Charles Eames and Ray Eames
April 18th, 2007 by Bob |
| Charles Eames and Ray Eames |
Charles Eames and Ray Eames
Charles Eames (1907-78) and Ray Eames (1912-88) gave shape to America’s
twentieth century. Their lives and work represented the nation’s
defining movements: the West Coast’s coming-of-age, the economy’s
shift from making goods to producing information, and the global
expansion of American culture. The Eameses embraced the era’s visionary
concept of modern design as an agent of social change, elevating
it to a national agenda. Their evolution from furniture designers
to cultural ambassadors demonstrated their boundless talents and
the overlap of their interests with those of their country. In a
rare era of shared objectives, the Eameses partnered with the federal
government and the country’s top businesses to lead the charge to
modernize postwar America.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Charles Eames grew up in America’s
industrial heartland. As a young man he worked for engineers and
manufacturers, anticipating his lifelong interest in mechanics and
the complex working of things. Ray Kaiser, born in Sacramento, California,
demonstrated her fascination with the abstract qualities of ordinary
objects early on. She spent her formative years in the orbit of
New York’s modern art movements and participated in the first wave
of American-born abstract artists.
Charles and Ray met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit
in 1940. Cranbrook’s holistic design approach and its creed of better
living through better design shaped their sensibilities and their
shared agenda. They married in 1941 and joined the westward migration
to Los Angeles as the city was gearing up for World War II. Wartime
experiments with new materials and technologies inspired the Eameses’
low-cost furniture for Herman Miller and later housing designs and
demonstrated expanded ways for designers to work with industry.
The Eameses also developed new partnerships with universities and
government agencies, as their interests expanded beyond the design
of objects
Recognizing the need, Charles Eames said, is the primary condition
for design. Early in their careers together, Charles and Ray identified
the need for affordable, yet high-quality furniture for the average
consumer — furniture that could serve a variety of uses. For forty
years the Eameses experimented with ways to meet this challenge,
designing flexibility into their compact storage units and collapsible
sofas for the home; seating for stadiums, airports, and schools;
and chairs for virtually anywhere. Their chairs were designed for
Herman Miller in four materials — molded plywood, fiberglass-reinforced
plastic, bent and welded wire mesh, and cast aluminum. The conceptual
backbone of this diverse work was the search for seat and back forms
that comfortably support the human body, using three dimensionally
shaped surfaces or flexible materials instead of cushioned upholstery.
An ethos of functionalism informed all of their furniture designs.
“What works is better than what looks good,” Ray said.
“The looks good can change, but what works, works.”
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The Eameses’ molded-plywood chair was their first attempt to create
a single shell that would be comfortable without padding and could
be quickly mass-produced. Throughout the early 1940s, the Eameses
and their colleagues experimented with this concept. Discovering
that plywood did not withstand the stresses produced at the intersection
of the chair’s seat and back, they abandoned the single-shell idea
in favor of a two-piece chair with separate molded-plywood panels
for the back and seat. The chairs — plus molded-plywood tables
and wall screens — were unveiled to the public in 1946. Variations
of these designs are still in production.
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The Eameses’ architecture promised good design for minimal cost
through the use of prefabricated standardized parts. At the end
of World War II, the Eameses joined a larger movement of architects
and builders aiming to supply veterans with affordable housing.
From their own house in Los Angeles to their proposal for the do-it-yourself
Kwikset House, the Eameses sought to bring “the good life”
to the general public by integrating high and low art forms, modern
materials and construction technologies, craft, and design. They
advocated mass-production of architectural components, furnishings,
and accessories as the ideal way to spread low-cost, high-quality
modern design throughout America. Although ultimately the Eameses
designed few buildings, they popularized basic tenets of their architecture
in their toys, furniture, films, and slide shows.
arles and Ray Eames’s careers in the 1950s mirrored America’s postwar
shift from an industrial economy of goods to a post-industrial society
of information. Rather than furnishings and buildings, the Eames
Office focused its efforts on communication systems — exhibitions,
publications, and films. The Eameses produced these media for governments
at home and abroad, for industry, and for the education and pleasure
of their friends and colleagues. In these endeavors the Eameses
used imagery of daily rituals and entertainments, vernacular landscapes,
and ordinary objects to promote popular culture as the currency
of exchange between nations and people. Their communications projects
elevated Charles and Ray Eames to the status of cultural ambassadors
overseas and interpreters of the meaning of America at home.
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The Eameses’ most ambitious attempt to teach one culture about
another was their multiscreen film Glimpses of the U.S.A. produced
for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow — the first
cultural exchange between the two countries since the Bolshevik
Revolution. A dazzling portrait of postwar American values — egalitarian
and consumerist — Glimpses of the U.S.A. projected 2,200 images
on seven 20-by-30-foot screens. Charles later noted that the “multiple
projection of images . . . was not simply a trick; it was a method
to employ all the viewer’s senses. The reinforcement by multiple
images made the American Story seem credible.”
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