Husband and wife design team Charles and Ray Eames established a new identity for American interior and graphic design. The Eames collected hundreds of photographic images and dressed both their home and their office with an array of folk art and objects from around the world. Their house - made from prefabricated elements - and their office, remain examples of an uniquely fertile breeding ground for many iconic designs of the mid 20th century.

Charles was born in St. Louis and studied architecture at Washington University, graduating in 1928. Throughout the 1930's he was a part of several architectural practices in St. Louis, designing houses in and around the city as well as two churches in Arkansas. In 1936 he went to Michigan to study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and stayed there until 1940, spending the last year as a design teacher. While at Cranbrook he met Eero Saarinen and collaborated with him on the groundbreaking and award-winning ‘Organic Design in Home Furnishings’ competition at MoMA. Their sculptured arm and dining chairs offered a new method of production, moulding a plywood shell in three dimensions. At this stage their production methods meant that the chairs still needed to be upholstered.

Ray was born in Sacramento and studied painting at the Art Students League and the Hans Hoffman School in New York. In 1936 she helped start the radical American Abstract Artists group, lauding avant-garde art and protesting against galleries with stringent and traditional policies. She left New York for Cranbrook in 1940, but was only there for few months before she and Charles married in Chicago and moved to Los Angeles. 

In the early 1940's, while working for the US Navy’s wartime effort, the Eames had the chance to experiment with new methods of bending plywood. They produced plywood airplane parts and moulded leg splints that were already so close to abstract art that it was no stretch for Ray to customize and exhibit them as such. 

They applied these techniques to their furniture design and produced the ‘Dining Chair Wood’, known as the ‘DCW’, the ‘Lounge Chair Wood’ and ‘Lounge Chair Metal’, known as ‘LCW’ and ‘LCM’ respectively. The Eames' approach to chair design was to start with a shell as the seat, shaped to fit the body so that upholstery was unnecessary.

In the late 1940's they came out with a series of reinforced moulded fiberglass shells that could be attached to a number of different stands like the ‘Eiffel Tower’, ‘Cat’s Cradle’ and a rocking base. 

Around 1950 they also released the Eames Storage Unit, a modular system of shelving that had brightly coloured panels, sliding/pull down doors in fiberglass and their signature dimpled wood front. They also came out with a series of wire chairs that were essentially mesh shells on wire rod bases. 

In 1956, a famous present for their friend Billy Wilder, a leather upholstered lounge chair and ottoman, was released as one of their most luxurious and expensive pieces. This chair also featured prominently in many photographs of the Eames' house. The late 1950s and 1960s saw the release of their ‘Aluminum Group’ of indoor/outdoor furniture, as well as the popular ‘Tandem Shell Seating’ and ‘Tandem Sling Seating’ designed for airports. The Eames worked extensively with the Herman Miller Company, a collaboration that included furniture production as well as advertising and showroom design.

A variety of toys, small objects, films and exhibitions was also part of the scope of the Eames Office. In the 1960's they focused on corporate films and exhibits for Westinghouse, Polaroid and IBM. To illustrate IBM's rapid technological advance, the Eames designed exhibits like ‘Mathematica’ and the IBM Pavilion for the 1964 World Fair in New York. 

Like many modernists, the Eames believed that affordable, mass produced, well-designed furniture and objects for the home were tools that could bring about an environment ripe for social change. Over several decades in which they were almost constantly working, the Eames took on the roles of decorators, entertainers, educators and artists. 

Their genius and philosophy helped define an American style, summed up by Ray as, "what works is better than what looks good, the 'looks good' can change, but what works, works."