Eames Furniture: Iconic Modern Design for Better Living. Charles and Ray Eames were a visionary husband-and-wife design team whose work profoundly shaped 20th-century modernism. Charles (1907–1978) and Ray (1912–1988) met at Cranbrook Academy of Art and married in 1941. They settled in Los Angeles, where their innovative experiments with molded plywood, initially for wartime applications like leg splints, led to groundbreaking furniture.