Review: The World of Charles and Ray Eames

Abstract

The World of Charles and Ray Eames Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, London 21 October 2015–14 February 2016 The Barbican Centre, in the City of London, is an extensive postwar development of 1955–82 by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon comprising high-rise residential towers, low-rise apartments, a major theater, cinemas, and an art gallery, all robustly executed in exposed-aggregate concrete and purple-brown brick and tile. It is very good of its kind, but it is the antithesis of anything one might associate with the delicate, colorful world of Charles and Ray Eames. In the same space where the Barbican Art Gallery's curator Catherine Ince presented the exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life in 2012, she attempted, for The World of Charles and Ray Eames , to imbue the heavy, windowless gallery with some of the sunlight of Southern California, and she largely succeeded. Much of the concrete structure that penetrates the gallery was hidden behind white or dark-gray wall panels on which exhibits and labels were sparingly displayed and from which a framework of cold-formed galvanized steel studs emerged to provide a sense of lightweight if temporary construction (Figure 1). In the absence of any attempt to re-create all or part of the Eameses’ house in Pacific Palisades, California—as was done in the Case Study Houses …