CA Boom Design Show 2009 to be June 26 to 28, 2009

We have a wonderful new venue this year in a beautiful mid-century modern building - the former Robinsons flagship Department Store - Beverly Hills, CA

Now with our 6th Los Angeles show, the CA Boom Design Show continues to be the west’s leading design trade event.

CA Boom Design Show 2009 now has a more convenient and prestigious westside location - adjacent to the Beverly Hilton Hotel - just west of the intersection of Wilshire Blvd and Santa Monica Blvd in Beverly Hills.

Our successful Design & Architecture Tours will be back - with new stops
in Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Westwood & West Los Angeles.

There are lots of new exciting additions to the show you will not want to miss!

Make sure your contact information is current so we can keep you updated on all the amazing new announcements to come.

Mark your calendars June 26-28 for CA Boom Design Show - Beverly Hills!

Why the move to Beverly Hills?

Last year at the Hangar we had to add over 30% additional tented space to handle the unprecedented exhibitor and attendee demand.

Our temporary reuse of the former Robinsons Department Store - which closed in 2006 - gives us a new prestigious and larger westside venue. The move almost doubles the possible exhibit and event space, plus provides us hundreds of additional convenient onsite parking spaces.nal convenient onsite parking spaces.

The Eames House (also known as Case Study House No. 8), is a landmark of mid-20th century modern architecture. It was constructed in 1949 in Pacific Palisades, California (a suburban neighborhood of Los Angeles) by husband-and-wife design pioneers Charles and Ray (Kaiser) Eames, to serve as their home and studio. Unusually for such an avant-garde design, the Eames publicized the house as a thoroughly lived-in, usable, and well-loved home. While many icons of the modern movement are depicted as stark, barren spaces devoid of human use, photographs and motion pictures taken at the Eames house reveal a richly decorated, almost cluttered space full of thousands of books, art objects, artifacts, and charming knick-knacks as well as dozens of projects in various states of completion. The Eames’ gracious live-work lifestyle continues to be an influential model.

The design of the house was proposed by Charles and Ray as part of the famous Case Study House program for John Entenza’s Arts and Architecture magazine. The idea of a Case Study house was to hypothesize a modern household, elaborate its functional requirements, have an esteemed architect develop a design that met those requirements using modern materials and construction processes, and then to actually build the home. The houses were documented before, during and after construction for publication in Arts and Architecture. The Eames’ proposal reflected their own household and their own needs; a young married couple wanting a place to live, work and entertain in one undemanding setting in harmony with the site.

A site near the coast in Pacific Palisades, on a wooded bluff that was once part of Will Rogers’ large estate, was selected. The design was first sketched out by Charles Eames with fellow architect Eero Saarinen in 1945 as a raised steel and glass box projecting out of the slope and spanning the entrance drive before cantilevering dramatically over the front yard. The structure was to be constructed entirely from “off-the-shelf” parts available from steel fabricators catalogs. Immediately after the war, though, these parts were in very short supply. By the time the materials arrived three years later, much pre-construction time had been spent picnicking at and exploring the lot where the house would stand. After a period of intense collaboration between the Charles and Ray, the scheme was radically changed to sit more quietly in the land and avoid impinging upon the pleasant meadow that fronted the house.

The new design tucked the house sidelong into the slope, with an 8 foot (2.4 meter) tall by 200 foot (60 meter) long concrete retaining wall on the uphill side. A mezzanine level was added, making use of a prefabricated spiral stair that was to have been the lower entrance. The upper level holds the bedrooms and overlooks the double-height living room. A courtyard was also introduced, separating the residence from the studio space. This revised scheme required only one additional beam. The 17 foot (5.1 meter) tall facade is broken down into a rigidly geometric, almost Mondrianesque composition of brightly colored panels between thin steel columns and braces, painted black. The entry door is marked with a gold-leaf panel above. An existing row of eucalyptus trees was preserved along the exposed wall of the house, providing some shading and a visual contrast with the house’s bold facade.

