A husband and wife team who met while studying design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Herman Miller produced many of their furniture designs. The Eameses had a combination of visionary design and ingenuity that propelled their names into furniture design.

Charles studied architecture at Washington University. He worked with an architectural firm in St. Louis and then with his own private practice until he became head of the department of experimental design at Cranbrook. In the 1940s, he worked with [[Eero Saarinen, with whom he began to investigate the artistic possibilities of new mid-20th century materials, in particular plastics. Plastics enabled die-press stamping of seats, and allowed Eames to explore a greater organic expression, enabling a new aesthetic for seating. Charles was on of the first furniture designers to realize that modern, more open-plan architecture, with its glass walls, would push furniture away from the walls; it would thus have to be seen in the round, like a free-standing sculpture.

Eames and Saarien won the Organic Design in home furnishings competition at New York’s MoMA in 1941 for molded plywood into complex curves and won the two first prizes. The same year he married Ray Kaiser.

Ray was an abstract painter who had studied under Hans Hofmann in New York and later at the Cranbrook Academy. It was at Cranbrook where she met and assisted Charles and Saarien in preparing designs for the Museum of Modern Art’s “Organic Furniture Competition”.

After their marriage, they moved to Los Angeles, where Charles designed film sets for MGM Studios. He continued to experiment with plywood, supplying leg splints to the US Navy.

In 1946, Evans Products began producing the Eameses’ molded plywood furniture. They were exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s show: “New Furniture Designed by Charles Eames”. Their molded plywood chair was called “the chair of the century” by the influential architectural critic Ester McCoy. Production was soon taken over by Herman Miller who continues to manufacture the furniture.

In the early 1950s, the Eameses extended their interest and skill in photography into filmmaking. They created over 85 short films.

Eames Office

Design Mueum: Charles + Ray Eames
Library of Congress
Design Addict
Ray Kaiser Eames
Charles and Ray Eames