Charles Eames was born in 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended school there and developed an interest in engineering and architecture. He also worked in a steel mill, built a lithography press, pursued an interest in photography and worked with the important stained glass window designer Emil Frei (who later created the windows for one of Charles' churches in Arkansas).  After attending Washington University on scholarship for two years he was thrown out for his premature advocacy of Frank Lloyd Wright and so began working in an architectural office.

In 1929, he married his first wife, Catherine Woermann (they divorced in 1941) and a year later Charles' only child, daughter Lucia was born. In the 1930ís, Charles began to practice as an architect in St Louis, which included designing lighting fixtures and furniture for some of the houses he built. He began extending his design ideas beyond architecture and ultimately received a fellowship to Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1937, where he eventually became head of the design department. There he studied weaving with Loja Saarinen, spent a lot of time in the darkroom, worked under Eliel Saarinen and with Eero Saarinen. In retrospect, it seems he was gathering the varied skills he would need to meaningfully pursue the many different activities of the Eames Office.

Ray Kaiser Eames was born in Sacramento, California in the middle of the century's second decade. She studied painting with Hans Hofmann in New York. Her detailed notes, now at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, are the only record of his first season of lectures in the United States.  With Hoffman she began to hone her lifelong talent for color and shape.  But even before moving on to Cranbrook, Ray was beginning to chafe at the limits of painting as a medium for the expression of her ideas.  After her mother's death, her friend (and Charles' former architecture studio mate) Ben Baldwin recommended she attend Cranbrook. Though she was only at Cranbrook for 4 months in the fall of 1940, she met Charles there while taking his design class.  Later, she assisted Charles and Eero Saarinen in preparing designs for the Museum of Modern Art's "Organic Furniture Competition."

Charles and Eero's designs, created by molding plywood into complex curves, won them the two first prizes in MOMA's competition.  But the designs that won were prototypes and the intention had been to manufacture them.  The challenge remained: how to mass-produce molded plywood in compound curves.

Charles and Ray married in 1941 and moved to California where together they continued the furniture design experiments with molding plywood. Here their partnership truly began and they ultimately achieved the goal.  During the war the Eameses were commissioned by the Navy to produce molded plywood splints, stretchers and experimental glider shells.  And, in 1946, they, through Evans Products, began producing their moulded plywood furniture. The influential architectural critic Esther McCoy called their molded plywood chair the chair of the century. Soon production was taken over by Herman Miller, Inc., who continues to produce the furniture in the United States to this day. Another company, Vitra International, manufactures the furniture in Europe.

The Eameses continued to create new furniture designs into the 1970s. Examples include the molded plastic or fiberglass chairs from the early 1950s and the famous Lounge Chair and Ottoman from 1956, seen in exploded version above. Sturdy, comfortable and elegant office furniture was created in the 1960s, as well as seating designed for Dulles and O'Hare Airports.  The Tandem Seating in this gallery is still in use in airports around the world today.

But the Eameses explored many other media as well.  In 1949, Charles and Ray designed and built their own home in Pacific Palisades, California as part of the Case Study House Program sponsored by Arts and Architecture Magazine. Their design and innovative use of materials made this house a Mecca for architects and designers from all over the world. It is considered one of the most important post-war residences anywhere in the world. The house is seen above under construction (with Charles and Ray standing in the frame of the studio) and as it is today.

In the early 1950s, the Eameses continued to extend their interest and skill in photography into filmmaking. They created over 125 short films (ranging from 2-30 minutes), delving into subjects from toy trains to the world of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, from tiny sea creatures to the explanation of advanced mathematical and scientific concepts, such as the workings of the computer. Toccata for Toy Trains, a marvelous journey through a world of toy trains  which also works as a statement about the honest use of materials, and Powers of Ten, the basis of this exhibition, are two brilliant examples of the Eameses' skill, creativity and far-reaching interests. Their friend and collaborator, Oscar winning composer Elmer Bernstein, wrote the scores for both those films and some thirty others. Bernstein is perhaps more familiar to you from his music for such feature films as To Kill a Mockingbird and My Left Foot.

The Eameses designed numerous museum exhibits for IBM (Mathematica, The World of Franklin and Jefferson, Copernicus, and the 1964 New York World's Fair), the Smithsonian Institution, and others. They created a huge seven-screen slide show for the American Exposition in Moscow (1959). Charles and Ray received many honorary degrees and awards from universities and organizations across the country. Charles was an appointee to the National Council of the Arts and held the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard in 1970-71. These 6 remarkable lectures served as a kind of summation of the Eames design philosophy and approach.

Charles died August 21, 1978. Ray died on August 21, 1988.  It was ten years later - to the day.

