A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
May 20 - September 4, 2011 Library of Congress Washington, DC
Table of Contents
Introduction................................. 4 Biography..................................... 8 Space............................................ 9 Culture....................................... 10 Beauty........................................ 11 Furniture.................................... 12 Science....................................... 15 Acknowledgements.................... 16
Introduction Charles and Ray Eames gave shape to America’s
twentieth century. They witnessed firsthand many of its momentous historic events—such as the Depression
and World War II—and in their lives and work they
represented its defining social movements—the shift of the nations attention from the East Coast to the West Coast, the rise of corporate and industrial America,
the global expansion of American culture. 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.
Charles and Ray Eames practiced design at its
most virtuous and its most expansive: their furniture,
toys, buildings, films, exhibitions, and books all aimed to
improve society—not only functionally but culturally and
intellectually as well. While designers with a social mission are now regarded with some skepticism, in the Eameses’ time it was plausible that designers, businessmen, and
government leaders had common goals, and the mutual aims were considered in their country’s best interest.
Designers like the Eameses had the ability to imagine
America’s future, and their major clients—the nation’s
government and corporations—had the political, financial, and technological capabilities to realize their vision. Left: Molded-plywood leg splint, produced during World War II Right: Sculpture by Ray Eames, carved from a molded-plywood leg splint, ca. 1943. Collection Eli Noyes and Augusta Talbot
The Eameses’ success at interpreting contemporary
America derived from their autobiographies. For their
own histories were firmly entwined with the country’s—
formative events of their careers coincided with formative
events of twentieth-century America. The Eameses in fact
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A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
grew up with the twentieth century. Both were born
move to Los Angeles, at that time considered America’s
and Ray Kaiser in 1912 in Sacramento. Charles was
the social and professional distractions of Detroit, St.
before World War I—Charles Eames in 1907 in St. Louis raided in America’s industrial heartland. As a young man
Louis, or New York. Los Angeles proved an ideal arena in
he worked for engineers and manufacturers, anticipating
which to test the role of design in a society forced to meet
his lifelong interest in mechanics and the complex
the war’s unprecedented functional demands. Within the
workings of things. The Great Depression was equally
circumstances of a global conflict dependent on airpower,
important in shaping his outlook. Charles’s struggles
Los Angeles solidified its position as the aviation capital
to develop his architectural practices were alleviated
of the United States. Major aircraft companies such as
by a stint with the Works Progress Administration, a
Douglas, Lockheed, and Vultee employed many of those
New Deal model of the activist, culturally beneficent
who emigrated to the Los Angeles region in search of
government that the Eameses would advocated
high-paying defense work. In the eyes of designers like
and that would support their postwar projects.
the Eameses, these companies also projected a compelling
While the Depression-era focus on art in the
vision of the future through the industrial architecture
service of industry enticed Charles, the modern
of their new aircraft factories and the advanced materials
art movements of the time prepared Ray for their
and technologies of their flying machines. “In the
dynamic partnership. Ray’s artistic leanings were
airplane,” Charles Eames wrote shortly after arriving in
fostered by the theater, dance and art programs at
Los Angeles, “one feels strongly the appropriateness of
the college she attended, the prestigious May Friend
its streamed lines and they seem healthy and good.”
Bennett School, near Poughkeepsie, New York. Upon
graduating in 1933 Ray moved to Manhattan, as it
these words in to practice, designing and manufacturing
modern art. She participated in the first great wave
molded-plywood aircraft parts, leg splints, and litters for
of American-born abstract artists, exhibiting her
the federal government and the city’s aviation industry.
paintings and studying with Hans Hofmann, one
of the decades most important studio teachers and
These partnerships gave the Eameses access to
funding and materials that would otherwise not have
a vital link to postwar Abstract Expressionism.
been available for civilian pursuits. Experiments with
In New York Ray was introduced to the visionary
new molded-plywood techniques ultimately led to
concept of modern design as an agent for social change.
the design and manufacture of a line of chairs, tables,
This philosophy also infused the Cranbrook Academy of
and screens that answered America’s postwar demands
Art, outside Detroit, where both Ray and Charles would
for more flexible and casual ways of living. The most
gravitated in the late 1930s. Cranbrook forged a holistic
technologically and aesthetically advanced designs
view of design, offering studios in architecture, art, urban
of their day, the Eameses’ furniture proved to be
planning and craft production. When Charles and Rat
revolutionary. Charles Eames, wrote the Washington
met, he was instructor of design and she was studying
Post, changed the way the twentieth century sat down.
weaving, ceramics and metalwork. Cranbrook’s message
of better living through better design would imbue the
The Eameses also sought to change the way the
twentieth century lived. Responding to the pressing
Eameses’ sensibility for the remainder of their careers.
