Charles (1907-1978) and Ray (1912–1988) Eames (pronounced /ˈiːmz/) were American designers, married in 1941, who worked and made major contributions in many fields of design including industrial design, furniture design, art, graphic design, film and architecture.

 

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Charles Ormond Eames, Jr (1907-1978) was born in 1907 in Saint Louis, Missouri. By the time he was 14 years old, while attending high school, Charles worked at the Laclede Steel Company as a part-time laborer, where he learned about engineering, drawing, and architecture (and also first entertained the idea of one day becoming an architect). Charles briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis on an architectural scholarship. After two years of study, he left the university. Many sources claim, with little evidence, that he was dismissed for his advocacy of Frank Lloyd Wright and his interest in modern architects. Several websites claim that "In the report describing why he was dismissed from the university, a professor wrote the comment 'His views were too modern.'" This alleged comment has yet to be attributed to any specific member of the architectural faculty. Other sources, less frequently cited, note that while a student, Charles Eames also was employed as an architect at the firm of Trueblood and Graf.[1] The demands on his time from this employment and from his classes, led to sleep-deprivation and diminished performance at the university. It needs to be explored and researched further to determine the actual cause of his departure from the university, rather than repeating the old, unverified story of his being a victim of backward-looking faculty who supposedly threw him out simply for his points of view. While at Washington University, he met his first wife, Catherine Woermann, whom he married in 1929. A year later, they had a daughter, Lucia. In 1930, Charles began his own architectural practice in St. Louis with partner Charles Gray. They were later joined by a third partner, Walter Pauley. Charles Eames was greatly influenced by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (whose son Eero, also an architect, would become a partner and friend). At the elder Saarinen's invitation, Charles moved in 1938 with his wife Catherine and daughter Lucia to Michigan, to further study architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he would become a teacher and head of the industrial design department. In order to apply for the Architecture and Urban Planning Program, Eames defined an area of focus - the St. Louis waterfront. Together with Eero Saarinen he designed prize-winning furniture for New York's Museum of Modern Art "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition.[2] Their work displayed the new technique of wood moulding (originally developed by Alvar Aalto), that Eames would further develop in many moulded plywood products, including, beside chairs and other furniture, splints and stretchers for the U.S. Navy during World War II.[3] In 1941, Charles and Catherine divorced, and he married his Cranbrook colleague Ray Kaiser, who was born in Sacramento, California. He then moved with her to Los Angeles, California, where they would work and live for the rest of their lives. In the late 1940s, as part of the Arts & Architecture magazine's "Case Study" program, Ray and Charles designed and built the groundbreaking Eames House, Case Study House #8, as their home. Located upon a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and hand-constructed within a matter of days entirely of pre-fabricated steel parts intended for industrial construction, it remains a milestone of modern architecture.

 

Ray-Bernice Alexandra Kaiser Eames (December 15, 1912 - August 21, 1988) (pronounced [ɹeɪ ˈiːmz]) was an American artist, designer, and filmmaker who, together with her husband Charles, is responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20th century. She was born in Sacramento, California. Having lived in a number of cities during her youth, in 1933 she moved to New York, where she studied abstract painting with Hans Hofmann. In September 1940 she began studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she met Charles Eames, marrying him the following year. Settling in Los Angeles, California, Charles and Ray Eames would lead an outstanding career in design and architecture. Ray Eames died in Los Angeles in 1988, ten years to the day after Charles.

In the 1950s, the Eameses continued their work in architecture and modern furniture design. Like in the earlier moulded plywood work, the Eamses pioneered innovative technologies, such as the fiberglass and plastic resin chairs and the wire mesh chairs designed for Herman Miller. Charles and Ray would soon channel Charles' interest in photography into the production of short films. From their first film, the unfinished Traveling Boy (1950), to the extraordinary Powers of Ten (1977), their cinematic work was an outlet for ideas, a vehicle for experimentation and education. The Eameses also conceived and designed a number of landmark exhibitions. The first of these, Mathematica: a world of numbers...and beyond (1961), was sponsored by IBM, and is the only one of their exhibitions still existent. The Mathematica Exhibition is still considered a model for scientific popularization exhibitions. It was followed by "A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age" (1971) and "The World of Franklin and Jefferson" (1975-1977), among others. The office of Charles and Ray Eames, which functioned for more than four decades (1943-88) at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice, California, included in its staff, at one time of another, a number of remarkable designers, like Don Albinson, Deborah Sussman, Richard Foy and Henry Beer. Among the many important designs originating there are the molded-plywood DCW (Dining Chair Wood) and DCM (Dining Chair Metal with a plywood seat) (1945), Eames Lounge Chair (1956), the Aluminum Group furniture (1958) and as well as the Eames Chaise (1968), designed for Charles's friend, film director Billy Wilder, the playful Do-Nothing Machine (1957), an early solar energy experiment, and a number of toys. Short films produced by the couple often document their interests in collecting toys and cultural artifacts on their travels. The films also record the process of hanging their exhibits or producing classic furniture designs, to the purposefully mundane topic of filming soap suds moving over the pavement of a parking lot. Perhaps their most popular movie, "Powers of 10" (narrated by the late physicist Philip Morrison), gives a dramatic demonstration of orders of magnitude by visually zooming away from the earth to the edge of the universe, and then microscopically zooming into the nucleus of a carbon atom. Charles was a prolific photographer as well with thousands of images of their furniture, exhibits and collections, and now a part of the Library of Congress. Charles Eames died of a heart attack on August 21, 1978 while on a consulting trip in his native Saint Louis, and now has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. Ray died 10 years later to the exact day. At the time of his death they were working on what became their last production, the Eames Sofa which went into production in 1984. From the beginning, The Eames furniture has usually been listed as by Charles Eames; indeed in the 1948 and 1952 Herman Miller bound catalogs, only Charles' name is listed, but it's become clear that Ray was deeply involved and should be considered an equal partner. The Eames fabrics (many are currently available from Maharam were mostly designed by Ray, as were the Time Life Stools. But in reading the various books on Eames, and seeing the photos of furniture developement, it's clear that Ray's involvement is absolute.