EAMES HOUSE
Waro Kishi  Architect

I once wrote a book about the Eames House. “Heavenly House - Journeys to Masterpieces of 20th Century Housing 2: Eames House/Charles & Ray Eames” is that book.
For a long time, I had been interested in the Case Study House Program, one of the leading examples of Los Angeles architecture in the 1950’s and 60’s, and the fact that the Eames House was the 8th home in this project, as well as the fact that this was virtually the only architectural project undertaken by the Eames, who had been involved in a wide range of fields, from film and graphic design to furniture and exhibitions, as well as work for the military during the Second World War－it was for such reasons that I was interested in this particular piece of architecture.
It was 1981, I believe, when I first visited the House, having made my way to that place in Pacific Palisades relying on a confusing map in a guidebook. I remember seeing the John Etenza residence, designed by Charles & Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen, in the foreground. As I stood there, transfixed, in front of this site that was actually off limits to trespassers, the maid working at the Eames House said that since Ray was out, I could go inside for just three minutes. All that remains of that visit is 2 or 3 photos, taken hurriedly with the maid standing behind me as I worried about whether Ray would return. Those few out-of-focus photos are all I have now to remind me of the distracted mood of that first visit.
It was 2008 when I came to write a book solely about the architecture of the Eames House, that place I had encountered ever so briefly. I visited the Eames House again, looking over it with greater deliberation. It was then that I realized that this building that had seemed like a textbook example of modern design, made with a collection of readymade building materials, was not as simple as it had looked on that first three-minute visit. The book that I wrote was my attempt to describe this follow-up experience, this process of discovery－that is, the realization that what had looked like a textbook example of modern design at first glance was in fact not such an easy-to-understand construction at all.
This raises the question: How do we talk about architecture? What does it mean to critique an architectural work?
If it’s just a matter of giving your impressions of the work, then architectural criticism is simple. But in that case, all you are doing is adding one more layer of story to the story of the architectural work. You’re just creating another myth. If on the other hand you want to avoid impressionistic criticism, the only thing you can do is read the architectural work as a single text while taking care not to depart from the work itself at any point along the way. But at the same time, you must not forget that when “reading” a work, there is always a risk that you will “misread” it. In fact, if you’re going to stick to the text that you are trying to understand, it’s the “misreadings” that are interesting.
It’s precisely because we accept the “misreadings” of those trying to understand a work that the process of understanding is interesting. Instead of stacking a new myth on top of the work, we slide across the work that we are seeking to understand, “misreading” it as we do so.
What I came to see through my efforts to understand the Eames House, or rather, what I saw through my own “misreadings” of the Eames House, included the surprising discovery that the use of space in the film “Powers of Ten”—a work that is completely unrelated to the Eames House—is the same as that of the Eames House, and that, to take another example, the use of visuals in the prologue to the 1961 movie “West Side Story”, in which the camera pans across a bird’s-eye view of New York and then zooms in on the group of people at the end, is extremely similar to the use of space in the Eames House. What the Eames House taught me—though it sounds overly simplistic when I put it in words—comes down to this: there can be a hidden channel that connects architecture and film, two modes of expression that seem very different at first glance. It goes without saying, though, that for me, the pleasure of coming to this understanding is far more important than the understanding itself.