Within a short time, the Eameses and a group
of inventive collaborators found opportunities to put
was poised to become the world’s postwar capital of
final frontier. There they sought to start anew, away from
housing needs of returning veterans, they participated
World War II provided new opportunities for the
in the Case Study House Program, which sponsored the
collaboration of art and industry. Six months before the
design and construction of a series of modern homes
bombing of Pearl Harbor, Charles and Ray married and
as prototypes for postwar housing. Established in 1945
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A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
by the avant-garde magazine Arts and Architecture,
to demystify concepts of science and mathematics and
architectural traditions established by prewar modernists
were commissioned to convey larger and more complex
the program drew upon Los Angeles’s progressive
familiarize the public with computers. As the Eameses
such as Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler. The
amounts of information in short periods of time, they
Eameses steel and glass house used standardized
developed new media techniques. Their multi-screen
construction elements out of trade catalogues—some
presentations and slide shows fulfilled their belief that
adapted for wartime use—and was intended to serve
learning should be a sensory and pleasurable experience
as a model for low-cost, do-it-yourself modern design.
and that ordinary objects could convey lessons about
Instead, it became a model of a different sort. The
major social and cultural issues. Devised for corporate and
house’s kit-of-parts aesthetic prefigured the “high-tech”
institutional clients, these presentations dazzled spectators
architecture of the 1970s, and its interior assemblages
at world’s fairs. The Eameses’ twenty-two-screen Think,
of handmade objects and folk artifacts successfully
shown at IBM’s pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s
personalized modern architecture, offering a model
Fair, was their most ambitious and extravagant of these.
of contemporary decoration and “organized clutter”
Through all their efforts the Eameses advocated a humane
for a younger generation of architects, such as the
modernism focused on man’s ability to control the
postmodernists Charles Moore and Robert Venturi.
machine for society’s benefit. “With the computer, as with
The Eameses’ career in the 1950s mirrored America’s
any tool,” Eames wrote in his script for the 1957 film The
postwar shift from an industrial economy of goods and
Information Machine: Creative Man and the Data Processor,
products to a postindustrial society of information and
“the concept and direction must come from the man.”
knowledge. Rather than furnishings and buildings, the
Eames Office began generating communication systems
witnessed a shift in the nation’s center of gravity
in the form of exhibitions, books, and films. A series of
from the East Coast to the West Coast. The Eameses’
media projects for the federal government signaled shifts
moved to Los Angeles was part of a wartime migration
in postwar America. The Eameses’ majestic film project
of more than fifteen million Americans in search
for the United States Information Agency, Glimpses of
of well-paid defense work. California, Oregon, and
the U.S.A., shown in Moscow in 1959, marked a thaw
Washington, with their vast aircraft and shipbuilding
in the cold war. Their late-1960s proposal for a National
industries, witnessed the most remarkable change:
Fisheries Center and Aquarium in Washington, D.C.,
more than five hundred thousand people moved to
presaged the rise of America’s environmental movement.
the Los Angeles area alone. This migration resulted in
The offices last major project, The World of Franklin
economic and demographic shifts that permanently
and Jefferson, celebrated the nations Bicentennial with
altered the nation’s regional balance, giving the West
a book, three films and an exhibition that traveled
Coast newfound status and independence. After the war
internationally. Projects such as these elevated the
Americans continued to be lured by the rich economy
Eameses to the status of U. S. ambassadors overseas and
and mild climate of Southern California, and the
cultural interpreters of meaning of America at home.
The postwar era that nurtured the Eameses also
region’s population doubled between 1949 and 1965.
