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The work of husband and wife design team Charles (1907-1978) and Ray (1912-1989) Eames established a new identity for American interior and graphic design, and conceived an arena for the development of multi-media and corporate design strategy. Perennial admirers of the details of everyday life, the Eames collected hundreds of photographic images and outfitted both their home and their office with an array of folk art and objects from around the world.
Charles was born in St. Louis and studied architecture at Washington University, graduating in 1928. Throughout the 1930’s he was a part of several architecture practices in St. Louis, designing houses in and around the city, as well as two churches in Arkansas. In 1936 he went to Michigan to study at Cranbrook Academy of Art and stayed there until 1940, spending the last year as a design teacher. While at Cranbrook he met Eero Saarinen and collaborated with him on the groundbreaking and award-winning "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition at the MoMA. Their curvy armchairs and dining chairs offered a new method of production, molding a plywood shell in three dimensions, but they hadn’t yet honed their production methods, so the chairs were upholstered over these shells.
Ray was born in Sacramento and studied painting at the Art Students League and the Hans Hoffman School in New York. In 1936 she helped start the radical American Abstract Artists group, lauding avant-garde art and protesting galleries with stringent and traditional policies about what to exhibit. She left New York for Cranbrook in 1940, but was only there for several months before she and Charles married in Chicago and moved to Los Angeles.
Like many modernists, the Eames believed that affordable, mass produced, well-designed furniture and objects for the home were tools that could bring about an environment ripe for social change and betterment. Over several decades in which they were almost constantly working, the Eames took on the roles of decorators, entertainers, educators and artists. Their work, and expansive work philosophy, helped define an American style, summed up by Ray as, "what works is better than what looks good. The ‘looks good’ can change, but what works, works."