IBM Pavilion in New York to also working in Moscow and even India too. Now the thing about Ray and Charles is they worked very hard, but as they also said they like to take their pleasure seriously. So on one of the photo shoots they actually jumped on this motorcycle. Do you notice the kick stand is down and it's one of the iconic pictures of them working together today. Now in about after 25 years of working together, they were asked to explain the design process, and this is how they did it. What they said is there's one circle that their office and themselves want to accomplish on the project. The second was also their client, but there was always a third circle society as a whole, and you had to focus on the part that overlapped for all three. That might be making the exhibit Mathematica for IBM in 1961. It might be making a leg splint during World War II to help the Navy with some of the injured soldiers, so everything they did fell into that area of overlapping interest. Now what's interesting is they took that idea farther with that little smaller diagram below. That's actually 5 circles, and when they spoke about making chairs for Herman Miller and Vitra, it actually had to be 5 areas of overlapping interest. It had to be good for the company, good for the person on the line actually making your chair, good for the designer, good for the community, and good for the environment. That's goodness all the way down is what they called it. Another way they like to say that is we wanted to make the best for the most for the least, the best product for the most people for the least amount. That was always the goal. This is my mother with Ray. I don't know if you know. Ray actually designed some of her own clothing. She'd often make one for my mother too. The best part of my grandmother's clothing was that she would put 8 to 10 pockets in her skirts, so she had a place for her camera, her sewing kit, her sketch pad, her keys. It was really what I realized later was her tool kit, and she was always prepared. Now, something that was also made special for my mother when she was growing up were letters that my grandfather used to write to her. It's called a rebus. This was before there were emojis. They were called Rebus letters. And what this says is, Lucia. I am so sorry that I cannot take you to school. Are you drinking milk like an angel? It rained all the way to Arkansas. Love Daddy. That was from one of his business trips when he was working on the churches in 1930s. It's one of my favorite artifacts in the collection. Now here's me with my grandfather. I love getting a chance to go visit them. They never talked down to us. They shared whatever they were working on. It could be a film, a toy, an exhibit, and what I loved was just being around them. You learned how they were solving problems. They call that more found learning less teaching, just being aware that way. Something they told when I said I wanted to be a sculptor, the most important thing is that you love what you're doing, and the second that you're not afraid of where your next idea will lead, and they really did that themselves. They really let their designs come from the learning. They said one of the most important things was to get away, put away your preconceived notions and let your designs come from the learning and working in those materials. Here's me and my mother and Charles on one of those visits. It was always exciting to get a chance to go visit Venice, California, not Venice, Italy, Venice, California, and yet to see what they were working on. I remember these as a grandchild, but today what's exciting is to look at these things as a chief curator because really everything that my grandparents did was about communicating ideas. It just happened to be through a piece of furniture, an exhibit, a graphic, whatever. And so what we're doing that today is sharing how they apply these ideas and really what was the best way to share what they wanted to communicate. Here's just one of the love correspondences when they shared with me, and I'm realizing now the greatest gift they gave me was the time that I got to spend with them. Now this is the place that my mother and I called home. She was on this side. My husband and I and our children are over there on the right hand side. She built this home when she inherited the collection from their space at 901 Washington Boulevard in Los Angeles, and she wanted to create a space where she could house the collection, share it with. who wanted to borrow pieces, but what ended up happening is friends and colleagues would come over and we started immersing and showing people all the different areas that Ray and Charles worked in. Most people enter the world of their work through the furniture, but for this case they could also be seeing some of the raw materials that Ray and Charles were working with at the time. Now what's fun about the drawers, these drawers happen to come from the graphics room at the office, is when you get to open them. And you get to see some of the raw materials that they worked with to actually make the products that they did. And in this time of so much of a digital age, it's been so exciting to watch our guests be able to see the tools that Ray and Charles, the prototypes that they made, being so hands on in the learning. This is the gallery space at my mom's home. What's really special about this for me is something that I'm hearing mentioned a few times today. As I look at each one of those chairs, I'm thinking about that Ray and Charles used to talk about the sum of all constraints. Each project that they worked on had its own peculiar list, they said, whether it was a chair, an exhibit, a film, and so what you have to think about, they always said, is, is it a constraint of price, of material, of surface, of time, and really think through. Everybody who's going to touch that chair from the sourcing of the material to when it might be thrown away later. And so what I appreciate is the discussions I've heard today is really thinking through that guest host relationship, something else that my grandparents talked about, which is anticipating the needs of your client before they've thought of it. Here's my mom and me. I'm so excited that today we are John and I are going to work together on a dream that was my mother's with how do we share this collection even more. And 7 years ago yesterday, John and I met, author and also ar. Test himself and wanting to really take this idea and amplify it in as many ways as possible, we've been doing things with pop-up exhibits, creating publications, and so with this, I would like to hand it over to my extraordinary partner and co-founder John. Thank you, Lisa. At the core of Charles and Ray's work is curiosity. They had this insatiable curiosity for the world around them. And so when we were conceiving of this organization, we came up with the name the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. We wanted Eames and Institute to be even more fun than Eames alone implies, and so we modeled it after Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and this is what we got. So we've been really intrigued by how curiosity has piqued people's interests as much, sometimes even more so than Eames. So there were 5 things that I think we want to walk through very quickly with the work of the institute. The first is about being a good host, and we do that at our principal headquarters now in Richmond, California. And there is no better host, let me assure you, than my co-founder Lisa. This is Lisa taking care of the land at the Eames Ranch on the left, and