Charles Ormond Eames, Jr (1907–1978) and Bernice Alexandra "Ray" (née Kaiser) Eames (1912–1988) ( /ˈiːmz/) were American designers, who worked in and made major contributions to modern architecture and furniture. They also worked in the fields of industrial and graphic design, fine art and film.

Charles Eames[link]

Charles Eames, Jr (June 17, 1907 – August 21, 1978) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Charles was the nephew of St. Louis architect William S. Eames. By the time he was 14 years old, while attending high school, Charles worked at the Laclede Steel Company as a part-time laborer, where he learned about engineering, drawing, and architecture (and also first entertained the idea of one day becoming an architect).

Charles briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis on an architecture scholarship. After two years of study, he left the university. Many sources claim that he was dismissed for his advocacy of Frank Lloyd Wright and his interest in modern architects. He was reportedly dismissed from the university because his views were "too modern."^[1] Other sources, less frequently cited, note that while a student, Charles Eames also was employed as an architect at the firm of Trueblood and Graf.^[2] The demands on his time from this employment and from his classes, led to sleep-deprivation and diminished performance at the university.

While at Washington University, he met his first wife, Catherine Woermann, whom he married in 1929. A year later, they had a daughter, Lucia.

In 1930, Charles began his own architectural practice in St. Louis with partner Charles Gray. They were later joined by a third partner, Walter Pauley.

Charles Eames was greatly influenced by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (whose son Eero, also an architect, would become a partner and friend). At the elder Saarinen's invitation, Charles moved in 1938 with his wife Catherine and daughter Lucia to Michigan, to further study architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he would become a teacher and head of the industrial design department. In order to apply for the Architecture and Urban Planning Program, Eames defined an area of focus—the St. Louis waterfront. Together with Eero Saarinen he designed prize-winning furniture for New York's Museum of Modern Art "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition.^[3] Their work displayed the new technique of wood moulding (originally developed by Alvar Aalto), that Eames would further develop in many moulded plywood products, including, beside chairs and other furniture, splints and stretchers for the U.S. Navy during World War II.^[4]

In 1941, Charles and Catherine divorced, and he married his Cranbrook colleague Ray Kaiser, who was born in Sacramento, California. He then moved with her to Los Angeles, California, where they would work and live for the rest of their lives. In the late 1940s, as part of the Arts & Architecture magazine's "Case Study" program, Ray and Charles designed and built the groundbreaking Eames House, Case Study House #8, as their home. Located upon a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and hand-constructed within a matter of days entirely of pre-fabricated steel parts intended for industrial construction, it remains a milestone of modern architecture.

Charles Eames died of a heart attack on August 21, 1978 while on a consulting trip in his native Saint Louis, and now has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Ray Eames[link]

Ray-Bernice Alexandra Kaiser Eames (December 15, 1912 – August 21, 1988) was an American artist, designer, and filmmaker who, together with her husband Charles, is responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20th century. She was born in Sacramento, California to Alexander and Edna Burr Kaiser, and had a brother named Maurice. After having lived in a number of cities during her youth, in 1933 she graduated from Bennett Women's College in Millbrook, New York, and moved to New York City, where she studied abstract expressionist painting with Hans Hofmann. She was a founder of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936 and displayed paintings in their first show a year later at Riverside Museum in Manhattan. One of her paintings is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art.

In September 1940, she began studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She met Charles Eames while preparing drawings and models for the Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition and they were married the following year.^[5] Settling in Los Angeles, California, Charles and Ray Eames would lead an outstanding career in design and architecture.

In 1943, 1944, and 1947, Ray Eames designed several covers for the landmark magazine, Arts & Architecture.

In the late 1940s, Ray Eames created several textile designs, two of which, "Crosspatch" and "Sea Things", were produced by Schiffer Prints, a company that also produced textiles by Salvador Dalí and Frank Lloyd Wright. Original examples of Ray Eames textiles can be found in many art museum collections. The Ray Eames textiles have been re-issued by Maharam as part of their Textiles of the Twentieth Century collection.

Ray Eames died in Los Angeles in 1988, ten years to the day after Charles.

