Charles Eames
20 quotes
Biography
Charles Ormond Eames Jr. was an American designer, architect and filmmaker. In professional partnership with his wife Ray-Bernice Kaiser Eames, he made groundbreaking contributions in the fields of architecture, furniture design, industrial design, manufacturing and the photographic arts.
"Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic."
"The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life."
"My wife is a painter, and a very good one... and we’ve been working together for, oh, twelve years now, I guess...and at first I used to help and criticize things she was doing, and then she would help and criticize things I was doing, and we would... pitch in and do all the jiggering for each other and get it as people do... and then, gradually, things begin to sort of, you know, entropy... things began to get shuffled, and pretty soon you didn’t know, sort of, where one started and the other ended, and anything that we’ve looked at or talked about here, you know, I say that I’m doing it, but actually, she’s doing it just as much as I am, only she sort of goes under the same corporate type name..."
"I have never been forced to accept compromises but I have willingly accepted constraints."
"Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects... the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se."
"The details are not the details. These make the design."
"One could describe Design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose."
"[Design is] an expression of purpose. It may, if it is good enough, later be judged as art."
"Design may be a solution to some industrial problems."
"Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world."
"Designers should only innovate as a last resort."
"In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route."
"Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design."
"To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need."
"Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose."
"The details are not the details. They make the design."
"In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route."
"Eventually everything connects — people, ideas, objects...the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se...I don't believe in this 'gifted few' concept, just in people doing things they are really interested in doing. They have a way of getting good at whatever it is."
"Eventually Everything Connects - all the Pain, the Struggle & the People."
"Take your pleasure seriously."