Charles & Ray Eames: Organic Chair

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.

It was at Cranbrook that Charles Eames finally got his diploma in architecture. He later headed the academy’s Industrial Design Department. He also worked in Eliel Saarinen’s architecture office and designed furniture for two of Saarinen’s buildings — Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, N.Y., and Crow Island School in Winnetka, Ill. These early works were influenced by Alvar Aalto, who had visited and lectured at the Cranbrook Academy.

Then, in 1940, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, announced an Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition. The contest was curated by Eliot Noyes, a young architect and student of Mies van der Rohe and the first head of the museum’s new Industrial Design Department. The winners not only would have their work shown at the museum in a major exhibition in 1941 but would be awarded contracts for the manufacture of their creations and the promise of distribution by major department stores. Sales were to begin on the first day of the show. The exhibition featured works by Klaus Grabe, a Bauhaus graduate then based in Mexico, and graphic designer Alexey Brodovitch. Charles Eames and architect Eero Saarinen, son of Eliel, took part as a team.

The winning entries were announced in September 1941, and Saarinen and Eames took top honors in two of the six furniture categories (living room and chair design). One reason for their success was the

Eames and Saarinen were the first to use the new technology for furniture.

The winning entries were announced in September 1941, and Saarinen and Eames took top honors in two of the six furniture categories (living room and chair design).

One reason for their success was the use of a cutting-edge technology that made it possible to mold plywood differently than ever before. Eames and Saarinen were the first to use the new technology for furniture.

The terms of the contest called for the winning objects to go into mass production, and the Eames-Saarinen chairs were set to be made by Haskelite and Heywood-Wakefield. But the technology for the chairs turned out to be too unrealistic, and the plan was abandoned, although prototypes were made. On the other hand, Eames and Saarinen’s winning cabinets and stands were produced by the Red Lyon company in 1941—1942. Manufacture stopped, however, when, with the onset of war, plywood could no longer be obtained.

The show at the Museum of Modern Art, it should be noted, was the first collaboration between Charles Eames and his future wife and lifelong design partner, Ray Kaiser. Ray designed the Organic Design in Home Furnishings show.

Ray Kaiser, a native of Sacramento, Calif., had moved to New York in 1933 to study painting with abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann. Her work was included in a pioneering show of abstract expressionist art in 1937. Ray matriculated at Cranbrook in 1940.