The Eameses
Creators of Mathematica: A World of Numbers... and Beyond
October 6, 2001- May 5, 2002

From the 1940s to the 1970s, Charles and Ray Eames, the husband-and-wife design team best known for their inviting and user-friendly mid-century designs, transformed America. Their innovative work includes their still popular 1956 lounge chair and ottomon, as well as everything from films to exhibitions. The broad sweep of the Eameses’ work—from furniture to nature films to a mathematics exhibition—testifies not only to their wide-ranging curiosity but also to their belief that knowledge, properly packaged, can entertain.

A major theme in all the Eameses' more scientific endeavors was the beauty and elegance of scientific principles and the tools used to study and convey them. Revealing science’s complex intergration of art, philosophy and nature, the Eameses’ films and exhibitions successfully translate complicated ideas into simple images that make them understandable.

In 1999, the first posthumous retrospective in the United States of the Eameses’ work opened at the Library of Congress in Washington. It then travelled the US, closing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in late 2000.

A little known fact is the Charles and Ray Eames were friends of physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer, founder of the Exploratorium and its director until his death in 1985. They visited the Exploratorium many times, providing some of their films to the Exploratorium’s collection. The synergy is obvious. The Eameses sought to foster universal understanding of the social benefits of science. To help people understand new technologies, and their potential, they produced approximately 60 films, exhibitions and books. The Eameses joined their scientist colleagues as visual communicators.

The Eameses believed in good design not just as a way to sell products but as a way to improve people’s lives. Whether they designed a chair, made a film about computers, or designed an exhibition on mathematics, they really believed they were helping others understand the world around them.

"One of the best kept secrets in science is how unpompous scientists are at their science, and the amount of honest fun that for them is part of it," Charles Eames once wrote. His goal, in presenting films and exhibitions on math and science for the public, was "to let the fun out of the bag."

Among the films of Charles and Ray Eames in the Exploratorium collection is "Powers of Ten." Look down on a picnicker napping in a park as the field of view steadily widens. With its fixed perspective, you then seem to be zooming upward at a rate of a power of ten every ten seconds. Within a few minutes, the galaxy is a white dot. Zooming back down again, you wind up inside a carbon atom in the picnickerÕs skin.

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