Designers[link]

Eames Lounge (670) and Ottoman (671) circa 1956

In the 1950s, the Eameses continued their work in architecture and modern furniture design. As with their earlier molded plywood work, the Eameses pioneered technologies, such as the fiberglass and plastic resin chairs and the wire mesh chairs designed for Herman Miller. From the beginning, the Eames furniture has usually been listed as by Charles Eames. In the 1948 and 1952 Herman Miller bound catalogs, only Charles' name is listed, but it has become clear that Ray was deeply involved and should be considered an equal partner.^{[citation needed]} The Eames fabrics (many are currently available from Maharam) were mostly designed by Ray, as were the Time Life Stools.^{[by whom?]} In 1979, the Royal Institute of British Architects awarded Charles and Ray with the Royal Gold Medal. At the time of Charles' death they were working on what became their last production, the Eames Sofa, which went into production in 1984.

Charles and Ray channeled Charles' interest in photography into the production of short films. From their first film, the unfinished Traveling Boy (1950), to Powers of Ten (re-released in 1977), their cinematic work was an outlet for ideas, a vehicle for experimentation and education. The couple often produced short films in order to document their interests, such as collecting toys and cultural artifacts on their travels. The films also record the process of hanging their exhibits or producing classic furniture designs. Some of their other films cover more intellectual topics. For example, one film covers the purposely mundane topic of filming soap suds moving over the pavement of a parking lot. Powers of Ten (narrated by the late physicist Philip Morrison), gives a dramatic demonstration of orders of magnitude by visually zooming away from the earth to the edge of the universe, and then microscopically zooming into the nucleus of a carbon atom.

The Eameses also conceived and designed a number of exhibitions. The first of these, Mathematica: a world of numbers...and beyond (1961), was sponsored by IBM, and is the only one of their exhibitions still extant.^[6] The Mathematica exhibition is still considered a model for science popularization exhibitions. It was followed by A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age (1971) and The World of Franklin and Jefferson (1975–1977), among others.

The office of Charles and Ray Eames, which functioned for more than four decades (1943–88) at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice, California, included in its staff, at one time or another, a number of remarkable designers, like Henry Beer and Richard Foy, now co-chairmen of CommArts, Inc.; Don Albinson; Deborah Sussman; Harry Bertoia; and Gregory Ain, who was Chief Engineer for the Eameses during World War II.^[7] Among the many important designs originating there are the molded-plywood DCW (Dining Chair Wood) and DCM (Dining Chair Metal with a plywood seat) (1945), Eames Lounge Chair (1956), the Aluminum Group furniture (1958) and as well as the Eames Chaise (1968), designed for Charles's friend, film director Billy Wilder, the playful Do-Nothing Machine (1957), an early solar energy experiment, and a number of toys.

Philosophy[link]

In 1970–71, Charles Eames gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. At the lectures, the Eames viewpoint and philosophy are related through Charles' own telling of what he called the banana leaf parable, a banana leaf being the most basic dish off which to eat in southern India. He related the progression of design and its process where the banana leaf is transformed into something fantastically ornate. He explains the next step and ties it to the design process by finishing the parable with:

But you can go beyond that and the guys that have not only means, but a certain amount of knowledge and understanding, go the next step and they eat off of a banana leaf. And I think that in these times when we fall back and regroup, that somehow or other, the banana leaf parable sort of got to get working there, because I'm not prepared to say that the banana leaf that one eats off of is the same as the other eats off of, but it's that process that has happened within the man that changes the banana leaf. And as we attack these problems—and I hope and I expect that the total amount of energy used in this world is going to go from high to medium to a little bit lower—the banana leaf idea might have a great part in it.

—^[8]

Works[link]

Architecture[link]

Eames House entry (Case Study House #8)

• Sweetzer House (between 1930–33)
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch model home (193?)
• St. Mary's Church (Helena, Arkansas) (1934)
• St. Mary's Church (Paragould, Arkansas) (1935)
• Dinsmoor House (1936)
• Dean House (193?)
• Meyer House (1938)
• Bridge house (Eames-Saarinen) (1945)
• Entenza House (1949)
• Eames House (1949)
• Max De Pree House (1954)

Selected films[link]

