Vitra has manufactured furniture designs by Charles & Ray Eames and George Nelson since 1957. Building on this foundation over the years, the company has developed a wide range of furnishings for the office, for the home and for public spaces in collaboration with progressive designers.
Yet Vitra is more than just a design-oriented manufacturing company. The name also stands for the Vitra Design Museum, for a collection of modern furniture and its accompanying archive, for workshops and publications on topics of design, and for an architectural concept that unites buildings by Frank Gehry, Nicholas Grimshaw, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Alvaro Siza, Herzog & de Meuron and SANAA at the Vitra Headquarters in Birsfelden (Switzerland) and on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein (Germany).
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Charles Eames, born 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri, studied
architecture at Washington University in St. Louis and opened his own
office together with Charles M. Gray in 1930. In 1935 he founded
another architectural firm with Robert T. Walsh. After receiving a
fellowship in 1938 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, he moved to
Michigan and assumed a teaching position in the design department the
following year. In 1940, he and Eero Saarinen won first prize for their
joint entry in the competition "Organic Design in Home Furnishings"
organized by the New York Museum of Modern Art. During the same year,
Eames became head of the department of industrial design at Cranbrook,
and in 1941 he married Ray Kaiser.
Ray Eames, née Bernice Alexandra Kaiser, was born in
Sacramento, California in 1912. She attended the May Friend Bennet
School in Millbrook, New York, and continued her studies in painting
under Hans Hofmann through 1937. During this year she exhibited her
work in the first exhibition of the American Abstract Artists group at
the Riverside Museum in New York. She matriculated at the Cranbrook
Academy of Art in 1940 and married Charles Eames the following year.
Charles & Ray Eames designed and developed stretchers
and leg splints made of moulded plywood between 1941-43, and showed an
exhibition of experimental moulded plywood furniture at the New York
Museum of Modern Art in 1946. The Herman Miller Company in Zeeland,
Michigan, subsequently began to produce the Eameses' furniture designs.
In 1948, Charles and Ray Eames participated in the "Low-Cost Furniture
Competition" at MoMA, and in 1949 they built their Case Study houses.
Around 1955 they began to focus more on their extensive work as
photographers and filmmakers, and in 1964 an honorary doctoral degree
from the Pratt Institute (New York) highlighted Charles’ achievements.
The Eames Office designed the IBM Pavilion for the 1964-65 World's Fair
in New York, and the year 1969 offered the opportunity to participate
in the exhibition "Qu'est-ce que le design?' at the Musée des Arts
Décoratifs in Paris. In 1970-71, Charles was invited to hold the
Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry lecture series at Harvard
University. MoMA again presented an exhibition of their work, entitled
"Furniture by Charles Eames", in 1973. Charles Eames died in St. Louis
in 1978; Ray's death followed in 1988.
The influence of Charles and Ray Eames was fundamental to
the development of Vitra. Its activity as a furniture manufacturer
began in 1957 with the production of their designs. Yet it was not only
the products of Charles and Ray Eames that left their mark on Vitra.
With their approach to and understanding of design, they made an
ongoing contribution to the values and goals of the company.
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Eero Saarinen, born in 1910 in Kirkkonummi, Finland, as the son of the architect Eliel Saarinen, studied sculpture in 1929 and 1930 at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris before studying architecture at Yale University in New Haven until 1934. A Yale fellowship enabled him to travel to Europe. In 1936, he returned to the USA and worked in his father’s architectural practice and also taught at Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills. It was here that Eero Saarinen met Charles Eames. Together they experimented on new furniture forms and produced the first designs for furniture made from moulded plywood. In 1940, they submitted a joint entry to the “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” competition held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Eero Saarinen went on to design numerous iconic furniture pieces, most notably for Knoll International. The TWA Terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York is considered to be his architectural masterpiece. He was working on the building of Dulles International Airport in Washington at the time of his death in 1961.
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