Anyone Can Now Buy an Eames House--Sort Of
Case Study Home No. 8, the 1949 Pacific Palisades home of designers Ray and Charles Eames, emerged from brainstorms around adaptability and industrial design, with a name as bland as the term "manufactured parts" suggests. The couple’s first vision for the hilly lot, purchased from Arts & Architecture magazine owner John Entenza, was a dramatic, cantilevering glass-and-steel, Eero Saarinen design. But it would get shelved in part due to postwar material shortages. Its replacement, erected via a series of grid-like, deceptively simple steel-framed panels, has since become a world-renowned museum and midcentury mecca.
But this singularity, a physical shrine to the couple’s vision, is better considered a system, a model that the couple would famously revisit and rework throughout their lifetime. (The couple did design a modular home for production, though one was never built.) "For them, architecture was not limited to the buildings you make," says Eames Demetrios, grandson of the couple and current director of the Eames Office. "It includes the systems you make to make things happen."
Now, Ray and Charles’s prefab visions can be the basis for your own project. In partnership with Barcelona-based manufacturer Kettal, the Eames Office has developed the Eames Pavilion System, a modular building kit of parts with a wide range of proposed uses, including a recording studio, backyard office, your own Case Study cabana, or, with some retrofitting, a "fully equipped two-story house." Made of aluminum structural modules, the system, which starts at around $325 a square foot, includes interchangeable roof types, windows, textiles, and other accessories that reference those of the iconic Pacific Palisades property and other Eames residential projects.
The strategy here on the part of Eames Office seems to be part caretaking of the Eames legacy, but also a seamless integration of it into the everyday, as with many of their famous furniture pieces. It is somewhat difficult, though, to imagine a structure that bears the material essence of the couple’s famous midcentury home effortlessly blending in with the mise-en-scène of a backyard, like the Eames lounge might in one’s living room. Is this canonization, then? Or something more commercial?
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https://www.dwell.com/article/eames-house-pavilion-system-modular-design-kettal-9aeb4708
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