“Play Parade. An Eames Exhibition for Kids” is the first exhibition project by the Vitra Museum that has been conceived especially for children and for the families. The different shapes and colours that fill the installation will take the visitors to discover and experience Charles and Ray Eames’s understanding of toys as an instrument to great ideas.
Charles and Ray Eames’s “Play Parades” shows a hybrid world of fantasy and museum, allowing the visitor to explore how the Eameses gave expression to their endless supply of ideas by designing, collecting and displaying all kinds of objects. Original artifacts can be viewed in the showcases as well as colorful paper kites and graphical striking masks, that serve as a backdrop for their own toy designs from the 1950s. Visitors are not only invited to see, but also to touch and play with the replicas and re-editions that they will find in the installation. The early Eames films such as »Tops« or »Parade« set the different objects such as the spinning tops or a series of dolls and toy vehicles in motion.

The works on display include »The Toy«, a modular construction set consisting of wooden dowels and colourful panels that can be used to make model aeroplanes, towers, tents or sales stands. Visitors can appear in a circus ring wearing Eames animal masks, or erect large structures with the famous »House of Cards«. Since the Eameses felt that toys were of equal value and deserved the same attention as everyday furnishings and other utilitarian products, their toy designs were intended not only for children, but also for adults who shared the couple’s enthusiasm for play.

The exhibition demonstrates how seriously Charles and Ray Eames regarded their work and experiments with toys, and how play can be an important source of creativity – as they proved with their own designs. The scope of this show extends beyond the Eameses’ concepts for toys from the 1950s. Objects from their personal collection of toys reach further back in history, exposing today’s children to the cultural history of play and allowing them to test the timeless quality of these toys.
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Curator
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Janna Lipsky
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Venue
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Vitra Design Museum Gallery. Charles-Eames-Straße 2. 79576 Weil am Rhein, Germany
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From September 9th, 2017 to February 11th, 2018
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The Eameses are best known for their groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture design, industrial design and manufacturing, and the photographic arts.

Charles Eames was born in 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri.  He attended school there and developed an interest in engineering and architecture.  After attending Washington University in St. Louis on scholarship for two years and being thrown out for his advocacy of Frank Lloyd Wright, he began working in an architectural office.  In 1929, he married his first wife, Catherine Woermann (they divorced in 1941), and a year later Charles’s only child, Lucia was born.  In 1930, Charles started his own architectural office.  He began extending his design ideas beyond architecture and received a fellowship to Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he eventually became head of the design department.

Ray Kaiser Eames was born in 1912 in Sacramento, California.  She studied painting with Hans Hofmann in New York before moving on to Cranbrook Academy where she met and assisted Charles and Eero Saarinen in preparing designs for the Museum of Modern Art’s Organic Furniture Competition.  Charles and Eero’s designs, created by molding plywood into complex curves, won them the two first prizes.

Charles and Ray married in 1941 and moved to California where they continued their furniture design work with molding plywood.  During World War II they were commissioned by the United States Navy to produce molded plywood splints, stretchers, and experimental glider shells.  In 1946, Evans Products began producing the Eameses’ molded plywood furniture.  Their molded plywood chair was called “the chair of the century” by the influential architectural critic Esther McCoy.  Soon production was taken over by Herman Miller, Inc., who continues to produce the furniture in the United States today.  Another partner, Vitra International, manufactures the furniture in Europe.

In 1949, Charles and Ray designed and built their own home in Pacific Palisades, California, as part of the Case Study House Program sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine.  Their design and innovative use of materials made the House a mecca for architects and designers from both near and far.  Today, it is considered one of the most important post-war residences anywhere in the world.
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Published on: January 2, 2018
Cite: ""Play Parade. An Eames Exhibition for Kids" at Vitra Design Museum" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/play-parade-eames-exhibition-kids-vitra-design-museum> ISSN 1139-6415
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