Charles & Ray Eames furniture
Charles Eames, born 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri, studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1940, Eames became head of the department of industrial design at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and in 1941 he married Ray Kaiser.
Ray Eames, née Kaiser, was born in Sacramento, California in 1912. She attended the May Friend Bennet School in Millbrook, New York, and studied painting under Hans Hofmann during 1937. Ray matriculated at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1940 and married Charles Eames the following year.
Charles & Ray Eames designed and developed stretchers and leg splints made of moulded plywood between 1941-43, and showed an exhibition of experimental moulded plywood furniture at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1946. The Herman Miller Company in Zeeland, Michigan, subsequently began to produce the Eameses’ furniture designs. In 1948, Charles and Ray Eames participated in the “Low-Cost Furniture Competition” at MoMA, and in 1949 they built their Case Study houses. Around 1955 they began to focus more on their extensive work as photographers and filmmakers, and in 1964 an honorary doctoral degree from the Pratt Institute (New York) highlighted Charles' achievements. The Eames Office designed the IBM Pavilion for the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York. In 1973 MoMA again presented an exhibition of their work, entitled “Furniture by Charles Eames”.
Charles Eames died in St. Louis in 1978; Ray’s death followed in 1988.
The extensive Eames furniture portfolio is produced under licence in Europe and the Middle East by Vitra.
