Charles Eames is among the most important American designers of this century. He is best known for his groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture design, industrial design and manufacturing, and the photographic arts.
It was a revolution of form, an exciting visual language that signalled a new age and a fresh start - and one of its prime movers was Charles Eames. His works are lean and modern, sleek, sophisticated and simple and beautifully functional.
Charles Eames was born in 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1930, Charles started his own architectural office. He began extending his design ideas beyond architecture and received a fellowship to Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he eventually became head of the design department.
Charles Eames created more than a "look" with his bent plywood chairs or moulded fibreglass seating. He had ideas about making a better world, one in which things were designed to fulfil the practical needs of ordinary people and bring greater simplicity and pleasure to our lives.
Charles Eames adventurously pursued new ideas and forms with a sense of "serious fun." Yet, it was rigorous discipline that allowed him to achieve perfection of form and mastery over materials. As Charles noted about the moulded 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 Eames created some of the most influential expressions of 20th century design-furniture that remains stylish, fresh and functional even today.
As the most important exponents of organic design, Charles Eames demonstrated how good design can improve quality of life and human understanding and knowledge. Durch die Kombination.