Charles and Ray Eames practiced in the era when
“what was good for General Motors was good for the
During those years Los Angeles and Southern
California came to represent the American Dream to
country.” They worked for such corporate giants as
the world, proposing radical new ways of living, from
Westinghouse, Boeing, and Polaroid. But for IBM—the
patio homes to decentralized freeway cities. As captured
“information machine” for whom they created more
in magazines from Life to Vogue, the Eameses enjoyed
than fifty exhibitions, films and books—they sought
the fruits of postwar American life, combining living
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A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
and working, indoors and outdoors, high style and
the traditional handicraft. The Eameses and their work
talents as well as traditional domesticity. Their house
accessibility, the best of contemporary technology with
seemed free of historical precedent, feeding the notions
exemplified the era’s home and hearth focus, yet it
of self-invention and self-reliance that have characterized
was also a studio where they made many of their
both Los Angeles and America. And while they were
early films. They worked for corporate clients, but
never overt boosters of the city, the Eameses became
with their own agenda. And although they were often
emblems of postwar Los Angeles, a mythic place where
called upon by the American government to produce
mankind tamed the machine, nature and history.
Charles and Ray Eames were both of their time
and ahead of it. Their marriage was one of creative
designs that represented the nation abroad, their
Today that era is regarded with some ambivalence.
impact went beyond national boundaries. Charles
In the days before Rachel Carson’s environmental
and Ray Eames belong to the twentieth century,
manifesto Silent Spring, an aura of progress and optimism
yet their legacy will endure long in to the future.
surrounded most new materials and technologies. A booming economy seemed to offer the middle class
unlimited horizons and a redistribution of wealth to the less fortunate. Inequalities certainly persisted, however,
and books such as Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit critiqued the nation’s rampant consumerism. And if the era’s emerging civil rights and sexual liberation
movements helped realize America’s egalitarian values,
so too did they point toward the tumult and divisiveness of the 1960s. “The scary fact is that many of our dreams have come true,” Eames said in 1971. “We wanted
more efficient technology and we got pesticides in the
soil. We wanted cars and television sets and appliances and each of us thought he was the only one wanting that. Our dreams have come true at the expense of
Lake Michigan. That doesn’t mean the dreams were all wrong. It means there was an error somewhere in the
wish and we have to fix it.” The Eameses wholehearted belief that design could “fix it” and improve people’s
lives remains their greatest lesson. What is all the more
remarkable about them—especially in light of our more
Stack of fiberglass-reinforced plastic chairs, 1954; dining armchair,
cynical times—is how they achieved their ambitious
produced 1950–1989
seriousness of purpose with elegance, wit, and beauty.
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A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
Biography
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, pinned by chair leg bases
Photographic sequence showing the process
to a sidewalk, photographed from the roof
by which the Eameses made their 1946
of the Eames Office
Christmas Card
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.
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A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
Space The Eameses’ architecture promised good design
Eames House, studio interior, 1993
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
Eames House, living room, 1993
in their toys, furniture, films, and slide shows.
The Case Study House Program, established in
1945 by the avant-garde Arts & Architecture magazine, sponsored the design and construction of a series of
modern residences as prototypes for mass-produced
housing. Case Study House #8 -- the Eameses’ own
steel-and-glass home in Los Angeles -- used construction elements from trade catalogues and was intended to
serve as a model for do-it-yourself modern design. The
Eames House’s studied contrast -- between old and new, rich and humble, foreign and familiar, mass-produced
and hand-crafted -- personalized modern architecture.
This aesthetic of collage became the Eameses’ signature.
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A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
Culture
Glimpses of the U.S.A. projected at the American National Exhibition, Moscow 1959
Charles and Ray Eames’s careers in the 1950s mirrored
values -- egalitarian and consumerist -- Glimpses of the
goods to a post-industrial society of information. Rather
screens. Charles later noted that the “multiple projection
America’s postwar shift from an industrial economy of
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.
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
U.S.A. projected 2,200 images on seven 20-by-30-foot 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.”
No country offered the Eameses greater
opportunities for cross-cultural explorations than India. The Eameses’ “India Report” (1958), commissioned by the Indian government to guide the country
into the future, contained recommendations for
industrializing and making mass-produced goods
without losing the qualities of the country’s traditional handicrafts. Among the Eameses’ recommendations was the establishment of a government-supported
design institute, which would foster India’s cultural
development as the country underwent revolutionary changes. As a result of the Eameses’ report, the
National Institute of Design was established in 1961 in Ahmadabad, the first institution for industrial design, education, and training in the developing world.
