Case study conservation on the Eames' Case Study House

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The Eames House in Pacific Palisades stands as an epitome of Midcentury California design, an expression of modernity and optimism that many still emulate today. Said Bill Stern, founder of the California Museum of Design: “The Eames House eschewed traditional materials like bricks and sticks, and used glass and steel in fresh ways to create a new understanding of how people can live.” (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

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Charles and Ray Eames nurtured a design imagination that knew few boundaries, but if you were to look for its center — its heart — you might have found it in their living room. With its 17-foot-high ceiling, panels of glass opening to a grove of eucalyptus, and a vast range of objects collected over a lifetime, the Eames House living room is where two of the most influential designers of the 20th century spent hours talking, entertaining friends and playing with the collections that informed their work. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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The living room does not resemble the type of rigorously formal space that people today expect in a modern house from the era. Even though the Eames House is a wonderfully calibrated exercise in steel, glass and concrete panel, inside, the architecture takes a back seat to the extraordinarily diverse collection of objects. Here, an American folk art crow decoy. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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A Chinese lantern hangs in front of one of the same house plants that, quite amazingly, can be seen in historic photos of the house. Since the Eameses’ deaths – Charles in 1978, Ray exactly 10 years later, to the day – a caretaker has kept the house in a state of suspended animation, as though Ray has simply the left the house on an errand. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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A stool designed by Lucia Dewey Eames, Charles’ granddaughter, and given to Ray as gift. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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Consumed by a quest to put their ideas about play and freedom into material form, Ray and Charles Eames were continually excited by how others, especially in cultures far from their own, expressed themselves. They filled their living room with hides, shells, stones and folk art from around the world. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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The bookcase was built at the Eames Office. The ladder reaching toward the corrugated steel ceiling allowed Charles to rearrange hanging light fixtures and string paintings face down, parallel to the floor, so if one were to look up, one would see a gallery on the ceiling. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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A Tlingit ceremonial oar from the Pacific Northwest hangs from the ceiling. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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More collections on the living room bookcase. Placement of every object was critical. “Ray would always be moving things around,” said Pat Kirkham, the author of “Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century.” “Mostly it was few inches here or there, but how everything aligned intrigued her.” (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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A white-painted terra cotta folk sculpture of Nandi, the bull of the Hindu god Shiva, sits on the living room bookcase. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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An alcove off the living room. Though it has been suggested that Charles was responsible for the hard, architectural edges and Ray did the soft interiors, Charles’ grandson Eames Demetrios said the partnership wasn’t that simple. “Charles was trained as an architect, Ray as a painter, but they had a holistic collaboration, where each was the other’s most important sounding board,” he said. “Their collaboration was always blurring the line between technology and art, and their designs flowed from an understanding of the materials and the needs of the user.” (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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In the living room alcove, a feather fan with wrapped handle and another Nandi figurine from India. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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A toy horse on wheels from India and a pillow-shaped basket, possibly from China. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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Enamel eye dishes, and … (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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A basket made by indigenous people of Canada. Elsewhere, visitors might seen a wooden spinning toy, a crystal vase or wooden leopard sculptures that arrived courtesy of Billy Wilder. Charles and Ray swapped them for an Alexander Calder mobile. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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Limoges plates, and … (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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Wooden grasshopper of unknown origin. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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Hallway looking back toward the living room. The design echos the Frank Lloyd Wright strategy of using confined entrances as a precursor to voluminous spaces, but the Eames House pushed the concept further with the kind of open floor plan that remains an element of modern living today. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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In the living room alcove, a feather fan with wrapped handle and another Nandi figurine from India. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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At the time, the couple’s cross-cultural and highly dense approach to decorating was much discussed. The house and its living room was published in numerous popular magazines, including Family Circle. Note the table, which is graced with an eclectic array of objects, including … (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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Enamel eye dishes, and … (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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Limoges plates, and ... (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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A decoupage book. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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Back in the living room, layered carpets from around the world provide a backdrop to a piece of marble - a de facto tabletop for the simple elegance of a candle, flowers and shell. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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More than 1,500 objects remain in place, the room frozen in time. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

By Suzanne Muchnic

May 18, 2013 9:07 AM PT

Surprisingly, little has changed at the Eames House since 1949, when Charles and Ray Eames designed their Pacific Palisades home and studio as a model of affordable modern living. Most of the objects they lived with remain in place at the two-part, rectangular structure on a bluff overlooking the ocean.

Charles died in 1978; his wife and professional partner passed away 10 years later. But they are remembered for their creative use of materials and innovative design of architecture, furniture and industrial products.

Ray’s colorfully patterned dishes, place mats and napkins are stacked in kitchen cabinets. The couple’s clothes fill upstairs closets — suits and dresses on hangers; shoes on the floor; sweaters, hats and scarves in boxes. Their playful approach to design and love of nature linger throughout the space in whimsical folk art, clusters of seed pods and little piles of smooth stones.

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But wait. What’s that windmill-like contraption perched on the ocean side of the grounds? Why do electrical wires and monitoring devices pop up here and there in the house? And why has a tiny section of black paint on a window frame been scraped away, revealing underlying colors?

