Charles & Ray Eames

[Jungla_Juana]

Design is for living. That maxim shaped a widespread shift in design during the 1940s and 1950s. It was a revolution of form, an exciting visual language that signaled a new age and a fresh start – and two of its prime movers were Charles and Ray Eames. The Eameses were a husband and wife team whose unique synergy led to a whole new look in furniture. Lean and modern. Sleek, sophisticated and simple. Beautifully functional.

Yet Charles and Ray Eames created more than a "look" with their bent plywood chairs or molded fiberglass seating. They had ideas about making a better world, one in which things were designed to fulfill the practical needs of ordinary people and bring greater simplicity and pleasure to our lives.

The Eameses adventurously pursued new ideas and forms with a sense of "serious fun." Yet, it was rigorous discipline that allowed them to achieve perfection of form and mastery over materials. As Charles noted about the molded plywood chair, "Yes, it was a flash of inspiration," he said, "a kind of 30-year flash." Combining imagination and thought, art and science, Charles and Ray Eames created some of the most influential expressions of 20th century design – furniture that remains stylish, fresh and functional today.

And they didn't stop with furniture. The Eameses also created a highly innovative "case study" house in response to a magazine contest. They made films, including a seven-screen installation at the 1959 Moscow World's Fair, presented in a dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. They designed showrooms, invented toys and generally made the world a more interesting place to be.

As the most important exponents of organic design, Charles and Ray Eames demonstrated how good design can improve quality of life and human understanding and knowledge.

dwr.com

a few of the most iconic Eames designs....

dwr.com

eames.biz

antiques.about.com

matthewjjacobs.blogspot.com

 

[Jungla_Juana]

The couple:

vanddesignmagazine.blogspot.com

vitra.com

loc.gov

pardonmeforasking.blogspot.com

sheilazellerinteriors.com

Ray's contribution to the Eames' body of work is just as important as Charles's... Unfortunately in the 1950's it was unheard of to give a woman equal credit as her male counterpart.
Back then and even today people think "Charles & Ray Eames" are brothers...!

 

[Jungla_Juana]

December 12, 2011, 2:54 pm
Ray Eames: How She Dressed
By RUTH LA FERLA

2011 Eames Office, LLC.Ray Eames.

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2011 Eames Office, LLC.Ray’s wardrobe often included starchy white blouses with trim square-necked jumpers.
To design aficionados the name Charles Eames conjures an image of the screen-idol handsome design visionary, studiedly natty in his tweed coats and bow ties. The figure of Ray, his wife and collaborator, is somewhat more elusive. But now a new documentary, “Eames: The Architect and the Painter,” brings Ray into sharper focus, the filmmakers Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey training their sights on her personal style, a quirky composite of diffidence and daring.
The movie, at IFC Center in Manhattan, to be broadcast on PBS on Dec. 19, is a revelation, highlighting emblematic Eames creations like their molded plywood chairs, their playful films and their steel-and-glass house on Pacific Palisades, its face as rhythmically colorful as a Mondrian canvas. A more subtle attraction is Ray’s wardrobe: the starchy white blouses, trim square-necked jumpers, waist-cropped jackets and dirndl skirts that she wore most days and throughout her lifetime.
“She found one way of dressing that worked for her,” Mr. Cohn said, “and that didn’t really change with the times.” That look, molded to her ample frame and maverick sensibility, was much emulated by her contemporaries. Deborah Sussman, the graphic designer, who worked for the Eameses early in her career, found herself dressing for a time almost exclusively in dark jumpers and white shirts that her boss favored. “Clearly,” she said, “Ray had gotten to me.”
In their mannish fabrics and custom tailored suits, the Eamses seemed to work consciously to complement each other. But while Charles’s larky academic look typified that of many young architects striving to make their mark, Ray’s was more audacious and harder to place: too maidenly to be echt-bohemian, too saucy to be quaint.
Ray’s sensibility was somewhat Victorian, Ms. Sussman said, “not only in her dress but in some of the things she treasured.” Her obsessive attention to detail prompted her to collect baubles by the dozens, among them the bumble bees, butterflies and ribbons that she pinned to her shirts. She was also full of mischief.
“She would give a little giggle,” Tina Beebe, an artist and Eames office alumna, recalled, “and take you aside to show you she had purple polka-dotted lining inside her jacket.”
Ray’s coquettish interpretation of the Beat-era look may well find echoes on the runways, as a winking alternative to the “Mad Men” clichés that fashion may finally lay to rest.

http://runway.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/ray-eames-how-she-dressed/

 

[Unknownpleasures]

I just learnt about them in school and I'm fascinated with their work. It was really edgy for the moment. Wouldn't it be amazing to own something designed by them?!

 

[KoV]

I don't know that I'd like to have pieces from them in my ideal home. Not that I'd refuse them if offered, but I wouldn't pay outlandish prices for them.

However, I really admire how distinctly their vision translated into their work and they're certainly hugely influential. Also, I always find it heart-warming for some reason when I hear about couples who work together.

 

[Lolaa]

I admire their products so much, they are simple and timeless. I would own most of their pieces if I could afford them, especially the aluminum office chair and the lounge one.

Plus, nothing beats the "La Chaise", to me it looks like a sculpture.