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Friday Food For Thought: It all began with the chair – the story of Charles and Ray Eames

date added: 20.12.2011

Ray and Charles Eames examining the sling locations to be covered by fabric lapping in a prototype of the Aluminum Group Lounge Chair, 1957; photo © Eames Office, LLC

He was an architectural school dropout who never got his license and she was a painter that rarely painted yet the husband-and-wife powerhouse of Charles and Ray Eames has become one of the most significant creative practices in the history of modern design. Now, for the first time since their deaths, filmmakers Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey make ‘a definitive and unprecedented cinematic foray into the private world of the Renaissance-style studio that Charles and RayEames conceived in a cavernous warehouse on a gritty street in Venice Beach, CA’ in their recently-released feature-length documentary, Eames: The Architect and the Painter.

Ray Eames with an early prototype vestries of The Toy that was made of cardboard triangles, outside the Eames House in 1951; photo © Eames Office, LLC

Narrated by the acclaimed American actor James Franco, the film features ‘a virgin cache of archival material’ such as never-before-seen films, love letters, photographs and artifacts as well as numerous interviews with with Charles Eames’ daughter, Lucia and grandson, Eames Demetrios, filmmaker Paul Schrader, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, noted architect Kevin Roche and a cast of former Eames Office designers, including Jeannine Oppewall, Deborah Sussman and Gordon Ashby.