Image: Eames Institute, Richmond
The Eames Institute has refreshed its Richmond, California, Archives with previously undisplayed artifacts, a reconfigured Work Gallery and an updated visitor presentation of materials from Ray and Charles Eames’s lives and practice. Announced on 8 September 2026, the changes are accompanied by a redesigned online Collections experience, where users can now sort objects by color and theme.
The revised Work Gallery is organized to highlight the iterative thinking behind Eames design. Its holdings include examples of the couple’s molded plywood experiments, among them the Organic Chair, as well as projects developed with IBM, Herman Miller and Vitra.
A molded plywood DCM chair carries a handwritten note from Charles Eames to his daughter, Lucia, on the underside of its seat. The gallery also offers the public’s first view of the Eameses’ toy collection, reinstalls the Eames Office’s original reference library and includes a previously unknown prototype of the Eames lounge chair and ottoman.
The Richmond Archives holds more than 40,000 objects, spanning furniture, films, prototypes, exhibition materials, tools, correspondence, ephemera and personal belongings. Much of the collection was drawn from the Eameses themselves and their Venice, California, office. The Institute characterizes the revised presentation as an opportunity to trace connections across projects, disciplines and decades of creative inquiry; materials are presented to show how one idea informed the next.
The online redesign extends the refresh beyond Richmond. Its new color and theme filters offer a direct way to navigate the collection’s objects, while each page refresh introduces different objects and ideas.
