A Close Partnership: Ray and Charles Eames

On a bluff in Pacific Palisades, California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, sit the Eames House and workshop, their rectangular structures nestled between the trunks of century-old eucalyptus trees. Expansive glass walls, subdivided into rectangles by steel mullions, offer tantalizing glimpses into the daily and work life of its occupants. The home and workshop were designed by Charles and Ray Eames and built in 1949.

The Eameses were two of the most significant designers of the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on her research and a 1983 interview conducted with Ray Eames, design historian Pat Kirkham writes that

[i]t is as furniture designers, whose work was both technologically innovative and aesthetically daring, that the Eameses are best remembered, but their architecture and interior design also brought them international acclaim as did their exhibition design, film-making and multi-media presentations.

While the Eameses designed and produced work in many visual fields, the Eames House remains an internationally celebrated example of their collaborative design.

Charles Eames was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1907. After graduating high school, he attended Washington University, just outside of St. Louis, to study architecture. During his time there, his interest in the architectural ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright grew and clashed with the offered Beaux Arts-inspired curriculum. After two years, Charles was asked to leave the University in 1927.

Charles married his first wife, Catherine Dewey Woermann, in 1929. The following year, he began an architectural firm with Charles Gray and welcomed the birth of his only child, his daughter Lucia. Life grew difficult as the Great Depression unfolded, and, in 1933, Charles went to Mexico, leaving behind his young family and his architectural practice. Eight-to-ten months later, he arrived back in St. Louis to pick up where he left off. He returned to his family and began a new architectural practice with Robert Walsh. His designs began to attract some attention.

Charles met artist Ray Kaiser in 1940, soon after she began studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Charles had arrived at Cranbrook in 1938, having been invited to study there by architect and academy president Eliel Saarinen after seeing his designs for St. Mary’s Church in Helena, Arkansas. By the time Ray arrived at Cranbook in 1940, Charles was a faculty member and had developed a close working and personal relationship with Eliel’s son, Eero Saarinen.

Ray found her way to Cranbrook on the suggestion of a friend. Born in Sacramento, California, in 1912, she spent much of the 1930s studying painting. In 1931, she moved to New York State with her mother, Edna. She first studied at the May Friend Bennett School in Millbrook, New York, but in 1933, she moved to New York City, where she continued her studies under the Abstract Expressionist painter, Hans Hofmann. As Edna’s health deteriorated, Ray helped her move to Florida in 1938; she subsequently moved there herself in 1939, becoming Edna’s caretaker. After Edna passed away in 1940, Ray felt a return to New York City wasn’t an option for her. So, on her friend’s suggestion, she applied to Cranbrook Academy of Art and was accepted shortly after.

Charles and Ray married in 1941. Soon after they moved to Southern California, where they flourished as designers. In giving context to the Eames’ arrival in Los Angeles in 1941, art historian Saloni Mathur writes that the pair “served to embody Southern California as a site for the ‘American Dream,’ defined as the seductive mix of postwar prosperity, consumerism, television, freeways, and good weather.” In that, they differed from those Modernists who kept mass culture at a distance.

The Eames House was commissioned and built as part of the Case Study House program. This was an initiative sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine to highlight the potential of efficiently built homes with a contemporary design aesthetic. While the original design featured cantilevered glass-and-steel box extending into a meadow, after the Eameses spent some time on the land, the design evolved into two glass-and-steel boxes, one house and one workshop, positioned at the edge of the plot so they could enjoy and use the meadow.

The Eames House showed a side of modernism that was livable. While the structure was built from sleek, prefabricated materials, the interior was a home. In describing how the interior differed from the spareness typically found in Modernist design, architectural historian Lynne Walker writes that “[d]omesticity, playful and productive, made a comeback in the Eames House, which introduced decoration through marks of human habitation and character, like the artful accumulation of a collection of folk toys…”

As with many husband-wife creative partnerships in the twentieth century, Charles received far more of the public credit for their designs than Ray. Yet, as Kirkham explains,

[t]he individual contributions of each person in any design partnership is always difficult to assess and, in the case of Charles and Ray Eames, the interchange of ideas between these two enormously talented individuals is particularly difficult to chart because their personal and design relationship was so close.

And while the closeness of this collaboration wasn’t always picked up by the public, it’s something that Charles and Ray emphasized themselves—many times over. As Kirkham writes, during the 1983 interview, Ray reaffirmed that their work “was a full collaboration. One can’t say Charles did this bit, Ray did this bit.”

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