• Traveling Boy (1950)
• Blacktop: A Story of the Washing of a School Play Yard (1952)
• Parade Parade Or Here They Are Coming Down Our Street (1952)
• A Communications Primer (1953)
• House: After Five Years of Living (1955)
• Day of the Dead (1957)
• Toccata for Toy Trains (1957)
• Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair (1960)
• IBM Mathematics Peep Show (1961), short documentary based on Mathematica: A World of Numbers... and Beyond exhibit by Eames
• Powers of Ten (1968, rereleased in 1977)
• Image of the City (1969)
• Banana Leaf (1972)
• Fiberglass Chairs
• SX-70, promotional announcement/documentary of the Polaroid Corporation SX-70 instant camera
• Eames Lounge Chair

Furniture Designs[link]

• Kleinhans Music Hall Chair (1939-40) Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen
• Conversation Armchair (1940) Charles Eames & Eero Saarinen
• Side Chair (1940) Charles Eames & Eero Saarinen
• Molded Plywood Pilot's Seat (1943) Charles & Ray Eames and staff.
• Prototype Plywood and Metal Chairs (various models) (1943-1946) Charles & Ray Eames and staff
• Molded Plywood Elephant (1945) Charles & Ray Eames and staff.
• Lounge Chair Wood or LCW (1945-1946) Charles & Ray Eames and staff.
• Lounge Chair Metal or LCM (1945-1946) Charles & Ray Eames and staff.
• Dining Chair Wood or DCW (1945-1946) Charles & Ray Eames and staff.
• 'Dining Chair Metal or DCM (1945-1946) Charles & Ray Eames and staff.
• Molded Plywood Folding Screen (1945-1946) Charles & Ray Eames and staff.
• Molded Plywood Coffee Table wood or metal legs (1945-1946) Charles & Ray Eames and staff.
• "Donstrosity" prototype lounge (1946) Charles & Ray Eames and staff.
• Prototype Plywood Lounge with metal base (1946) Charles & Ray Eames and staff.
• Prototype Stamped Metal Chairs (1948) Charles & Ray Eames and staff
• LaChaise prototype (1948) Charles & Ray Eames and staff
• Molded Plastic & Fiberglass Armchair Shell various bases (1948-1950)Charles & Ray Eames and staff
• Molded Plastic & Fiberglass Side Chair Shell various bases (1948-1950)Charles & Ray Eames and staff
• Molded Plastic & Fiberglass Rocking Chair or DAR (1948-1950) Charles & Ray Eames and staff
• Wire Mesh Side Chair or DKR (1951) Charles & Ray Eames and staff
• Hang-It-All (1953) Charles & Ray Eames and staff
• 670 & 671 or Eames Lounge & Ottoman (1956) Charles & Ray Eames and staff
• Leisure Group (later Aluminum Group): High Back Lounge, Low Back Lounge, Dining Side Chair (1958) Charles & Ray Eames and staff

Exhibition design[link]

• Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India (1955)
• Glimpses of the USA (seven screens for the American exhibition in Moscow, Sokoolniki Park) (1959)
• Mathematica: A World of Numbers... and Beyond (for IBM, 1961)
• IBM Pavilion at the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair
• Nehru: The man and his India (1965)
• The World of Franklin and Jefferson (1975) built for the US Bicentennial Commission, opened in Paris, traveled to five other countries and the US.

Exhibitions and retrospectives[link]

• Charles and Ray Eames at the Design Museum, London (1998)^[9]
• Library of Congress exhibit (1999)

Awards and recognition[link]

This section requires expansion.

On June 17, 2008, the US Postal Service released the Eames Stamps, a pane of 16 stamps celebrating the designs of Charles and Ray Eames.

Film[link]

A well-received documentary about the couple titled Eames: The Architect and the Painter was released on November 18, 2011 as part of the American Masters series on PBS television.

Quotes[link]

This section is a candidate to be copied to Wikiquote using the Transwiki process.

• "Eventually, everything connects."—Charles Eames [from http://powersof10.com]
• "Innovate as a last resort."^{[citation needed]}
• "Design is the appropriate combination of materials in order to solve a problem."^[10]
• "I have never been forced to accept compromises but I have willingly accepted constraints." ^[11]
• "Take your pleasures seriously."^{[citation needed]}
• “The details are not the details. They make the design.”^{[citation needed]}
• "I like to consider myself to be very very funny, the funny thing is, I dont know what a joke actually is."^{[citation needed]}

References[link]

