Separately, they would have stood out in their fields: he as a brilliant architect and technician, she as an outstanding artist. Together, they changed the spaces where the world works. Their designs – at once practical, playful, durable, comfortable and pleasing to the eye – are still in production, still in demand, still inspiring others today.

Born in 1907 in Saint Louis Missouri, Charles Eames learned about engineering, drawing, and architecture while working after school at the Laclede Steel Company. He briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, but was dismissed due to his interest in modern architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright.

In 1929 he married Catherine Woermann and began his own architectural practice. Nine years later, he became a teacher and head of the industrial design department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. There, together with Finnish designer Eero Saarinen he developed a new technique of wood-molding, which he later employed to make everything from chairs to splints and stretchers for the U.S. Navy.

At Cranbrook he met Bernice Alexandra (Ray) Kaiser. Born in Sacramento, Calfiornia in 1912, Ray had studied painting at the Art Students League in New York. In 1941 Charles left Catherine and married Ray. A tumbleweed they picked up on their honeymoon drive to Los Angeles still hangs from the ceiling of the Eames House today.

Over the next 10 years, in their Venice, California studio, they expanded their range from molded plywood to fiberglass, plastic resin and wire mesh. Thanks to German furniture maker Willi Feldbaum, their designs quickly caught on in Europe, and by the 1970s, Eames furniture was indispensable to modern offices and public spaces everywhere.

Later they expanded their range to motion pictures, chronicling such everyday miracles as soap suds moving over the pavement of a parking lot to a joyride from the earth to the edge of the universe, and then back into the nucleus of a carbon atom in the short film “Powers of 10.”

Charles Eames died of a heart attack on August 21, 1978 while on a consulting trip in his native Saint Louis. Ray died 10 years later to the exact day.