THE FILMS OF CHARLES AND RAY EAMES ARE THEIR ESSAYS

If you go into an architecture bookstore today there will be a few books on the Eameses and fewer still of their own writings. Not all that many, especially when you consider their influence and importance to many designers and architects. Why is this?  One reason may be that an academic - like many a writer - generally deals with architects and designers by examining their words, particularly writings and manifestos from before their success.  Then the critic compares the writing to the work and explores 1 of 3 themes: they did what they said they would; they didn't do what they said they would do; or they did it  - but the critic wishes they hadn't.  However, with the Eameses there aren't that many writings per se for a critic to fit into this formula, what there are the films.  Their many, many short films are Charles and Ray's essays. Some, like Design Q&A, excerpted in the panels above, have a strong verbal component. Others, like Blacktop, one of whose arguments might be said to be the uncommon beauty of common things, do it without words -the camera simply and eloquently captures the abstract forms and shapes created while washing a school playground. 

This quality of the films is closely tied to the notion of models. Models in the Eames view were an important way to get a handle on the world and to understand a problem. There was a sense that the best way to understand a problem was to create a model of it, and then rework it and refine it as much as you possibly could. This happened with the furniture, where, although there were drawings and sketches made in the process, a huge number of prototypes (compared to other furniture designers) were made, worked and reworked.  And, though the office was also very adept at making models of exhibition spaces, this use of the term "model" may be a bit limiting.  For the Eameses,  modeling was also meant conceptually.

A film could be a model, not simply a presentation of an idea, but a way of working it out.  Looking back at the way the office worked, there is a constant sense that the best way to understand a process was to carry it all the way through.  For example, in the creation of the project that became the film Powers of Ten, first came a test known as Truck Test (1963) then the production of Rough Sketch (8 minutes; essentially black-and-white, 1968), which was a model of the idea of the journey in spatial scale.  The full title is quite revealing: Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe.  Charles and Ray recognized the value of such multiple iterations.  In fact, they felt that in many cases, it was only by carrying the idea all the way through, could one see the right way to approach the problem. And, indeed, the final version of Powers of Ten  (9 minutes; color, 1977) has quite a few differences.  But both films are models in a more important sense: they are models of the idea of size.  Intellectually, the Powers of Ten project had a number of different sources. Probably the most important was something Eliel Saarinen, the noted Finnish architect and head of Cranbrook when Charles taught there, had often stressed to Charles: the importance of looking at things from the largest perspective - and the next smallest. Another important source was a children’s book by Dutch writer Kees Boeke  which, in Ray’s words, suggested the idea of exploring the idea as a film. Watching how cogently Powers of Ten expresses these ideas gives a taste of the way in which the Eames films are the Eames' essays.

PHOTOGRAPHY AS PART OF THE DESIGN PROCESS

Photography was a critical part of the Eames aesthetic.  Charles often said that photography was a way of having your cake and eating it too.  One had the pleasure of the experience, but also the pleasure of keeping and sharing that experience as well.  A favorite family (at office and at home) story tells how once in the 1960's Charles' only - and beloved - sister Adele called from her home in Gulfport, Mississippi to say that there had been a terrible hurricane.  Houses were floating down Main Street, massive 200 year old trees up rooted, lines down and, in fact, they would probably be cut off from the outside world for a few days, but not to worry, everyone in the family was okay.  Thus assured, Charles said, "Yes. But did you get pictures?"

On one of the panels above, we have a selection from the House of Cards, a toy the Eameses created in the 1950’s.  The objects were selected  by Charles and Ray and others at the Eames Office and the photographs are by Charles.  Looking at the cards - which are a lot of fun to play with (on your way home, peek at the construction in the left hand window at the front of this building) you can see how work and play were intertwined for the Eameses.  They often said, Take your pleasures seriously. And photography was often part of that look again at them on the Eames House frame in the photo above.

For the Eameses, and particularly Charles, photography was a part of the process of design, part of the process of understanding the furniture. It wasn't a matter of taking these pictures and examining them later for flaws - no, it was the act of moving around the object, viewing it through the lens, making a series of decisions about taking a picture, and perhaps isolating and assessing the object without distraction or delusion.  That process was a critical experience for Charles.

Dick Donges, who worked at the Eames Office for 15 years, particularly in the workshop, comments on the process of critiquing the prototypes: "[Charles] would come back, and Ray would come back, and they both had a very good eye. Charles had a terrific eye. He'd do a piece of furniture and not until he looked at that piece of furniture through a camera could he make really any criticism. But once he started photographing it, he knew exactly what was wrong with it."  In other words, photography was not something that happened at the end of the process to help you sell furniture. For Charles and Ray Eames, it was actually part of the process of designing it.

