Computer House of Cards by Charles Eames, 1970

Computer House of Cards

Charles Eames Ray-Bernice "Ray" Alexandra Kaiser Eames

1970

Mixed Media

Height 3.65"
Width 2.4"
Depth 0.86"

One box, 56 cards and instruction pamphlet detailing what each card photograph represents.

56 die-cut photographic playing-cards (3 ⅛ × 4 ¾ in) with six side-slits so any card can interlock with any other to build freestanding “houses.”

Description

For the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, IBM commissioned Charles Eames to design the Computer House of Cards: a deck of 56 cards given away as a souvenir for visitors to the IBM Pavilion. The Eames Office had a long-standing relationship with IBM, resulting in numerous projects that together form an important chapter in 20th-century design and technology history.

Printed by Otto Maier Verlag in Germany, the Computer House of Cards is an inventive twist on two older works. The format is derived from Charles and Ray Eames’s well-known 1952 House of Cards, a construction toy consisting of 54 cards, each printed with a colorful pattern on one side and an asterisk on the other. The cards have side slits so they can be locked together to form various structures.

For the 1970 version, Charles Eames replaced the patterns with close-up images of computer components from his 1968 film The Computer Glossary, made for the IBM Pavilion at that year’s World’s Fair in San Antonio, Texas. The deck is similarly sized to a normal deck of playing cards. It comes with a pamphlet describing technical details of the computing components visible in each image.

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