ABSTRACT
In the early 1970s, Charles Eames delivered a lecture at Harvard University entitled ‘Goods’. In Goods , Eames delivers less a lecture than a summary of his and Ray’s philosophy of professional practice. Within this practice, the Eameses use films and animations to structure and document their ‘research’, which addresses recurring themes: materials; systems; information and media; popular culture and history; science, technology, engineering, maths and aesthetics; the inseparability of experience and form; and design as a way of both knowing and making known. Eames opens Goods with a story about a thief who breaks into Ray’s car. Eames’ narrative ‘breaks into’ the constitutive properties of things roughly in the middle of their journey from manufacture to use. Eames ends his homage to old-fashioned goods with common firewood – chopped, split, stacked for burning – one of our oldest sources of energy and social continuity.