One striking numerical measure of the importance of photography to the Eames Office is the bequest that Ray made to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.  Over a million items, including about 750,000 photographs were donated to the Library (the family still controls the intellectual property rights).  The vast majority of the photographs were taken between 1941 and 1979.  This collection comprises an astonishing 7% of all the Library’s photographic holdings. It is worth noting that the Library of Congress is the largest such institution in the world.

CHARLES AND RAY AS A TEAM - SOME THOUGHTS

Charles and Ray Eames were a husband and wife design team who created an extraordinary body of work.  Charles was trained as an architect and saw everything that he/they did as an extension of architecture.  Ray was trained as a painter and saw all the work as an extension of painting.  These were not duelling visions, but complementary ones that saw the deep connections between systems of meaningful rigor.  It is natural to want, but not particularly helpful to try, to find out who did what.  Even if one could show that one or the other worked more directly on a specific project,  that would probably not be enough.  Everything in the office flowed directly and unselfconsciously from the body of work as whole, much of which, in turn, sprang from early experiments and discussions in the Strathmore apartment with just the two of them.  The 1943 sculpture that is often called "Ray's sculpture" was actually by the both of them, a marvelous and intentional test of their technology, shaped together.

Charles often said that "fully half of everything we have done is due to Ray."  Charles was once asked why people never heard from Ray in public. Charles' answered dryly that  his reaction to a question was "a tendency to pontificate, become a kind of Mr. Know-it-all, but Ray's was much simpler: absolute catatonia."  Certainly Ray was not comfortable speaking in public and was probably content in the knowledge that she and Charles knew the value of her work.  She also said she saw her role as protecting Charles so he could do his work.  Too, most of their colleagues remember him as setting the direction the Eames Office took, and the collaboration taking place within that vision set by Charles.  But, of course, his work was their work, and her protection but one facet of her extraordinary capacity for focusing on a problem until it was solved.  Her gift for color and shape informs all the work.

Visitors to the Eames House sometimes assume that the "hard, masculine" edges of the steel frame came primarily from Charles and the "soft, feminine" decorations were primarily Ray's.  To look at it that way, is to forget not only the complexity inside most people, but in particular to forget that Ray also is co-designer (with Charles) of the house itself, and that on his solo travels abroad Charles was well-known for mailing box after box of folk art and the like which he had collected - boxes that would continue to arrive long after his own return to the office.

When Herman Miller, Inc offered to give her solo credit on the 1960 Time Life stools, she rejected it; not only would it be odd considering the collaboration, it would imply that she had nothing to do with rest of the Eames furniture.  In fact, most of their films bear a joint credit.  And yet, somehow the burden of proof has, for some, fallen on Ray to show her contribution.  In this way, Ray's reputation may be said to have suffered the backlash against feminism without the benefits.  The issue was not that important to either of them.  What mattered was the work.

Jehane Burns Kuhn, who worked at the office, mused on this issue, "If the office were an island, they would have been equals."  One resonant ambiguity of that statement is that in some ways the office was an island, a very self-reliant environment; but, of course, it ultimately was not.  Like any entity, particularly one that so joyously and assiduously engaged the world, it could not be an island.

THE GUEST/HOST RELATIONSHIP

Since the Eameses felt the guest/host relationship was one of the most powerful relationships in the world, it is fitting that their most famous film, Powers of Ten, should center on a picnic.  Charles and Ray argued that the guest/host relationship existed everywhere:  in the tent of a nomadic herdsman, in the layout of a railroad station, in the way you are greeted by the circus.  It also exists in design: how you make a chair or begin a film, and in all the subtle equations and gestures of welcoming in every day human existence.  And it certainly had to do with the way the office took care of guests: good meals at the shop, precise notes of which guests had seen what films already, not so much to impress - though it surely did - even more because it was the responsibility of the host to make sure the guest had as rich an experience as possible.  It is also a reason that Ray's gift for presentation and arrangement becomes such a significant thread in their work. What may have been the ultimate in guest/host relationing, as one observer put it, was the Sample Lesson for Hypothetical Course where as stills and movies of bread played, the smell of fresh cooked bread was wafted to the audience through the air conditioning ducts.

Elsewhere in their film Design Q and A, Charles said, Design addresses itself to the need.  It sounds like a rigorous philosophy - and it was.  But it may also sound stern, which it was emphatically not.  Theirs was joyful philosophy where rich meaningful pleasure and rewarding experience were, in that sense, as legitimate a need as a comfortable chair, well crafted plywood or an eloquent statement about scale. Charles and Ray Eames believed in constraints.  They believed that recognizing the right constraints was the key to the design challenge.  The Powers of Ten journey is a perfect example of the power of constraints. One might quite accurately say the film represents a single view in a single direction centered on a single point and yet it quite literally reveals the universe.