Charles Eames (Charles Eames, Jr) and Ray Eames (Ray-Bernice Eames) were an American married couple of industrial designers who made significant historical contributions to the development of modern architecture and furniture through the work of the Eames Office. They also worked in the fields of industrial and graphic design, fine art, and film. Charles was the public face of the Eames Office, but Ray and Charles worked together as creative partners and employed a diverse creative staff. Among their most recognized designs is the Eames Lounge Chair and the Eames Dining Chair.
Background
Charles Eames secured an architecture scholarship at Washington University, but his devotion to the practices of Frank Lloyd Wright caused issues with his tutors and he left after just two years of study.
He met Ray Gayber at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1940. Charles arrived at the school on an industrial design fellowship as recommended by Eliel Saarinen, but soon became an instructor. Ray enrolled in various courses to expand upon her previous education in abstract painting in New York City under the guidance of Hans Hofmann. Charles entered into a furniture competition—with his “best friend” Eero Saarinen—hosted by the Museum of Modern Art. Eames and Saarinen's goal was to mold a single piece of plywood into a chair; the Organic Chair was born out of this attempt. The chair won first prize, but its form was unable to be successfully mass-produced. Eames and Saarinen considered it a failure, as the tooling for molding a chair from a single piece of wood had not yet been invented. Ray stepped in to help with the graphic design for their entry. Eames divorced his first wife Catherine Woermann, and he and Ray married in June 1941. Their honeymoon was a road trip to relocate to Los Angeles.
Their first home, after staying in a hotel for a few weeks, was Neutra's Strathmore Apartments in the Westwood neighborhood. Charles and Ray began creating tooling and molding plywood into chairs in the second bedroom of the apartment, eventually finding more adequate work spaces in Venice.
The Eames Office
The design office of Charles and Ray Eames functioned for more than four decades (1943–1988) in the former Bay Cities Garage at 901 Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, Los Angeles, California.
The Eames' worked approximately 13-hour days, six or seven days a week, and directed the work of a team of collaborators. Through the years, its staff included many notable designers: Gregory Ain (who was Chief Engineer for the Eames' during World War II), Don Albinson, Harry Bertoia, Annette Del Zoppo, Peter Jon Pearce, and Deborah Sussman. The Eames' believed in "learning by doing"- before introducing a new idea at the Eames Office, Charles and Ray explored needs and constraints of the idea extensively.
Early Use of Plywood
In addition to their initial attempts in the molding of plywood into functional furniture, the Eames' developed a leg splint for wounded soldiers during WWII. This was in response to the war's medical officers in combat zones reporting the need for improved emergency transport splints. The Eames' created their splints from wood veneers, which they bonded together with a resin glue and shaped into compound curves using a process involving heat and pressure. With the introduction of plywood splints, they were able to replace problematic metal traction splints that had side effects of inducing gangrene due to impairment of blood circulation. The US navy's funding for the splints allowed Charles and Ray to begin experimenting more heavily with furniture designs and mass production.
Domestic furniture design
Eames products were manufactured on Washington Boulevard until the 1950s. 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); the Eames Chaise (1968), designed for Charles's friend and film director, Billy Wilder; the Solar Do-Nothing Machine (1957), an early solar energy experiment for the Aluminum Corporation of America; and a number of toys.
