Eames: The Architect and the Painter opened in New York last week.
Co-director of the documentary Bill Jersey talked about the film and the impact of the Eames aesthetic on design with Leonard Lopate on WYNC:
As mentioned in the interview, A.O. Scott also reviewed the movie for The New York Times, drawing the interesting, if inevitable, parallel with Steve Jobs Apple:
The subjects are Charles and Ray Eames, a married couple (sometimes thought to be brothers because of their names) whose approach to product design and the presentation of information was in its way as influential as Mr. Jobs’s… Their motto was “the best for the least for the most” — a characteristically pithy statement of a utopian ideal of capitalist mass production. The idea that striking design and sound craftsmanship could be available to everyone has an obvious democratic charm, but it also contains a paradox. The Eameses, who had long-lasting contracts with Westinghouse, I.B.M. and other large corporations, were selling the notion that individualism could not only coexist with commercial standardization, but that idiosyncratic expression could also flourish within the collective rituals of consumption. The stuff you buy, if it’s the right stuff, is part of what makes you what you are.
A must-see, I think.
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