Charles & Ray Eames
Charles & Ray Eames were born in Missouri and California respectively in the early 1900s. Their career spans from architecture to art, from painting to design and developed in parallel with the evolution of post-war American design.
The spouses were forerunners not only in the field of design, but also in architecture, photography and cinematography. Their works are the result of a perfect combination of American and Scandinavian design, of which Charles Eames was an expert (in fact, the Finnish-born designer Eero Saarinen is one of his greatest friends).
Virtually all the works designed by the Eames have now become collectibles due to their originality and modernity. In fact, their union proved to be a perfect partnership: he, architect and designer, focused mainly on the technological, productive and material aspects, she, artist and painter, more interested in the aesthetic, formal, spatial and, last but not least, ergonomic aspect.
Their journey, marked by great complicity, as well as by a desire for experimentation, meant that in 1942 they received an important order from the Navy, which led them to open a bentwood and plywood processing company that allowed them to lay the foundations for some of the most famous products designed by the Eameses like the famous Chaise Lounge.
This desire for experimentation regarding the processing of materials allowed them to obtain the maximum performance from materials such as wood, aluminium sheet, polyester resin reinforced with fibreglass and others.
In 1946 Charles Eames was invited by the MoMA of New York to present his first personal exhibition, in which the prototypes of some of the most important Eames chairs were exhibited. Following this exhibition, some American companies began to show great interest in their work and soon their furniture was sold exclusively by the American company Herman Miller and later by the Finnish company Vitra for the European market.
Op. cit. "The role of the designer is comparable to that of a kind and attentive host who knows how to foresee the needs of his guests"
