Parke Meek

"Based on the exhibition "Photography and the city", designed by the Eames Office for the Smithsonian Institute". A primer on the modern problems of and future solutions to growing cities.

A Rough Sketch features a linear view of our universe from the human scale to the sea of galaxies, then directly down to the nucleus of a carbon atom. With images, narration, and a dashboard, it gives a clue to the relative size of things and what it means to add another zero to any number. The 1977 film, Powers of Ten, was an expanded and updated version of this 1968 study film. Charles and Ray often gave projects long titles to indicate that they were still exploring their ideas—that the presentation was a model or a type of “sketch.”

This film reveals design proposals for the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. It incorporates photography and animation to present the concepts, architecture, and overall look of the pavilion and to convey an impression of the exhibition's spirit and content.

Charles and Ray produced this film for IBM’s pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The Information Machine was the first completely animated project produced by the Eames Office. Intended as an introduction to the electronic computer, the film depicts the computer as the culmination of the tools and systems we have created over the centuries to process information. It also explores how humans solved problems both before and after this technology was invented. The Information Machine is ultimately the story of our continual need to process and communicate larger and more complex amounts of data, and how we learn to manipulate abstractions with increasing sophistication and skill.