They were a magic couple, a designing duo who helped lift American style from the doldrums of the Great Depression and the patriotic inertia of World War II.
Charles and Ray Eames created furniture that is casual, comfy and forward-looking. For an increasingly mobile society, the pieces were practical yet flexible enough to suit individual tastes in the new suburbs that sprawled over the postwar landscape.
Among their namesakes is the Eames Chair-simplicity itself, consisting of two pieces of molded plywood joined together by stainless-steel tubing. Another is the popular “ESU” or Eames Storage Unit, featuring a modular design of off-the-shelf materials.
Other familiar objects in their wide-ranging repertoire include the single-shell plastic chair in a spectrum of colors, wire tables and chairs with “Eiffel Tower” legs, the body-friendly aluminum chair, and the signature lounge chair made with interlocking pieces of plywood and a companion ottoman.
“I always thought as this century ends, you should look back and find things that represent the century,” said Don Albrecht, the curator of the first posthumous retrospective of the Eameses’ work. “After the 1980s’ and ’90s’ excesses of over-designed furniture, their pieces look remarkably good and what people will know as our century.”
Accompanying the show at the Library of Congress is the book of the same title, “The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention” (Henry N. Abrams Inc., $49.50), published in 1997 to coincide with the opening of its European tour in Germany. Several years in the making, the show was organized by the library in collaboration with the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany.
It will run from May 20 through Sept. 4 at the library, the first stop on the U.S. tour that will continue to New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Seattle and possibly Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art at the end of 2000 and early 2001.
“If you go back, you will see the Eameses were pioneering people in the terms we all talk about today,” emphasized Albrecht, a New York-based architect and writer. “They were living in a multicultural interior with all this diversity, juxtaposing all these cultures.
“There may not be a direct link to them,” he continued. “But things we find important, they found important. For instance, the whole notion that design is everywhere. Setting a dining room table is design. There also was a design choice there about dining-room tables.”
Their laboratory was the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the suburban Detroit institution founded in the 1920s and dominated for decades by the Finnnish-born Saarinens. Like the German Bauhaus, Cranbrook sought to meld art, design and craft with mass production to create a distinctively modern look for the 20th Century and beyond.
“The aesthetic was very much a collage of the machine-made and the craft-made,” explained Albrecht. “Cranbrook operated under the belief that the machine and mass-production were here to stay but that you had to temper the machine with things made by the hands.”
Success at home
From the look of the interior of their house in Pacific Palisades, Calif., the Eameses achieved this ideal through the careful display of the furniture with handmade rugs, pillows and bric-a-brac, such as vases and candlesticks. Some of their favorite objects came from Mexico, India and 19th Century America–notably toys and Shaker pieces.
“They saw in historic design lessons for contemporary designers,” said Albrecht. “The 19th Century toy, for example, was truthful to its materials: What was wood, was expressed as wood, and the same for metal. These are warm to the touch just as their chairs are.”
The Eameses’ house and studio, a converted garage, remain in family hands. Before Ray’s death in 1988 at age 72 (Charles died in 1978 at age 71), she talked with Charles’ daughter, Lucia, about wanting the family to take care of the place, grandson Eames Demetrios said recently.
Each year, a few thousand visitors come to the steel-and-glass house and grounds, according to Demetrios, but they are not allowed inside the residence because “it just can’t take the traffic.” Lucia, an only child, now lives there.
“One of the special things about the house is its relationship with nature,” Demetrios said. “It’s actually a pair of steel boxes placed next to each other and tucked behind a grove of eucalyptus trees to take care of nature and preserve the meadow.”
Earlier plans had called for a bridge-style house designed by Mies van der Rohe–the modern Chicago master celebrated for his less-is-more style. But it would have destroyed the integrity of the site, the grandson explained, and was never built. From photographs, the house succeeds in uniting the outside environment with its interior.
`Kind of combusted’
For decades the Eameses thrived as a husband-wife team and seemed inseparable. Yet the charismatic Charles gravitated to the spotlight, obscuring his wife’s critical contribution to their design equation. It was as if the moon hovered over the brightest star in the firmament.
The Museum of Modern Art, for example, ignored her completely in its 1946 exhibition, “New Furniture Designed by Charles Eames.” And as late as 1989, Charles was acclaimed as “the most important American furniture designer since Duncan Phyfe.”
Albrecht admitted it is difficult to separate the individual contributions of husband and wife from their oeuvre. Meeting at Cranbrook in 1940 and marrying at the Chicago home of a friend the next year, “they came together” and–in his words–“kind of combusted.”
Ray Kaiser had left her native California in the early 1930s for school in New York, where she pursued painting and dance. In 1937, she became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists (catalogs list her as R.B. Kaiser) and studied with the influential Hans Hofmann, a precursor of the postwar Abstract Expressionist movement.
“At Cranbrook, where she studied weaving, ceramics and metalwork, Ray made the decision to say goodbye to her career as a painter and instead transform this background into making beautiful useful objects.”Charles had studied architecture at Washington University in his native St. Louis and worked with the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal jobs program. At Cranbrook, he became head of the experimental design department.
“He was very interested in machinery and how the parts fit together,” said Albrecht. “And he talked about how a chair is put together like a building.”
In 1940, Eames and architect Eero Saarinen, a Cranbrook associate, won first prize in the Museum of Modern Art’s competition “Organic Design in Home Furnishings.”
Moving to Los Angeles in 1941, the Eameses continued to work on prototypes for new furniture and struggled, in particular, with the problem of creating a chair in which the back, seat and arms were one continuous piece of molded plywood.
Eventually, the solution would be found by using a different material–fiberglass-reinforced plastic, which could be stamped out in assembly-line fashion .
During the war, the couple had a contract to make leg splints for the Navy and worked on an experimental project to develop a molded plywood airplane that never happened.
By the war’s end, the Eameses found themselves in the right place at the right time to see some of their experimental designs take shape. As their list of clients grew, so did their reputation as a multimedia couple.
They conceived affordable and well-designed pieces as well as showrooms for the Herman Miller Furniture Co. of Zeeland, Mich. They also designed and produced films, exhibitions and books for such corporate giants as IBM, Polaroid and Westinghouse.
