Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century.

Pat Kirkham is Professor of Design History and Cultural Studies of Design at De Montfort University, Leicester, and writes as a design historian. So this book is interesting on numerous levels, connections being made across a wide range of subjects. Unfortunately, as an architectural history I just do not think it makes the mark. Architecture for Charles and Ray Eames was obviously important: over 60 pages of the 380-page text deal with architecture alone. Charles referred to himself as an architect although he was not one.

As an architectural student at Washington University in St Louis, he had been compelled to leave the course because of his enthusiasm for Frank Lloyd Wright. Throughout the 1930s he worked in partnership as an architect in St Louis, building brick houses which displayed a range of influences from Colonial Williamsburg to modern Scandinavia, and in her description of these almost unknown buildings Kirkham is at her most interesting.

But the analysis is shallow. There is not a single plan and never more than two photographs (an outside shot and a close up of the front door) of any of the buildings discussed - except for the Meyer House where the same garden view appears in both monochrome and colour. So why did this young acolyte of Wright's organic theories design the Dinsmore House in a Colonial style? Because it was fashionable after the reconstruction of Williamsburg in 1932? And what of the white cubic Dean House with its curious combination of brick quoins and string course below, and 'advanced' corner windows (made possible by modern technology) (p22) above? Is this the influence of Wright or some European modernist? Eames had honeymooned (with his first wife, Catherine Woermann) in England, France and Germany in 1929, and had actually visited the Weissenhofsiedlung at Stuttgart.

Of these early buildings, only the Meyer House is dealt with in depth but then the styles identified - 'Georgian Revival, Scandinavian National Romanticism, Swedish Modernism, Vienna Secession, and Art Deco' (p26) are so eclectic that the result is hard to imagine.

With the discussion of the Eames and Entenza Houses, Case Study Houses 8 and 9, Kirkham is now, for most readers, on more familiar territory. And the description of the Entenza House, so often ignored, is refreshingly clear and enticing. But she repeats old and introduces new misconceptions of the Case Study Program and Arts Architecture, such as: 'The magazine commissioned architects to design and build houses' (p103). Well, actually it didn't, unless you include the Entenza House, but then John Entenza owned the magazine anyway. The Eames House was first designed (in 1945) as a bridge house very similar to Mies's 1934 design for a house on a hillside. But to suggest that it also 'drew heavily' (p111) on Mies's 1937-38 design for the Resor House at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, would appear to me to be completely erroneous. Indeed, the elevations of both buildings are interrupted by two vertical steel members but in terms of form, structure and siting they are totally different.

One of the main theses of the book is the reinstatement of Ray as a major player in the Eames team, although I wonder if Ray would have felt this was necessary. It is true that Ray's involvement has not always been given the credit it deserves and that Charles is often seen as the front runner, but anyone who knew Ray, or visited the house or the office, would sense if not know that theirs was a team effort, a point Kirkham repeatedly makes.

If the Eameses did one thing for twentieth-century design, it was to open it up and imbue it with all the vitality of living. And here this book sadly fails to live up to expectations. Set in Garamond 3 and Stone sans serif, single columns and unjustified, it is printed conventionally on octavo with all of the colour images restricted to a 16-page signature located 300 pages into the text. There is variety in the monochrome illustrations which range from full-page bleeds to 35 mm contacts, but none of the vivacity one would expect from the Eameses or, as in Thames and Hudson's Eames Design (1989), from their work. An opportunity sadly missed. NEIL JACKSON