Eames.STL talk – Tuesday, November 28, 2023

“The Details are Not the Details” #CharlesEames

I invite you to my special talk on Charles Eames and his career in the 1930s. Just as we find value in examining the early work of other modern masters such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright, we ought to study Eames’s early work for signs of his many later successes.

My focus is examining his work in the context of his motto, “The details are not the details.” I’m applying this principle to his work on churches in the 1930s. There are two churches in St. Louis for which he created additions and alterations. The other two churches, which are Catholic churches designed from the ground up, are located in Arkansas.

I’ve photographed these works in detail and will present a multi-sensory presentation illuminating his design process and its results and linking them to particular details of his later work, evince similar obsessions with form, symmetry, symmetry, structure, and symbols.

I will present my illustrated talk this Tuesday, November 28, 2023, at 6:30 pm. You can attend in person at the St. Louis Public Library’s Central Branch or in the live stream. Everyone who registers for my talk will have the opportunity to receive my recent essay studying one of these projects in great detail, which held particular meaning personally and within the context of his family, the Pilgrim Congregational Church, where he married Catherine Woermann on Friday, June 7, 1929, just ten days before his 22nd birthday. He became the church’s in-house architect and designer for the next nine years.

Everyone who registers via this link will be eligible to receive my 4,000-word illustrated essay on Pilgrim Church as a PDF. You’ll also have the chance to receive my monthly newsletter, “Eames.STL.” Sign up for the limited seats before they run out!

You can either use this QR code or the link below to register quickly:

https://bit.ly/EamesEcclessiastical