Abstract
This book focuses on Charles and Raye Eames – a US couple and ‘arguably the most influential American designers of the postwar period’ whose public image was of ‘a model happy couple whose iconic designed objects and design practice would be globally exported as the promise of the cheery lifestyle afforded by US-style democratic liberalism’ (p. 1). According to the blurb, the book offers ‘a fresh cultural history of mid-century modernism through the film and multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their peers’. The author Justus Nieland argues that film and moving-image technologies were ‘the defining media of postwar happiness’ (p. 2). Nieland engages in a thought-provoking discussion on ‘how modernism communicates’, which also questions a lot of the premises the field of communication is based upon. Nieland writes, After the war, the success and influence of the {Rockefeller Foundation-funded ‘Communications Group’} group led to the consolidation of mass communications research as a social scientific discipline and the entrenchment of Harold Laswell’s model for understanding communications systems and media effects: who says what to whom in which channel with what effect? But it also marked a technocratic revision of traditional democratic theory insofar as its media research seemed to confirm the need for a democracy guided by experts. (p. 9)
The book is split into eight chapters, including Introduction. The chapters explore topics such as the media environments of the Eames chair, designer pedagogy and expanded cinema, film, communication and postwar world making in Aspen, environmental design and designer film theory.