Charles Eames was born in Saint Louis (Missouri) in 1907, studied architecture at Washington University St. Louis and in 1930 opened his own architectural office together with Charles M. Gray. In 1935 Charles Eames opened another studio with Robert T. Walsh before in 1938 he received a scholarship for the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and subsequently taught design there. In 1940, Charles Eames together with Eero Saarinen won the first prize in the MoMA New York's "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition. A victory which helped set both on the path to professional success. In 1941, Charles Eames married Ray Kaiser.
Designer Charles Eames
X-Base Chair An xpression; An xpansion; An xposition Whereas the English word 'furniture' has its origins in the middle French verb 'fournir', to furnish, the French 'meuble' and German 'Möbel' have their origins in the Latin 'mobile': capable of being moved...
...A sculptural understanding reinforced in Charles Eames' reply to Fraser where we learn Galaxy is/was the most joyous bricolage, being as it was, "essentially of automotive parts and brass tubes of sizes varying from 18" to 6" radiated from a central sphere", a central sphere that was "a wooden croquet ball" which had been "hollowed out to allow room to collect the wires... From Charles Eames' reply we also learn that Fraser's was one of "quite a few inquiries and requests for the Galaxy" the Eames received but which were all to be equally disappointed, for "it has never been put into production"...
...In an attempt to approach one the Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris asked Charles Eames, Verner Panton, Roger Tallon, Joe Colombo and Fritz Eichler, Qu'est-ce que le design?... featured not only five of the leading international designers of the period but five designers who, on paper, represented five very different understandings of design: Charles Eames, one of the leading proponents of that post-War American interpretation of functionalism; the young Italian radical Joe Colombo with his utopian visions of our domestic spaces and understandings of design as much as a branch of linguistics as 3D forming; Roger Tallon, the Grand Doyen of French design, and for all of technical design for industry; Fritz Eichler, the first Design Director at Braun, a man very much associated with technical design for consumers, and the sober reduction of Germanic gute Form; and Verner Panton with his pop tendencies, holistic compositions and understanding of the role, the near primacy, of colour in design...
With their 1997 exhibition The Work of Charles and Ray Eames the Vitra Design Museum staged one of the first major Charles and Ray Eames retrospectives Twenty years later they return to two of the 20th century's most important creatives with An Eames...
...smow blog: One of the things that has always interested us about Charles Eames is that he appears to have been a journeyman architect, he then went to Cranbrook Academy of Art and subsequently, as it were, revolutionised design and how we view the world... Why was Cranbrook so important for Charles Eames' development...
...We know what you're thinking, lost furniture designs from Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames... In 1940 the Museum of Modern Art New York staged their "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition, a design competition that has of course gone down in history as the first time the chair design work of Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames was presented to a wider public...
On a recent trip we discovered a genuine Herman Miller Eames fibreglass chair bench at an airport. Being a relatively small airport - in fact so small that the word "airport" appears optimistic in describing it's capabilities - our frenzied photographing of...