Lisa guiding tours as she does almost every day at our archives. Here's a small glimpse into what guests get to experience, and as Clay mentioned, it's this amazing sampling of the parts and pieces that went into what Lisa describes as the home runs, their iconic chairs, their films, their exhibits, things of that sort, and we get to watch day over day people react to these physical objects in such a, you know, a time of digital consumption, and we're so fortunate to be able to do that. The second area is craft, and this is something that I certainly associated with Eames because Lisa and her mother had their practices, their art practices at the ranch long before I arrived, and we've tried to in the in the time period that we're going to create an immersive Eames experience again at the ranch, we've tried to welcome artists, designers, and creatives to come and hone their craft, and so they've drawn on some of the most basic tools. Which we think are very important to return to again in this time of digital technology. They've tended to our textile studio, our wood studio, our metal shops, etc. They've also worked with our team to draw on the collection for inspiration, and they've worked with our team that tends to the land. Our farmers and others in order to bring new new modes of of medium to their practices, and these are but two of our amazing artists that were part of our pilot year cohort this year. On one hand, a very experienced artist named Wendy Chin, and on the other, a very up and coming artist who had her first residency with us at the Eames Ranch, Kristen Steyn, and we're so proud to be working with both of them. The third area is around connections around community. Community was so important to the life and the work of Ray and Charles, and this quote, I think, speaks to it well. Eventually everything connects people's ideas, objects, the quality of the connections is the key to the quality per se. And so with that we knew that there were many more people than just Ray and Charles or just us or just our team or even our artists and residents who were using curious problem solving to address some of the world's most intractable challenges, as well as simply bring the light and joy into our world. And so we conceived of this program called the Curious 100 through through which we would identify 100 curious problem solvers initially in the United States and expanding in 2027 to be more global, and it was such an amazing opportunity for us to convene this group of people. We broke it down into 10 categories. We hoped that we could identify like what what are the variety of people that practice curious problem solving. And so within each one of these categories are 10 people as well, including one of our speakers coming up soon, Kevin Bethune, and we had a chance to welcome this group of people in a couple of different formats to our archives to be in community and work with us and workshop ideas, and we hope to do a lot more of that going forward. The third area is around the details. The 4th area is around the details, and this is something that we have a chance to share when people can get up close with the material, sometimes even hold it in their hands. And we had an opportunity this year to take one of San Francisco's most iconic buildings, the Transamerica Pyramid Center, and to partner with Chave Development that owns Transamerica now and bring not just our brand to the pinnacle of the of the Transeric pyramid but bring our collection to the city. San Francisco and so we selected a small group of objects. We brought them to the Transamerica Annex gallery and over the course of the past 6 months we've welcomed over 40,000 people through these doors free and open to the public seven days a week and it's such a beautiful exhibit bathed in natural light. It's called Past as Prologue The Last Decade of Eames furniture in 1968 to 1978. And we've held public programming of all types, outdoor movie screenings, um, you know, talks and other things of the sort in the gallery, and it's just been amazing to be right in the heart of San Francisco, especially at this time of rebirth there. And the fourth area is, excuse me, the 5th area is to think about, well, what do we take from all of this, how do we keep iterating, and how do we bring all of this to scale? And so the quote that we love from Ray and Charles is, how do we get from where we are today to where we want to be. And in August of this year we had a chance to acquire this extraordinary complex. It's a former corporate campus for two multinational corporations, McGraw Hill Publishers and Birkenstock later, and we are planning to transform this building and campus that was essentially Not utilized for the past decade or more and turned into a world class art design and creativity museum. We're so thrilled to be the stories of this new campus, and we've got the opportunity now to work with Herzog and Demeron, Basel-based architects that have designed multiple major museums as well as worked on adaptive reuse in really compelling ways. So today for the first time we're sharing a few interior images from the conceptual design phase of this work and so this is inside the warehouse which is this very distinct hyper parabolic roof structure and our intention is to take this from a super raw industrial space and to bring slightly warmer elements like wood. into it as well as to open up and create a true indoor outdoor connection. It's a curtain wall system so we're able to effectively eliminate all of the exterior walls, and we're so excited to be working with this with these spaces. There will also be Huge spaces like the Tate Modern or the the Armory in New York that have opportunities for extremely large, flexible events, temporary exhibits, and who knows what else we can dream up. There will also be extraordinary outdoor spaces, public plazas, water features, sculpture, and miles and miles and miles of walking trails across both this 90 acre site as well as our adjacent properties. And we're not just working with the existing spaces, we're taking, for example, this underside of a of a parking lot and turning it into a conditioned space that could be an educational center or something of the sort. And these are just some of the spaces that we've started to consider as we enter into our schematic design phase. We're so excited to bring this project online. Our goal is by 2030. We've got an incredible group of partners. We're always looking for more. In the meantime, we're so excited to be welcoming an array of groups, companies, organizations, institutions to partake in our ENS archives experience as well. And In 2030 we hope to welcome you all to what we are calling the Museum of Infinite Curiosity, and it will use Ray and Charles's legacy as the cornerstone, but it will expand far and wide to other creative legacies. It will showcase the work of other contemporary stars, people that you could name, and it will bring to the world emerging artists and emerging voices that have really truly yet to be discovered. This is a quote by John as we've been interviewing more and more and sharing about this extraordinary next step, but for me, I just think it really sums up what our goal is. The world's greatest resource is human curiosity. It is the force that guided the Eameses through a lifetime of exploration, fuels every act of design, and will continue to shape our collective future. The Museum of Infinite Curiosity will honor that for, give it form, space, and voice, becoming a home for curious problem solvers, and we look forward to welcoming you in 2030. Thank you.