Charles Ormond Eames was an American designer, architect, and filmmaker who achieved international recognition as a versatile designer of buildings, interiors, furniture, rugs, toys, stage and movie sets, urban plans, industrial products, and exhibitions, as well as by his work in photography, films, and graphics.
Background
Charles Ormand was born on June 17, 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. He was the son of Charles Ormand Eames, a Pinkerton security officer and amateur photographer, and Marie Celine Adele Pauline Lambert. The family resided briefly in Buffalo and Brooklyn, New York, before returning to St. Louis, where Charles entered elementary school.
His father died in 1919. The following year Eames found his father's photographic materials and experimented with wet-plate printing.
Education
Eames attended Yeatman High School in St. Louis, where he served as senior class president and captain of the football team; he also worked weekends and summers for a steel company.
After graduation in 1925 he had a summer job with a lighting fixture company and then entered Washington University, where he studied architecture with the aid of a scholarship.
He remained in college until 1928, combining his studies with part-time and summer work for the architectural firm Trueblood and Graf.
Career
Eames became aware of the work of early modern architects and designers, including Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier in Europe during his honeymoon. He helped to form the architectural firm of Gray and Eames (later Gray, Eames, and Pauley) in St. Louis in 1930. In 1933, Eames designed sets for the St. Louis Municipal Opera outdoor theater, and he remained active with the firm until 1934, designing domestic and religious structures. After spending eight months in Mexico, Eames returned to St. Louis in 1935 and opened a new architectural firm, Eames and Walsh.
The firm designed residences and churches, among them St. Mary's Church in Helena, Arkansas, for which it also designed vessels, lighting fixtures, and vestments. The church came to the attention of Eliel Saarinen, the Finnish-born architect and director of the Cranbook Academy of Art in Michigan, who would later advise Eames and Walsh on the design of the Meyer house at Huntleigh, west of St. Louis. It had furniture and stained glass designed by Eames, as well as draperies and carpets woven by Loja Saarinen and sculpture by Carl Milles. The design of the Meyer house illustrates key elements of the early development, and, later, the professional practice of Eames.
His success was in large measure brought about by his ability to benefit from mentoring by seasoned professionals and by his ability to work well in collaboration. In the autumn of 1938, with the aid of a fellowship, Eames began studies in architecture and design at Cranbrook. In 1940, Eames joined the faculty to teach design, and he began working for Saarinen's architectural firm. While at Cranbrook, Eames assisted Carl Milles in his St. Louis commission for a fountain with symbolic figures, Meeting of the Waters, completed in 1940. The chief contribution of Eames was the design for the basin. In 1939, in collaboration with Saarinen's son Eero, Eames designed the installation of the faculty exhibition in Cranbrook Pavilion.
On visits to Chicago, Eames conferred with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, director of the School of Design in Chicago. Eames next collaborated with Eero Saarinen on winning designs for the competition Organic Design in Home Furnishings, announced in 1940 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including three plywood chairs molded into complex curves by laminating thin layers of veneers and glue. They were assisted in preparing their entries by three Cranbrook students, Harry Bertoia, Don Albinson, and Ray Kaiser.
Although the winning designs were supposed to have been put into production and sold by a network of cooperating department stores, World War II prevented any immediate attempt at mass production. Nevertheless, prototypes of the designs, produced at great expense, were part of an exhibition (organized by the Museum of Modern Art and the Modern Art Society of Cincinnati) that toured American museums in 1941 and 1942. Soon after his wedding with Ray Kaiser they moved to Los Angeles, where they began a working partnership that lasted until the death of Charles.
While in California, Charles worked on movie sets for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer until the summer of 1942. Meanwhile, he and his wife continued to experiment with plywood. With the help of John Entenza, Gregory Ain, and Griswald Raetze, they began to develop molded-plywood leg splints and stretchers for the United States Navy.
In July 1943 the Eames workshop, with a staff of more than twenty, became the Molded Plywood Division of Detroit-based Evans Products Company. Later that year Molded Plywood moved into a converted garage in Venice, California, and expanded production to include plywood parts for aircraft. At the end of the war the Eameses began to produce molded plywood furniture.
In March 1946 the Museum of Modern Art opened an exhibition of the furniture of Eames. In summer, production began on chairs developed from those shown in March, including a dining chair with back and seat units of plywood, bent into compound curves, attached by shock mounts to a leg-and-spine unit of bent slender metal rods.
In 1949 the chairs began to be manufactured by the Herman Miller Furniture Company of Zeeland, Michigan. This chair has become a classic; probably more of them are in museum collections worldwide than any other item. The Eameses continued to carry out commissions for Herman Miller, creating graphic designs for advertisements and catalogues, showroom interiors, and a range of furniture, as well as films. Highlights were a 1950 molded fiberglass armchair with metal legs and a 1956 leather-covered plywood lounge chair with a metal swivel base and a related ottoman. Charles Eames and Kenneth Acker designed a Los Angeles showroom building for Herman Miller in 1949; the interior was redesigned periodically, in collaboration with George Nelson or Alexander Girard.
The finest achievement of Eames as an architect is the house and studio in Pacific Palisades, California, in which he and Ray lived and worked. Its design began (with Eero Saarinen) in 1945 as a case-study house for Arts and Architecture magazine. The design was radically altered with the assistance of Acker, and the house and studio were constructed in 1949, utilizing the prefabricated parts originally ordered for the 1945 design. The result was exposed metal frames, glass walls alternating with solid panels, dramatic touches of color, and open, light-flooded interiors looking out on trees and other plants on the site. The straight lines and right angles of the living areas were softened by furniture and plants and displays of antique toys and artifacts.
The Eames firm continued to use the converted garage in Venice, with a staff at times numbering as many as seventy-five people. The firm designed a number of creative toys for Tigrett Enterprises of Jackson, Tennessee, from 1951 to 1961; some were sold through Sears, Roebuck and Company catalogues. The best known of the toys, "House of Cards, " was later reissued by other firms. Films and exhibitions increasingly became a major part of the office's work. Glimpses of USA, for the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, was a film presentation on seven large screens depicting the everyday lives of a cross section of Americans. A series of exhibitions commissioned by International Business Machines included Mathematica for the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles and A Computer Perspective for the IBM Exhibit Center in New York City.
The most complex exhibition undertaken by the Eames office was The World of Franklin and Jefferson, which was shown in Europe, the United States, and Mexico from 1975 to 1977.
Other films included A Computer Perspective (related to the exhibition), Powers of Ten, Toccata for Toy Trains, with music by Elmer Bernstein, and Tops.
Charles and Ray Eames developed a close relationship with India; in 1957 they were invited by the national government to investigate design opportunities presented by the possible interrelationship of Western design and technology and India's traditional culture. This invitation led to The Eames Report (1958), which has become a classic of its kind: sensitive and informed advice, practical and without condescension, for a developing country. Their work led to the establishment of the National Institute of Design in Ahmadabad in 1961. In 1965 the Eameses used the NID as a working base to set up a Jawaharlal Nehru memorial exhibition, Jawaharlal Nehru: His Life and Times, that opened in New York City and was later seen on four continents.
Charles Eames delivered a series of six Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University in 1970 and 1971, an honor he considered a high point of his career. He died in St. Louis while serving as a consultant for a new project at the Missouri Botanical Gardens.
Achievements
Connections
Eames married Catherine Dewey Woermann, a fellow architectural student, in 1929. They had one child and were divorced in May 1941.
Eames married Ray Kaiser on June 20, 1941. They had no children.