christmas house of cards...

this little hand made christmas card is one of my favorite things i own. it's probably from the late 1950's, simply made by gluing an original photograph to some green and red construction paper. of course, the wonderful thing is the construction made using the house of cards set designed by charles and ray eames. the eames house of cards is one of my favorite toys ever created, and i have numerous different variations on the sets as they were released - originally through tigrett in the 50's, and later through creative playthings and ravensburg in the 70's. the cards were one of the eames best realizations of their own creative process resulting in a situation of new creative process for the user.

the architect as hot-rodder...

i discovered this image of the eames house in reyner banham's 1962 "guide to modern architecture". i'd never seen this image before, with charles' notations referencing a manufacturer's standard window sizes (the house was mainly built without any custom materials)... it's certainly a beautiful thing... (and one more potential score?).

banham has a special way of writing about architecture, as you can see here by his description of eames and the eames house: to many thinking men, frank lloyd wright was never the all-american architect of his own image of himself. he never appeared as much at ease in the real america as in the america of some splendid usonian dream, and - in some curious ways - he trailed a whiff of the european meisterschule of the high romantic period. charles eames, for all his internationalism and lack of whitmanesque ham, is as american as cambell soup. for all his love of things european and oriental he handles power tools and catalogued components like a hot-rodder born, and his own house, spare and elegant, square and ineloquent, is american like a shaker chair or a trestle bridge."

more do nothing machine

charles eames has pointed the way with his ultimately functional functionless solar toy."

back in october i did a post on the solar toy, better known as the "do nothing machine", designed by charles eames. the project was funded by alcoa, and the images in the previous post were from an alcoa publication.

a musty cache of old radio, stereo, and hi-fi magazines arrived in the mail today, intentioned to be subjected to the human paper shredder, and hopefully ending up in some of my work; but a few nice looking things are most definitely going to have to be left intact. one of them was the above surprise... an issue of radio and tv news with the eames solar toy on the front cover!

unlike the alcoa article, which focused mainly on eames's ideas; the short text in this magazine speaks about the technical aspects of the solar powered display - much of which, thankfully, i do not understand.