• Caplan, Ralph, "Connections: the work of Charles and Ray Eames". Los Angeles: UCLA, 1976.
• Rago, David and John Sollo. Collecting Modern: a guide to mid-century furniture and collectibles. Gibbs Smith, 2001. (ISBN 1-5868-5051-2)
• Drexler, Arthur. "Charles Eames Furniture from the Design Collection of Modern Art, New York". New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973 (ISBN 0810960281)

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Charles and Ray Eames

• A Virtual Encyclopedia of All Things Eames
• The Library of Congress Website for The Work of Charles & Ray Eames
• The Industrial Designers Society of America Charles Eames page
• The History of Eames Furniture
• Eames Foundation
• Museum of Modern Art website
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Page on Charles & Ray Eames
• Art Directors Club biography, portrait and images of work
• Charles Eames - Design Dictionary—Illustrated article about Charles Eames
• Ray Eames on The California Museum's California Legacy Trails
• Charles and Ray Eames at the Internet Movie Database
• "A Communications Primer"(1953) at the Internet Archive
• American Abstract Artists

Oldham holding five $20 bills and a producer credit for The 1 Second Film in January 2005

Todd Oldham (born October 22, 1961) is an American-born designer and president of L-7 Designs Inc. His fun, lighthearted approach^{[citation needed]} to fashion and style has become known to millions through his fashion lines, interior designs, books and by appearing in television shows. Oldham is openly gay.^[1]

Oldham launched his first clothing line in 1989 and won the Council of Fashion Designer Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent in 1991.^[2] In 1998, Oldham moved to New York with his business partner, Tony Longoria. Oldham served as creative consultant to Escada in the late 1990s. He launched a perfume line in 1995 and designed a clothing line for Target (2002–2003). In 1995, he produced a clothing line associated with the Warner Brothers film Batman Forever. Oldham designed furniture and home accessories for La-Z-Boy furniture (2003–2007) and served as creative director for Old Navy.^[3]

Oldham designed The Hotel of South Beach in 1999.^[4] He is currently designing the annex to the hotel. Oldham has become widely known to American TV audiences through his many television appearances, most notably as host of "Todd Time" on MTV's House of Style in the 1990s. He hosted Fashionably Loud on MTV in 1999 and recently served as mentor to contestants on Bravo's Top Design.

Oldham is also actively involved in book publishing. He has produced a number of books on various aspects of style for Ammo Books as part of the Place Space series. Books in the series include photos and essays on filmmaker John Waters, the artist compound in upstate New York owned by Joe Holtzman (the founder of Nest magazine), and the Rhode Island School of Design’s off-campus housing and Bedrock City. Oldham has also created Hand Made Modern, Without Boundaries, and various other titles. In June 2007, Oldham released a monograph of artist Charley Harper’s work titled An Illustrated Life.^[5]

Early life[link]

Oldham was born Jacky Todd Oldham^[6] in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1961 to Jack and Linda Oldham. He has two sisters and one brother. At age 15, he designed his first dress when he stitched together some pillowcases.^[7] His father was a computer programmer and the family moved around due to his father’s job, including a four-year stint in Iran when Oldham was 12. He moved to Dallas, Texas, after graduating high school. His first job was in the alterations department at the Polo Ralph Lauren. He borrowed $100 from his parents, bought 41 yards of white cotton jersey, dyed it and put together a tiny collection that he sold to Neiman Marcus.^[8]

Philanthropy[link]

Oldham is on the advisory board of the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), to work in partnership with indigenous people in conserving biodiversity, health and culture in Central America.^[9] He is also on the board of Aperture,^[10] a nonprofit foundation dedicated to promoting photography. Oldham has also been involved with Habitat for Humanity, Bailey House, the oldest supportive housing program for persons with HIV and AIDS in the United States,^[11] and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.^[12]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Todd Oldham designer profile at Fashion Model Directory

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2009)

Ice cubes in a glass of iced tea

Ice cubes are small, roughly cube-shaped pieces of ice, conventionally used to cool beverages. Ice cubes are sometimes preferred over crushed ice because they melt more slowly; they are standard in mixed drinks that call for ice, in which case the drink is said to be "on the rocks."

Ice cubes that are crushed or sheared into irregularly-shaped flakes may add an interesting aesthetic effect to some cocktails. Crushed ice is also used when faster cooling is desired, since the rate of cooling is governed by the number and average radius of the ice particles.^[1]

Melting ice cubes sometimes precipitate white flakes, commonly known as "floaties". This is calcium carbonate which is present in many water supplies and is completely harmless.^{[citation needed]}

Origin[link]

Gorrie's ice machine.