All these curiosities, along with a new white tile floor in the living room, are evidence of a collaborative effort to conserve a landmark of mid-20th century modern architecture. The Eames House is the pilot project of the Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative, launched last year by the Getty Conservation Institute.

Conceived as an experiment in postwar California living, the house emerged from the Case Study Program initiated by John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture magazine. With the idea of using new materials and techniques to provide well-designed, mass-producible housing for average Americans, forward-thinking architects such as Charles Eames, Pierre Koenig, Eero Saarinen and Richard Neutra were invited to participate in the program and contribute their own ideas.

Today, the unconventional Eames residence — constructed of prefabricated materials and off-the-shelf products but highly customized — is in the forefront of a struggle to prolong the lives of notable modern buildings.

“Our projects aim to advance conservation practice in some way,” says Susan MacDonald, head of the GCI’s field projects. “The Eames House is of international significance and demonstrates a number of challenges that are shared across houses from this period that are publicly accessible — from environmental issues and collections management to physical conservation challenges related to the use of modern materials.”

Future projects have to be determined, says MacDonald, who is pleased that the first one is in Los Angeles.

“There couldn’t be a better case study for our initiative,” says Kyle Normandin, an architect with extensive conservation experience who is managing the program for the GCI. He came to the Getty from Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates Inc. in New York City.

Starting with a needy building of such a high caliber, he says, will emphasize the urgency of the mission.

The timing couldn’t have been better either. The Eames Foundation — charged with preserving the house and the designers’ creative legacy — asked the Getty for help just as the initiative was taking shape. In another stroke of luck, a request from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to re-create the Eames’ living room for its 2011-12 exhibition “Living in a Modern Way: California Design, 1930-1965” coincided with the necessity of replacing the original floor.

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The tiles were brittle and laden with asbestos, and the adhesive attaching them to the concrete slab had been destroyed by moisture seepage. It wasn’t easy to figure out a waterproofing system for the concrete, find a tile adhesive that would emit no dangerous gases and ferret out asbestos-free tiles that looked like the originals.

But instead of being confined to storage for the duration of the work, the furniture and other contents of the room were a highlight of LACMA’s popular and critically acclaimed show. “Living in a Modern Way” is at the National Art Center in Tokyo until June 3, but the Eames living room material didn’t travel with it. The show was part of the Getty’s original “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions.

The foundation approached the Getty for general guidance as well as advice on specific issues, says Lucia Dewey Atwood, a member of the foundation’s board and a granddaughter of Charles and Ray Eames. The floor was done first because of the exhibition.

“Our situation is very unusual,” Atwood says, “because we are not just preserving the structure. We are preserving the contents, and at times, those two things come into conflict.” One obvious difficulty is that light streaming through windows of a house designed as an indoor-outdoor space inevitably damages sensitive fabrics and artworks.

Members of the Getty team, including GCI scientists and conservators at the museum, will offer advice to the foundation, based on a variety of tests and analyses. They will also help to develop a long-term conservation management plan.

“In this particular case,” Normandin says, “it isn’t just the environment of the house. It’s the environment of the site. The house sits in a meadow overlooking the ocean. There’s a marine environment. We need to look at temperature fluctuations on a day-by-day basis, humidity levels and how they change over time, as well as wind, precipitation and temperature differentials.”

What looks like a spindly windmill is a weather station that downloads information and transmits it to the GCI. Inside the house, a different monitoring system measures temperature, humidity and light.

“We wanted to compare data collected over a long period of time at the weather station with what was happening in the interior of the house,” Normandin says. “A holistic program of monitoring is going to give us an opportunity to fine-tune a climate control system that the Eames Foundation will be able to use in the future, one that will stabilize the environment of the house and protect the contents and interior finishes.”

(The property continues to be open for tours by reservation, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily except Sundays and Wednesdays. Visitors cannot go inside the house, but much of the interior can be seen from outside.)

Other investigations of the structure have already produced results. GCI conservator Emily MacDonald-Korth’s excavation of paint on a steel window frame showed that the familiar black top coat covers hand-mixed grays, probably created by Ray Eames. Atwood says the tests show that the grays were tinted with mineral pigments, including red iron oxide, Prussian blue and chrome yellow, and they confirm verbal and written accounts of paint colors in earlier days.

Yet another exploration has solved a mystery — the identity of wood on a living room wall that continues outside under a roof. Getty Museum conservator Arlen Heginbotham got the job and determined that it is a species of eucalyptus, commonly known as Australian tallowwood and quite similar to the large eucalyptus trees alongside the house.

“We don’t think for one second that choice was accidental,” Normandin says. “Charles and Ray obviously picked a very warm wood that could be used in the house and tied in with the landscape that they enjoyed so much.” It has now been lightly cleaned and varnished to maintain its original appearance.

“What’s so exciting to us,” Atwood says, “is that this project echoes the original Case Study Program.”

Just as the postwar program was meant to make cutting-edge housing widely accessible, the Eames House project is intended to have a far-reaching impact.

“We must share our findings, with the hope that other people can adapt it knowledgeably to their own needs,” Atwood says.

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