The Architect and the Painter: The Creative Lives of Charles and Ray Eames

FAIN: TS-50027-06

Catticus Corporation (Berkeley, CA 94710-2597)
Bill Jersey (Project Director: November 2005 to August 2007)

Scripting of a 90-minute documentary film on designers Charles and Ray Eames and their impact on visual vernacular culture in 20th-century America.

Working together from 1941 to 1978, the husband and wife design team of Charles & Ray Eames helped shape the 20th century. They are best remembered for their midcentury Modern furniture and the Eames House, a landmark of Modern architecture. But they created a dazzling variety of other work, including pioneering films and multimedia exhibitions. Their democratic design philosophy aimed to get “the most of the best to the greatest number for the least." For the Eameses, design was less a career than a mission to reinvent the way people lived, worked, played and communicated. Our 90-minute film will tell the story of this fascinating couple in the context of the rapidly shifting consumer, artistic, and intellectual culture of postwar America.