Charles & Ray Eames

United States

Person

Designer

Charles Eames Born 17 June 1907 St. Louis, Missouri, USA Died 21 August 1978 St. Louis, Missouri, USA Ray Eames Born 15 December 1912 Sacramento, California, USA Died 21 August 1988 Los Angeles, California, USA Charles Eames studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis from 1925 to 1928 and subsequently worked as a freelance architect, with breaks for extended trips to Europe and Mexico. After further studies in design and architecture at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, he taught there from 1939 to 1941. Together with Eero Saarinen, he won two first prizes in MoMA’s 1940/41 competition 'Organic Design in Home Furnishings'. Ray Eames studied art under Hans Hofmann in New York City and Provincetown from 1933 to 1939 and attended the weaving class at Cranbrook Academy in 1940. Following their marriage in 1941, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where they began experimenting with the three-dimensional moulding of plywood and developed an industrial production process for plywood mouldings. The technology was first used for leg splints for the U.S. Navy. From 1942 Ray designed twenty-seven covers for the magazine 'Arts & Architecture'. Between 1944 and 1949 they designed and produced an extensive collection of plywood furniture. From 1946 they collaborated with Herman Miller. During the early 1950s they developed the world’s first plastic shell chairs and a series of wire furniture designs. In 1949, the Eames House in Santa Monica, California, was constructed and is known as the Case Study House #8. 1956 the Eames Lounge Chair was launched, followed by the Aluminum Group in 1958. From the late 1950s onwards, they increasingly focused on exhibitions, films and multimedia projects, including 'Glimpses of the U.S.A.', IBM’s 'Mathematica', the IBM Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair and 'The World of Franklin and Jefferson'.