Of the twenty-five Case Study Houses built, the Eames house is considered the most successful both as an architectural statement and as a comfortable, functional living space. The brash sleekness of the design made it a favorite backdrop for fashion shoots in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps the proof of its success in fulfilling its program is the fact that it remained at the center of the Eames’ life and work from the time they moved in (Christmas Eve, 1949) until their deaths.

The Eames’ family maintains the house as an occasional residence. They have overseen the conservation of the structure and have preserved Charles and Ray’s collections and decor. The studio is used for the continuing work of the Eames Office.

References

Steele, James (1994). Eames House: Charles & Ray Eames (Architecture in Detail). London & New York: Phaidon. ISBN 0-7148-4212-5.
Smith, Elizabeth A. T. (1989). Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-69213-9.

Eames Foundation Official site

Flickr set of photos of this home - photos above from here

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Have you considered living in the forth dimension?  When we move into a high-rise building usually we feel lucky if we have the choice of where to put some of the interior walls.  Most commonly we are left to choose between one floor plan and another.  There may be a choice between one of two models - maybe one or two sizes. But now there is, in Miami at least, a new way to build your condo even if you are buying into a high-rise.

About 100 years ago artists like Picasso and Braque decided to try out a new way of looking at things.  Cubism was born because rather then looking at something, like a row of boxes, from the typical horizontal view point, Cubists broke out of that mold. It was a revolutionary way to see space. Boxes could be viewed in multiple contexts and from multiple viewpoints.  In this century it appears that the architect Chad Oppenheim with the Miami firm Oppenheim Architecture + Design, has broken the dimensional mold again and in his own way is applying Cubism consciously or subconsciously, to the artistic medium of architecture.

In a building that is going beyond the box, you buy cubes of space and then you decide how they are being placed together. You can arrange your cubes of space horizontally of course, vertically which is nice, and then you can go beyond any expectation for a high-rise.  You can tell Oppenheim you want the cubes to meet diagonally, have an open space (they are calling them “voids”) for say, a garden, and even leave the building and jump out into space.  In the CUBE building that wouldn’t be a balcony jutting off the side, it would be the entire cube of space, 625 sq ft.   Like in the style of Cubism the objects, in this case, living spaces, are broken up and looked at from an abstract perspective.  Chad Oppenheim, says of it, “ The original inspiration was my thesis project at Cornell, an idea of creating a vertical neighborhood, with people building and defining their own domains similar to how they do so in horizontal developments of single family houses.”[i]

To further complete the cubist analogy, many cubists felt that time was the 4th dimension and time was best represented as a cube; the very center of the cube being the current reality of the person.  In the CUBE it works out that time will stay current because the CUBE system isn’t just great for the original buyers of the condos, it also makes it easier for future residents to remodel.  Future laborers with sledge hammers can go through walls sure, we expect that, but how about the floors?  Oppenheim wanted all of CUBE’s users to have endless possibilities but, as he puts it, with a laugh, “We didn’t want to give them a leash to hang themselves.”[ii]

They achieve this by grouping the necessary elements - plumbing, electrical, air treatments – in a central core.  This is a classic technique in Modern architecture which here is being refined and taken to another level.  In the case of this building aptly named CUBE, Oppenheim met with his engineer, Ysreal Seinuk and asked “What if we do the structural system on the outside, a girded, diagonal bracing, so we don’t need sheer walls coming down internally?”[iii] Together they found that by placing a strong steel frame on the exterior to carry the load of the weight, the building becomes more economical, and since the floors are not cantilevered or sources of support, they become as non-essential as a dividing wall.

The building starts construction this year, 2008 in Miami’s design district.  Specifically it will come to be at 50 NE 41st St, Miami FL 33137.  It will stand 22 stories high.  If you wanted to buy into it the prices as of September 2007 are charted below.  Join up with this generation’s architectural Picasso, Chad Oppenheim, and sculpt out a new kind of living space.