IBM New York World’s Fair pavilion

The collaboration between Charles and Ray Eames with the most successful American architects of their generation created a series of extraordinary projects that dealt with the propaganda of the American culture, the ephemeral architecture and the deliberate use of images with a political target. Apart of the pavilion that they did with Buckminster Fuller for the first USSR-USA cultural exchange fair, it stands out the project that they built with Eero Saarinen for IBM. La colaboración entre Charles y Ray Eames con los arquitectos americanos punteros de su generación generó una serie de proyectos extraordinarios que se movían entre la arquitectura efímera, la propaganda de la cultura americana y el uso intencionado de las imágenes con un fin político. Aparte del pabellón que realizaron con Buckminster Fuller para la primera feria de intercambio entre Estados Unidos y la Unión Soviética, destaca el proyecto que construyeron con Eero Saarinen para IBM. The project is clearly divided in two different parts. First, a translucent shelter formed by forty-five corten steel columns of 9.8 meter high that attempted to create a soft transition between the trees of the surrounding and the pavilion. Second, there was a large suspended ovoid that enclosed the auditorium and was covered by white tiles with the IBM logo. However, the full understanding of the pavilion shows up when one visits the auditorium where it was projected the film that the Eames specifically made for the fair. The movie had a length of thirty two minutes and pursuit to bring the emerging computing to the general public, solving some of the doubts that the population had about it. The documentary was project on twenty screens of different sizes and shapes at the same time. Animated images were mixed with real situations showing that the resolution of problems used in the computer processing had several connections with daily situations.