by Lian Kan
Charles and Ray Eames were a power couple in the 20th century design movement, creating an impact on modern architecture and furniture design, as well as graphic design, film and fine art.
Born in 1907, Charles Eames attended Washington University on an architecture scholarship, however he was thrown out after just two years. He then got married to his college sweetheart and started his own architecture firm in 1930, where he met Eliel and Eero Saarinen, a father and son duo of Finnish architects, and Eliel recommended that Eames continued his studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He quickly became the head of the design department, and in 1940, he met Ray.
Bernice ‘Ray’ Kaiser was born in 1912 in California, and studied painting in New York with Hans Hofmann, a renowned artist, before enrolling in various courses at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1940, where she met Charles Eames. Eames was entered into a furniture competition hosted by the Museum of Modern Art with Eero Saarinen, where they had to mould plywood into a chair, and Ray was brought in to assist Charles and Eero in preparing drawings and models. They won the competition, netting the first two prizes, however this chair failed to become mass-produced. However, throughout this process Eames fell in love with Ray, and in May of 1941 he proposed to her through a letter.
After getting married and moving to Los Angeles, the pair started designing products together based on the work that Eames and Eero started at the competition. At the time plywood was a new material, so the process of moulding was a new concept. Charles and Ray began experimenting with this process in their spare bedroom with glues that Charles stole from his day job as a set architect for a film studio. It was then that they created the well-known Eames Lounge Chair, one of their many molded plywood furniture, which influenced the style of many houses of the middle and upper class Americans.
The Eameses were major influences of the Functionalism and Modernism movement, and as Ray said, “What works good is better than what looks good because what works good lasts,” and that is the impact the Eameses made on the world of design. Whilst for a lot of their products only Charles’ name was listed, Charles was very adamant in acknowledging Ray for her role in their work, even saying “Anything I can do, Ray can do better,”. In 1949, Charles and Ray built their own house in California which overlooked the Pacific Ocean as part of a case study where they used post-war materials, which is where they lived for the rest of their lives.
Charles Eames died in 1978, and Ray Eames died exactly ten years later to the day in 1988, after completing any unfinished projects they had started together.
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