Set of 6 Charles and Ray Eames Fiberglass Sidechairs with Eiffelbase

height 81 cm, width 47 cm, depth 43 cm

Charles Eames, born in 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri, studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis and worked with partners as an architect of residential buildings and churches. He came to the attention of Eliel Saarinen, who offered Charles a scholarship to the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1938. In 1940, together with Eero Saarinen, he won first prize in the “Industrial Design Competition for the 21 American Republics”, also known as “Organic Design in Home Furnishings”, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and became head of the industrial design department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Ray Eames, born Bernice Alexandra Kaiser in Sacramento, California in 1912, studied painting at Bennett College in Millbrook, New York. Until 1937 she attended painting courses at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and in 1937 she took part in the first exhibition of abstract American artists at the Riverside Museum in New York. In 1940, she enrolled at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Charles and Ray Eames married in 1941, moved to Los Angeles and worked together on the technique of three-dimensional shaping of plywood. The aim was to create affordable and comfortable chairs. But the war interrupted their work and Charles and Ray developed leg splints made of plywood, which were produced in large quantities for the Navy. In 1946, they showed furniture designs made using this method at an exhibition at the MoMA. The Herman Miller company in Zeeland, Michigan, then began manufacturing Eames furniture. In 1948 Charles and Ray Eames took part in the MoMA’s “Low-Cost Furniture” competition and in 1949 they built their “Eames House”. In addition to their contributions to furniture design and architecture, they worked regularly in the fields of graphic design, photography, film and exhibition design.