Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era by Justus Nieland (review)

"Do designers ever sleep?"¹ In Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era, Justus Nieland highlights the tirelessness of Charles and Ray Eames, their commitment to design as a force for social transformation, and their conviction that work is play and play is happiness. But this isn't just a book about the Eameses; in invoking the "Eames era," Nieland conjures an ensemble of designers, filmmakers, theorists, artists, and other cultural figures who contributed to the development and the texture of the American midcentury. At the core of the invigoratingly dizzying array of ideas in this book—communication, transparency, democracy, technophilia, organicism, and, yes, happiness—is film, and more specifically, film's role in the development of an interdisciplinary design discourse promising the good life. And we can't talk about any of these ideas, or any of these people, without talking about Charles and Ray Eames. Not for nothing does Nieland refer to the postwar power couple as "the happy protagonists of midcentury lifestyle media."²

Nieland has done mind-bogglingly exhaustive research into this moment, and the result is a dazzling intellectual history of a period marked by creative ferment and interdisciplinary collaboration. One of the book's greatest strengths is the way it situates the Eameses within a vast network of transdisciplinary figures; far more than merely fleshing out the history of the titular couple, Nieland conjures a widespread and intricately connected milieu. Reading these microhistories often feels like finding out two of your closest friends knew each other independently of you, long before you met them. Eero Saarinen, Billy Wilder, and Norbert Wiener appeared together in a public affairs TV segment devoted to the Eameses? Maya Deren hung around with László Moholy-Nagy? Jean Baudrillard joined environmental protestors to interrupt Walter Paepcke's design conference? Nieland's talent not just for finding connections between far-flung figures, but also for transporting the reader to the places where they connected, brings this deeply theoretical work of historiography to immediate, tangible life. Through these stories, Happiness by Design develops a divergent, design-oriented film theory "shaped by a modernist aesthetics and ideology of information that crossed a range of disciplines and institutional agendas."³

Part of Nieland's project is to challenge the dominant idea of modernism at midcentury as willfully difficult, obsessed with medium specificity, and devoted to the personal expression of the artist. He foregrounds a modernism running parallel to this old story, one that is in almost every way its opposite: transparent instead of obscure, televised instead of cloistered, promiscuous instead of pure. It is a modernism of toys and chairs, of serious ideas expressed in whimsical photographs. It is not a modernism of austere contemplation; it is a modernism of happiness. Yet in all this discussion of happiness and the good life, Nieland doesn't shy away from the Eameses' complicity in larger and more overtly ideological projects of nation-building and corporate hegemony. If happy modernism was envisioned for everyone, it was also swept up in burgeoning technocracy and corporate managerial logics that threaten to discipline as much as they aim to liberate. He follows these tensions into design studios, conferences, and schools, tracing the development of a film theory that is rigorously interdisciplinary and immersed in the language of design.

Chapter 1 is about chairs. But in exploring the Eameses' work in furniture, Nieland embraces the Eames ethos in his own scholarship: if you're talking about chairs, you're actually talking about everything. In his inventive readings of Eames furniture, as well as the films about that furniture, Nieland hits upon the core of the Eameses' worldview: they didn't care about things. They cared about the variety of things, the networks those things reached out to join, the permutations that arose when chairs and sofas met the people who sat in them. The chapter masterfully...