Charles & Ray Eames

Charles Ormond Eames Jr. (1907—1978) and Bernice (Ray) Alexandra Kaiser Eames (1912—1988) were the principal American designers of the middle years of the 20th century. Their furniture substantially influenced all postwar modernist furniture. But the Eameses are memorable also for the spirit in which they worked. They have left us many photographs. In many of them, they are either laughing or making faces. For them, work was play—a joyful, yet totally serious business, as it is for children. The Eameses may be best known for their furniture, but their late works—learning games for children and popular science exhibitions—are even more important.

Charles Eames enrolled as a student of architecture at Washington University of St. Louis. In 1927, his junior year, however, he and a fellow student, Catherine Woermann, abandoned their formal studies to travel in Europe. It is not clear whether Eames chose to leave school or had been expelled. In any case, Charles Eames was going his own way: the St. Louis school was teaching its students how to build houses with columns and arches, while Charles was moving in a different direction.

Charles and Catherine married in 1929, and their daughter was born the next year. Also in 1930 Charles Eames teamed up with Charles Gray to open an architecture office in St. Louis. Soon after they were joined by Walter Pauley. The Great Depression was not the best of times for architects. In all, over the course of eight years, Eames built a handful of homes and two churches. The buildings sometimes show the strong influence of Frank Lloyd Wright (especially Meyer House), but Charles Eames was not a consistent Wrightian. Sometimes, pressed by clients, he built houses in historic styles.

Happily, his neo-gothic church (1936) in Helena, Ark., caught the eye of Eliel Saarinen, the president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. In 1938 Saarinen invited Charles to study at the academy, and Eames moved to Bloomfield Hills. The school was one of the strongholds of modernist art in the United States.