The Eames

The Eames

 
Charles and Ray Eames

Charles Ormond Eames, Jr and Bernice Alexandra "Ray" Eames née Bernice Kaiser were a couples American designers, who worked in and made major contributions to modern architecture and furniture. They also worked in the fields of industrial and graphic design, art and film.

Charles Eames
Charles Eames, Jr was born in 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri. Charleswas the nephew of the renowned architect William S. Eames. By the time he was 14 years old, while attending high school, Charles worked at the Laclede Steel Company as a part-time laborer, where he learned about engineering, drawing, and architecture
Charles studied for a few time architecture at Washington University in St. Louis on an architecture scholarship. After two years of study, heleft the university. His passion for the modern architects was remarkable, and many people used to say that he was fired for defending Frank Lloyd Wright, one of them. He was reportedly dismissed from the university because his views of design were "too modern”. Other reasons, less frequently cited, said that while he was a student, Charles Eames also was employed as an architect at the firm ofTrueblood and Graf. The demands on his time from this employment and from his classes, affected to sleep-deprivation and had to stop going to the classes at the university.
While he was at Washington University, he met his first wife, Catherine Woermann, whom he married in 1929. A year later, they had a daughter, Lucia.
In 1930, Charles began his own architectural practice in St. Louis with hispartner Charles Gray. They were later joined by a third partner, Walter Pauley.
Charles Eames was greatly influenced by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (whose son Eero, also an architect, would become a partner and friend). At the elder Saarinen's invitation, Charles moved in 1938 with his wife Catherine and daughter Lucia to Michigan, for study more architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art,where he would become a teacher and boss of the industrial designdepartment. In order to apply for the Architecture and Urban Planning Program, Eames defined an area of focus, the St. Louis waterfront. The Project was developed with Eero Saarinen and they designed prize-winning furniture for New York's Museum of Modern Art "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition. Their work displayed thenew technique of wood moulding (originally developed by Alvar Aalto), that Eames would develop in many moulded plywood products, including, beside chairs and other furniture, for the U.S. Navy during World War II.
In 1941, Charles and Catherine divorced, and he married his Cranbrook friend Ray Kaiser, who was born in Sacramento, California. He then moved with her to Los Angeles, California,where they would work and live for the rest of their lives. In the late 1940s, as part of the Arts & Architecture magazine's "Case Study" program, Ray and Charles designed and built the original Eames House, as their home. Located upon a cliff at the Pacific Ocean, and hand-constructed within a matter of days with pre-fabricated steel parts intended for industrial construction, it remains a greatlegend of modern architecture.

Ray Eames
Ray-Bernice Alexandra Kaiser Eames was an American artist, designer, and filmmaker who, together with her husband Charles, is responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20th century. She was born in Sacramento, California to Alexander and Edna Burr Kaiser, and had a brother, Maurice. She lives in a number of cities during her youth, in 1933 shegraduated from the Bennett School in Millbrook, New York and moved to New York, where she studied abstract expressionist painting with Hans Hofmann. She was a founder of the 'American Abstract Artists' group in 1936 and displayed paintings in their first show a year later at Riverside Museum in Manhattan. One of her paintings is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art....