Charles Eames (born 1907 in St. Louis/USA; died 1978 in St. Louis/USA) studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis and in 1930 opened his own office together with Charles M. Gray. In 1935 he founded a second architectural firm with Robert T. Walsh. After receiving a fellowship in 1938 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, he moved to Michigan and assumed a teaching position in the design department the following year. In 1940, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen won first prize for their joint entry Organic Chair (also known as Conversation Chair) in the competition "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" organized by the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMa). During the same year, Eames became head of the department of industrial design at Cranbrook. Ray Eames (née Bernice Alexandra Kaiser, born 1912 Sacramento/USA; died 1988), attended the May Friend Bennet School in Millbrook, New York, and continued her studies in painting under Hans Hofmann through 1937. During this year she exhibited her work in the first exhibition of the American Abstract Artists group at the Riverside Museum in New York. She matriculated at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1940 and married Charles Eames the following year.
Ray and Charles Eames
Designer couple Eames
Charles Eames and Bernice Alexandra Kaiser first met at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1940 and married in 1941. That same year the couple moved to Los Angeles and founded their own design studio - the Eames Office, which was located in an old garage in Venice. Between 1943 and 1979, the creative agency had a total of 438 employees. Depending on the scope of the project, sometimes 8-10 and sometimes even 20-50 people could be involved in projects. Following their work with plywood for the US military it came as no surprise that their first furniture creations were also plywood; for example design chairs such as the DCW and LCW and accessories such as their folding screen or their Eames Elephant. In the late 1940s the Eames started to seriously experiment with modern materials, including fibreglass resin. Apart from their natural desire to test modern technology, the step was also true to one of Charles Eames' mottos: "The most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least".
Eames Lounge Chair from Vitra
The Organic chair produced in 1940 by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen had been their first attempt at a Fiberglass chair, however it was not until the 1950s that the technology became available to produce such chairs in large quantities. The fiber glass armchair and sidechair ranges from Charles and Ray Eames, including such classics as the Eames DSR, DAR or DAW were the most obvious fruits of that period. In 1993 Vitra switched from fiber glass resin to the more environmentally friendly recyclable polypropylene for the production of the, now, plastic armchair and plastic side chair ranges. 1956 saw the creation of one of the most easily recognisable of all Charles and Ray Eames's work: the Eames Lounge chair and Ottoman - a modern interpretation of the classic English Gentleman's Club chair. Following the success of their Lounge chair Charles and Ray Eames again switched material with their aluminium chair range (eg. ES 117, EA 119), before in 1960 they undertook one of their most famous commissions - creating lobby chairs and stools for the Rockefeller Centre in New York by Time Inc. The resulting walnut Eames stools and the Eames Lobby Chairs ES 104, ES 105 and ES 106 remaining amongst the most iconic of mid 20th century American design. From a design career that spanned three decades, Charles and Ray Eames left the world a rich heritage of designer furniture and design philosophy that continues to motivate, excite and enthral designers, consumers and critics alike. In addition to the development of furniture, Charles and Ray Eames were also active in other creative fields. From about 1955 they also worked as photographers and filmmakers and produced, among other things, an image film for the then new SX-70 camera from Polaroid, which led to Charles and Ray Eames' camera collection consisting of various film cameras, Hasselblad and 35 mm models being joined by a Polaroid camera. In 1964-65, they were responsible for the IBM pavilion at the World Exhibition in New York, in 1969 they contributed to the exhibition "Qu'est-ce que le design?" at the The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and in 1973 the MoMA new York presented "Furniture by Charles Eames". In 1964 Charles Eames received the honorary doctorate from the Pratt Institute, New York and from 1970-71 held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair at Harvard University. Charles Eames died in Saint Louis in 1978, Ray Eames in 1988. Over the course of their three decades of career, Charles and Ray Eames have left the world a rich heritage of design furniture and a design philosophy which still inspires and fascinates designers, customers and critics alike today.
