Charles & Ray Eames
Charles and Ray Eames are both a point of departure
and a fixed star. In 1953, Willi Fehlbaum saw an Eames
chair in New York and decided to become a furniture
manufacturer and to acquire the licence to launch
production of the designs in Europe. Since then, the
designer couple is ubiquitous at Vitra. Even today,
we often ask ourselves, “What would Charles and Ray
say?” – be this in connection with products, re-editions,
exhibitions, anecdotes, memories, acquiring collector’s
items, legal disputes with copyists, research or simply
when making important design decisions. It comes as
no surprise that the Vitra Design Museum is on Eames-
Strasse and that the original Eames office was
reconstructed at Vitra.
Designers and partners Charles and Ray Eames
exploited the possibilities of industrialisation in
connection with new materials and technologies like
no one before or since. But they were more than just
engineers. Ray was a painter and Charles was an
architect. They were artists who did not see themselves
as artists. They solved problems using technical means,
accepted material constraints and worked patiently
by trial and error until they found a satisfactory solution,
and they improved the products over time when use
revealed faults. However, all of this does not explain
why their products are still so appealing today: the
solutions that the Eames found were always artistic
and a stroke of genius (although Charles Eames
rejected the idea of the genius artist), which made
the designs distinguished and inexplicably magical.
Even today, decades after they were created, the
designs are just as cutting-edge as they were then.