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A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
Beauty Charles and Ray Eames’s philosophy of the educational role of
everyday things led them to develop projects that would spur people
to find beauty in the commonplace. Charles heard the music of Bach
in the splash of soapy water on an asphalt schoolyard -- and made the film Blacktop. Ray saw beauty in the shape of a utilitarian leg splint -- and made elegant sculptures. The Eameses’ ability to transform
the ordinary into the extraordinary is one of their greatest legacies.
Charles and Ray at the office, 1968
The Eameses’ films and slide shows gave the spectator, in Charles’s
words, a “new depth of vision.” Encompassing an enormous breadth of
subject matter, the Eameses’ slide shows were assembled for friends, for
school courses and lectures, as well as for their corporate events. Like objects themselves, the Eameses’ slides were valuable vehicles of information, providing essential connections to distant times, places, and cultures.
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A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
Furniture
Recognizing the need, Charles Eames said, is the
Aluminum dining chair, 1959
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.”
The Eameses’ molded-plywood chair was their
Lounge chair and ottoman, 1956
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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A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
Molded-plywood lounge chair with metal legs (LCM), 1946
The Eameses’ fiberglass chair solved the
problem of how to make a seat out of a single body-fitting shell. The progressive quality
and moldability of plastic made it even more alluring to the Eameses than plywood or
stamped metal. Fiberglass had been used during the war by Zenith Plastics to reinforce plastic on airplane radar domes. Working together, Zenith and the Eameses re-conceptualized
the use of the material, creating one of the first one-piece plastic chairs with an exposed rather than an upholstered surface. Zenith began
mass-producing fiberglass armchairs in 1950 for the Herman Miller Furniture Company
(today Herman Miller, Inc.). The chairs have only recently gone out of production.
Inspired by trays, dress forms, baskets, and
animal traps, the Eames Office investigated bent and welded wire mesh as the basis for
furniture designs. The wire-mesh chair, like the fiberglass chair, was a uni-shell design. The shell could be adapted to various base
configurations and upholstery types. Ingenious techniques were developed to mass-produce suitable upholstery, and special molds were created as forms over which to weld the
wire shells. The office adapted a resistance-
welding technique used for making drawers and developed an innovative method for
reinforcing the shell’s rim with a double band The concept for this chair was developed by the Eames Office and presented at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1948 “International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design.” Since 1991 the chair has been manufactured by Vitra AG, Basel
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of wire. The wire chairs are still in production.
A Legacy of Invention: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames
Science
The Eameses sought to foster universal understanding of socially
beneficial science. To help people understand new technologies and
their potential, they produced approximately sixty films, exhibitions, and
books for such corporations as IBM, Boeing, Polaroid, and Westinghouse. Throughout their careers, the Eameses counted many scientists as
colleagues and friends, joining their community as visual communicators.
A major theme in all the Eameses’ scientific endeavors was the
beauty and elegance of scientific principles and the tools used to study and convey them. Revealing science’s complex integration of art,
philosophy, and nature, the Eameses’ films and exhibitions successfully
Conceptual model for the exhibition Mathematica, 1960
related the unfamiliar aspects of science with familiar and comfortable facets of everyday life. These projects translated complex ideas into simple images to make them understandable to the layperson.
The ultimate Eamesian expression of systems and connections,
Powers of Ten explores the relative size of things from the microscopic to the cosmic. The 1977 film travels from an aerial view of a man in a
Chicago park to the outer limits of the universe directly above him and back down into the microscopic world contained in the man’s hand.
Powers of Ten illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and
change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery. The film also demonstrates the Eameses’ ability to make science both fascinating and accessible.
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Acknowledgements
The exhibition was organized by the Library of Congress in partnership with the Vitra Design Museum.
Charles (in lift), Ray, and staff outside their office filming the picnic scene for the first version of Powers of Ten, 1968.
Funding for the exhibition was provided by IBM, Herman Miller, Inc., and Vitra AG. Additional support was provided by CCI, Inc and the Eames
Office. The Library of Congress and the Vitra Design Museum gratefully
acknowledge the financial support, insight, and participation of the Eames family. The organizers extend special thanks to Charles’s daughter, Lucia
Eames, and the Eameses’ grandson, Eames Demetrios, head of the Eames
Office. The Eames Office is committed to communicating, preserving, and extending the legacy and work of Charles and Ray Eames.