Dining area with Eames Fiberglass Chairs in original Eames colours
The collaboration between Charles and Ray Eames and Vitra started in a, somewhat, unconventional way: but ultimately proved very successful for both sides. During his first visit to the United States in 1953, Vitra founder Willi Fehlbaum was in a taxi when he saw a chair in a shop window that attracted his attention. He stopped the taxi to take a closer look at the chair and learned it was a Charles and Ray Eames Plywood Chair. Fascinated and delighted by the Eames chair design, Fehlbaum immediately spoke with the producer - Hermann Miller - to acquire the rights for furniture production. In 1957, Vitra was granted the license to manufacture the designer furniture by Charles and Ray Eames. In 1984, Vitra received the rights to all Charles and Ray Eames products for Europe and the Middle East - not just Vitra chairs, but also complementary items such as the Eames Hang it all, the Eames Elephant or the Eames House Bird. The relationship between Vitra and Charles and Ray Eames was more than just a manufacturer:designer relationship. Willi and Erika Fehlbaum and Charles and Ray Eames became very good friends and Charles Eames was to become one of Fehlbaum's most important mentors. The Vitra philosophy is strongly influenced by the Eames and even today, important questions at Vitra are approached from the perspective "What would Charles and Ray do?"
Eames Plywood Chair LCW
Eames Elephant Plywood
In 1949, Charles and Ray Eames built a house in Pacific Palisades: a construction which not only plays an important role in the architecture of the 20th century, but also reflects the work and philosophy of the designer couple in a very beautiful way. The house was designed as part of the "Case Study House Program" for the US magazine "Arts & Architecture": architects and designers were invited to plan innovative houses specifically for specific end-user groups in the context of American post-war architecture. The Charles and Ray Eames House was conceived for their own needs: a young couple looking for a house where you can live as well as work. The Eames House is based on a modular system and consists largely of elements of industrial series production, thus perfectly reflecting the Eames' enthusiasm for the latest technologies and the need to test them to the limits. However, the Eames House is not only architecturally relevant, but the interior furnishing by Charles and Ray Eames also play a role in modern design history. Anything but uniform or monotonous, the interior of the Eames House is a living example of Eames' philosophy of "mix and match": new and old, different styles and concepts are intermingled, the living space in a continuous "work in progress". The personal, relaxed atmosphere created by the collage approach impressed Willi Fehlbaum deeply and has greatly influenced Vitra's design philosophy.
Eames House in Pacific Palisades
Interior of the Eames House in Los Angeles
The influence of Charles and Ray Eames on today's world goes far beyond architecture and designer furniture. Their legacy is their design philosophy, the division of space and the role that design occupies in our daily lives. Rolf Fehlbaum, son of the Vitra founder Willi and Erika Fehlbaum, founded the Vitra Design Museum as a collection for important and influential design of the 20th century. It is therefore based to a large extent on the work of Charles and Ray Eames and their collaboration with Vitra. In a permanent exhibition, the Vitra Design Museum presents both finished products as well as prototypes and sketches. In addition together with the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. the touring exhibition "The Work of Charles and Ray Eames" was conceived and since 1997 been on display in London, New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv.
Vitra Design Museum on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein
Eames Aluminium Chair from Vitra
Vitra wardrobe Hang it all
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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...
...Stühle zum (Be)Sitzen's brief tour through the (hi)story of chair design in western Europe ends with Harry Thaler's 2011 Pressed Chair through Nils Holger Moormann, a chair that as Harry once told us began as "a small fork made from one piece of wood", became a desire to create a chair in one material, and which through the choice of pressed aluminium not only neatly translates the moulded plywood of, for example, Arne Jacobsen, Aino and Alvar Aalto or Charles and Ray Eames into metal, but reminds that the plastic shell of the RAR that rocks next to the Pressed Chair in Stühle zum (Be)Sitzen began life as pressed steel, before that was deemed too expensive and the, then, novel fibreglass was used...
...In 1959 Alexander Girard was commissioned to design the interior of the New York restaurant La Fonda del Sol, a commission for which Charles and Ray Eames designed the seating... Housed on the ground floor of the, then, new Time & Life building on Manhattan's Rockefeller Platz, a building for whom Charles and Ray Eames designed three lobbies1, a project which saw them develop the eponymous Lobby Chair as a fusion of their Lounge Chair and Aluminium chairs, and also develop a family of walnut stools-cum-side-tables2, La Fonda del Sol was conceived as a Central and South American themed restaurant, a restaurant which sought to bring not only the foods and flavours and spices of Central and South America3 to New York, but the ambiance, the, if one so will, flair of Central and South America...
Cranbrook An Alma Mater; An Academy of Art; A colony of experimentation Cranbrook Academy of Art arose on the Cranbrook Estate, a private fiefdom nestling quietly in a forest glade to the north of the contemporary Detroit ruled by the Booth dynasty; and a...
...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 these dispatches we once doubted the prevalence of designer furniture in comics, noting and acknowledging the regular appearance of popular furniture designs in other visual media, we, off-handedly, opined, "... Designer furniture in a comic?" Elegantly...
...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...