American physician and humanitarian John Gorrie built a refrigerator in 1844 with the purpose of cooling air. His refrigerator produced ice which he hung from the ceiling in a basin. Gorrie can be considered the creator of ice cubes, but his aim was not to cool drinks: he used the ice to lower the ambient room temperature. During his time, a dominant idea was that bad air quality caused disease. Therefore, in order to help treat sickness, he pushed for the draining of swamps and the cooling of sickrooms.

Methods of production[link]

Ice cubes are produced domestically by filling an ice cube tray with water and placing it in a freezer. Many freezers also come equipped with an icemaker, which produces ice cubes automatically and stores them in a bin from which they can be dispensed directly into a glass.

Ice cube tray[link]

Ice cubes in a tray

Ice cube trays are designed to be filled with water, then placed in a freezer until the water freezes to ice, producing ice cubes. Trays are often flexible, so the frozen cubes can be easily removed by flexing the tray. Twist ice trays have a simple spring loaded mechanism with a lever that is used to turn the tray upside down and flex at the same time such that the cubes drop are collected in a removable tray below and return the ice cube tray to its upright position without removing it from the freezer which can save time and reduces accidents and mess, though the tray has to be removed to be collected and the ice cube tray still has to be removed to be refilled. An alternative system is an aluminum tray with a lever that raises the ice cubes, freeing them from the tray. A motorized version of this is found in most automatic ice-making freezers.

While the usual shape of the ice 'cube' is roughly cubical, there are trays that dispense hemispherical or cylindrical blocks. These are commonly referred to as ice tubes. Some novelty trays produce blocks of ice in seasonal, festive or other shapes.

The first rubber ice cube tray was invented by Lloyd Groff Copeman. One day in 1928, while walking through some woods collecting sap for maple syrup, Copeman noticed that slush and ice flaked off his rubber boots rather than adhering to them. Having recalled this incident over lunch with his patent attorney, he conducted experiments using rubber cups. Later, he set about designing and then patenting different types of tray: a metal tray with rubber separators, a metal tray with individual rubber cups, and a tray made completely of rubber.^[2]

The first flexible stainless steel, all-metal ice cube tray was created by Guy L. Tinkham in 1933. The tray bent sideways to remove the ice cubes.

Several companies now offer pre-filled disposable ice trays for home freezing, which they claim provide better taste and reduced risk of contamination.^[3]

Large-scale ice cube production[link]

Dedicated ice-maker machines can be used to produce ice cubes for laboratories and academic use. Ice cubes are also produced commercially and sold in bulk; these ice cubes, despite their name, are often cylindrical, and may have holes through the center.

An interesting characteristic of commercially made ice cubes is that they are completely clear, lacking the clouding found in the center of domestically made ice cubes. Cloudy ice cubes result when water is frozen quickly, or when the water is high in dissolved solids. When water is cooled to its freezing point, and ice starts to form, dissolved gases can no longer stay in solution and come out as microscopic bubbles. However, as ice floats in water, once there is enough ice to form a layer on the surface, the ice layer traps all bubbles within the ice cube. Commercial ice-makers use a flowing source of purified water to make ice with cooling elements at the bottom, allowing the bubbles to be washed away from the top as the cube grows.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

Listen to this article (info/dl)

This audio file was created from a revision of the "Ice cube" article dated 2006-05-10, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)

More spoken articles

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ice cubes

• Ice pack
• Pagophagia
• Refrigeration
• Ice

References[link]

1. ^ Rauch, Jeffrey (1975). "The mathematical theory of crushed ice". Partial differential equations and related topics (Program, Tulane Univ., New Orleans, La., 1974). Berlin, New York (the state): Springer-Verlag. pp. 370–379. MR0427863. 
2. ^ "www.lloydcopeman.com: Biography". http://www.lloydcopeman.com/biography/CopemanStory.pdf. 
3. ^ "After Bottled Water? Purified Ice Cubes". http://www.aquaice.com/PressRelease_WSJ_2006.htm. Retrieved 2008-06-03. 

External links[link]

Look up ice cube in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Hot water can freeze faster than cold water (Subscription required)