Industrial-Strength Design Studio Pays Homage to Past

Motorists driving on West Washington Boulevard in Venice might not notice the simple brick warehouse buildings on the corner of Hampton Drive, marked only by large black numbers spelling out the address: 901.

But this group of industrial sheds is noteworthy because it housed the practice known as the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. From the 1940s to the ‘70s, the office was the West Coast’s leading design studio and the welcome pilgrimage spot for designers of every sort, from architects to graphic artists, from all over the world.

“Visiting architecture freaks tried to make the Eameses’ office in Venice their first port of call,” wrote critic Reyner Banham, “exploiting their good nature to secure introductions before going on to investigate the rest of the scene.”

After Ray Eames’ death in 1988, 10 years after that of her husband and partner, the studio is getting a new lease on life as the office of graphic designers Bright & Associates.

An extensive remodeling, crafted by architect Frank Israel, has transformed the old warehouses into a post-modern stage set for the act of design in a post-Industrial Age.

Within the shell of the old Eames studio, Israel has created a series of dramatic spaces to serve the functions of a busy design practice. The rough brick exterior is left largely untouched, as homage to the buildings’ history.

“I felt the Eames studio would be a great place to work in,” said Keith Bright, president of Bright & Associates. “The warehouses, though humble, have a powerful aura for any designer.”

As a direct homage to the past, the famed black-on-white “901” that Ray Eames personally painted on the brick work has been freshened but otherwise left intact. The white-painted wall that served as an impromptu outdoor screening room for the Eames films and slide shows is still in place; it will continue to be used to show movies and graphic images.

Other sections of warehouse walls have gotten a coat of off-white paint; an elaborate new angled metal and glass canopy marks the pivoting, zinc-clad front door.

The outdoor areas surrounding the studio, where the Eameses and associates ate lunch in the open air or set off for strolls on Venice Beach, have been landscaped and populated with benches and tables under a retractable sailcloth canopy.

“We didn’t want to lose the rough-and-ready ambience the studio had on the street in its heyday,” Israel explains. “But we did want to express its new, and rather more self-conscious incarnation.”

Israel’s strategy of honoring the ghosts of the past while creating a contemporary mise en scene takes a dramatic turn in the mustard-yellow interior courtyard. It is two stories high, is illuminated by a wide skylight and serves as Bright & Associates’ reception lobby.

The courtyard’s odd proportions are deliberately hard to figure at first sight. A skewed parallelogram vertically and horizontally, the airy space, overlooked by a mezzanine of offices, resembles a house of cards about to topple over.

The sense of oddness is emphasized by the edge of a boardroom table projecting through a slot high in one wall, as if the company directors, in an excess of playfulness, were trying to push it out of an upper window.

From the courtyard, a dark tunnel, lined with gray ribbed sheet metal and chocolate-colored plywood, leads into the studio’s main space.

In the studio, the original timber ceiling trusses are left exposed above a new series of wide stucco arches. The arches, which Israel says were inspired by a New York City subway tunnel, exaggerate the studio’s interior perspective and make it seem much longer than it is.

Continuing the subway metaphor, Israel has filled the spaces on either side of the arches with small, glass-walled cubicles housing paste-up and layout rooms that resemble concession stalls. The activities in these stalls, open to view by passing associates, clients or visitors, add an air of urban buzz to the general creative hum.

A curved, outwardly tilted birch plywood wall screens the main conference room and bellies out into the interior lobby. Alongside is Bright’s office, beside the glazed side entry off Hampton Drive.

The slanting rust-red steel beam above the side door runs into Bright’s space and becomes part of a slatted wooden canopy that hides the overhead lights. A high square window in the opposite wall allows Bright a glimpse of the rooftops of the Indiana Avenue artists’ studios designed by Frank Gehry--one of Israel’s mentors.

The color scheme throughout the interior plays off areas of mustard-yellow, chocolate-brown and a rusticated reddish terra cotta against the neutral backdrop of bare brick and white stucco. The effect is muscular yet artful, Arnold Schwarzenegger in an Esprit sweat shirt.

“Frank (Israel) has made us a very creative space to work in,” Bright said, “where every perspective stimulates the eye and makes the pulse beat faster.”

The radically redesigned Eames studio’s sophisticated new ambience is poles apart from the atmosphere that ruled in the old days, says noted graphic designer Deborah Sussman, who worked at 901 for years, off and on, between 1953 and ’66.

“In Charles’ and Ray’s era, the studio itself was never consciously designed,” she says. “It was a workshop, pure and simple. How it looked was simply a byproduct of the Eameses’ creative energy and style.”

Sussman remembers that the “excitement came from being around Charles and Ray and the sense of family they created, and the images and objects they invented or collected. I can’t imagine them ever caring about the studio’s interior design as a stage-y setting for their work.”

The Eames style, known as the “systems approach,” cross-fertilized advanced technologies, such as molded laminated plywood and fiberglass-reinforced plastics, with traditional craftsmanship and influences drawn from the native arts and crafts of many countries. These elements were fused in a multimedia range of designs, including architecture, films, furniture, displays, exhibits, children’s building games and an early prototype for a solar energy Sun Machine.

Charles Eames’ design motto was direct and populist.

“If you are going to really involve people,” he wrote, “you must open the door in an intriguing and fascinating way.”

Their studio may have been unself-conscious. But in their famous high-tech house in the Pacific Palisades, they inhabited an artfully contrived space.

Assembled out of standard industrial structural components, the Chautauqua Boulevard residence, one of the earliest to be designed as part of the innovative Case Study House program, resembles a three-dimensional, walk-in painting by Piet Mondrian in its composition of black steel and primary colored panels.

“I feel an affinity for the Eameses in their admiration of the raw elements of the technology of construction,” Israel explains, “and I’ve tried to express that in the re-creation of their old studio, reinterpreted in a contemporary idiom.”

In the 1940s and ‘50s, when the Eameses were at the height of their influence, designers took their technology straight, Israel observed. “Sharing a belief that technical fixes could help create a bright Brave New World, Charles and Ray invented a high-tech style that was, even then, more metaphor than practical fact.”

Technology is a major metaphor in his own style, but seen through a veil of irony that playfully recognizes its ambivalence, Israel says.

As in his design for the Propaganda Films offices in Hollywood, Israel has, in the Bright & Associates studio, put industrial details in implied quotation marks. Familiar technologies thus become one more contrivance in the post-Modernist’s bulging bag of tricks.

“I feel the Eameses, with their noted sense of fun, would appreciate the irony,” Israel says. “They would understand that, while their charming kind of innocence is no longer possible in today’s more ambiguous and treacherous context, it’s still a designer’s challenge to create spaces that delight.”