Celebrating Charles Eames’ Birthday

Let’s celebrate Charles Eames birthday. The most charismatic figure of the American design world during the age of Mad Men was born on June 17, 1907. Forging a lifelong partnership with his wife Ray – he was an architect by training and she was a painter and sculptor — the two had become the heroic figures of American modernism. Eames the star-designer created endless headlines. He designed the winning furniture for MoMA’s competition of the “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” in 1940 (with Saarinen), and ultimately best remembered for a series of molded plywood products and fiberglass-reinforced plastic, bent metal wire and aluminum, offering American consumers functional inexpensive produces that came to transform the American taste away from antiques. They famously lived in Case Study House #8 in Pacific Palisades, which Eames designed together with Saarinen as a part of the Arts & Architecture magazine’s Case Study program. In 1959, they illustrated the fabric of American life in a film created for the American National Exhibition in Russia. Entitled ‘A day in the Life of the United States,” screened in a 250-foot diameter geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, brought the notion of American capitalism to the Russian audience. Happy 109th.