OntwerperAmerican
Charles & Ray Eames
8 actieve items
Charles Eames (1907–1978) grew up in St. Louis, studied architecture briefly at Washington University before his modernist leanings got him expelled, and eventually arrived at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he became head of industrial design. Ray Kaiser (1912–1988) came to design through painting, studying under Hans Hofmann in New York and co-founding the American Abstract Artists group before meeting Charles at Cranbrook in 1940. They married in 1941 and immediately moved to Los Angeles, where they set up a studio that would operate for nearly four decades.
Their earliest shared obsession was plywood. Working in their apartment with a homemade contraption they called the Kazaam machine, they taught themselves to mold wood into compound curves under heat and pressure. A U.S. Navy contract during the Second World War put that knowledge to practical use, producing lightweight molded splints and aircraft components. Once the war ended, they applied the same technology to furniture, reasoning that a curved shell could provide comfort without padding or upholstery. The DCW and DCM chairs of 1945, and the LCW shortly after, demonstrated that mass production and genuine formal quality were not opposites. Time magazine later named the LCW chair of the century.
Herman Miller began distributing their plywood pieces in 1947 and acquired the full catalog in 1949, starting one of the most productive manufacturer-designer partnerships in twentieth-century furniture history. The collaboration produced the fiberglass shell chairs of the early 1950s, the aluminum group in 1958, and the Lounge Chair and Ottoman in 1956, a piece composed of three curved veneer shells and leather cushions that reads as a modern answer to the English club chair. Nineteen of their product lines entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Furniture was only part of what the Eames Office produced. The studio in Venice, California became a working laboratory for exhibitions, films, and industrial design for clients including IBM, Westinghouse, and the U.S. government. Their 1977 film Powers of Ten, which scales from a human picnic to the edge of the observable universe and back to a single atom, remains a touchstone of scientific communication. The Eames House in Pacific Palisades, Case Study House No. 8, built in 1949 from prefabricated steel components, served as both their home and a proof of concept that industrial materials could produce genuinely warm domestic spaces.
Both Charles and Ray died in 1978 and 1988 respectively. Their chairs are produced continuously today by Herman Miller and Vitra, and appear regularly at Nordic auction houses where the Lounge Chair in particular draws consistent attention. The breadth of what they touched, furniture, architecture, film, exhibition design, toy-making, remains the clearest argument that their collaboration was not a design practice so much as a method of thinking.