Charles Eames

Charles Eames grew up in St. Louis, the son of a railway security officer, and won an architecture scholarship to Washington University — then lost the goodwill of his professors by admiring Frank Lloyd Wright's work more than theirs, and left after two years without a degree. He spent the late 1920s and 1930s designing houses and churches in Missouri and Arkansas with no architecture license, married Catherine Woermann, and by 1938 had talked his way into a fellowship at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan on Eliel Saarinen's recommendation. He was teaching there in 1940 when he met a painting student named Ray Kaiser. He divorced Catherine, married Ray in June 1941, and the two drove to Los Angeles on their honeymoon and kept working together from then on.

Working out of a cramped Los Angeles apartment, Charles and Ray spent the early 1940s molding plywood into compound curves on a machine they nicknamed the Kazam!, first for a leg splint the Navy ordered by the thousands, then for chairs. The 1946 DCW and LCW used a molding process new to furniture manufacturing; Herman Miller began producing it and kept producing it for decades. The Eames Lounge Chair followed in 1956, alongside molded fiberglass shell chairs, and the partnership expanded into exhibitions — Mathematica for IBM in 1961 — and film. Between 1950 and 1982 the office made roughly 125 short films, the best known of them Powers of Ten, a nine-minute zoom from a picnic blanket to the edge of the universe and back down into a proton.

The office they ran together was named Eames Office, and Ray's hand was in the color, the textiles, the film editing and much of the furniture besides — yet for decades the public simply said 'Eames' and meant Charles. Design magazines profiled him alone, awards went out in his name only, and Ray herself pushed back for the rest of her life, insisting the work was never a solo act. The imbalance had a personal root too: Charles left his first wife, Catherine Woermann, and their young daughter Lucia when the second marriage began in 1941, and Lucia spent much of her childhood on the edges of a household organized entirely around her father's new studio. Only after Ray's death in 1988 did credit start moving back toward something closer to fifty-fifty.

Charles died of a heart attack in St. Louis in August 1978, on a trip back to his hometown, and was buried there. Ray outlived him by exactly ten years to the day, dying on August 21, 1988, and spent the decade between running the office and safeguarding the archive rather than expanding the line. The furniture never left production — Herman Miller in the United States and Vitra in Europe still build the molded plywood chairs and the lounge chair largely unchanged, and a mint lounge chair now resells for many times the several hundred dollars a middle-class buyer paid for one new in 1956. Their Pacific Palisades house is a National Historic Landmark that still gives public tours.

Charles Eames's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Eames House (Case Study House No. 8) building
  Built almost entirely from off-the-shelf industrial parts — now a National Historic Landmark 1949
• DCW and LCW molded plywood chairs invention
  Made plywood-molding at scale practical for furniture 1946
• Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman invention
  Debuted on NBC's Home television program 1956
• Mathematica: A World of Numbers... and Beyond other
  Traveling exhibition designed for IBM 1961
• Powers of Ten film
  A nine-minute zoom from a picnic blanket to the edge of the universe and back to a proton 1977

• June 17, 1907 aged 0 Born in St. Louis, Missouri
• 1924 aged ~17 Enrolls in architecture at Washington University on scholarship Left after two years without a degree.
• 1938 aged ~31 Wins a fellowship to Cranbrook Academy of Art Recommended by Eliel Saarinen.
• 1940 aged ~33 Meets Ray Kaiser at Cranbrook
• June 20, 1941 aged 34 Marries Ray Kaiser and drives to Los Angeles on their honeymoon
• 1946 aged ~39 The DCW and LCW molded plywood chairs enter production with Herman Miller
• 1956 aged ~49 The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman debuts on national television
• 1961 aged ~54 Mathematica opens for IBM
• August 21, 1978 aged 71 Dies of a heart attack in St. Louis

• Eero Saarinen 1910–1961
  Architect whose expressive buildings and furniture became icons of postwar American modernism. rival and collaborator on early furniture competitions
• Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
  Architect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment. idolized as a student, to his professors' dismay
• Buckminster Fuller 1895–1983
  Popularized the geodesic dome and promoted resource-efficient structural design. fellow midcentury design experimenter