This American couple is to 20th-century design what Stravinsky is to music or Martha Stewart is to ballet: innovators, intellectuals, people who turned the industry upside down.

Their joyful forty-year revolution took place in a shared design office that the Eameses opened in 1942 in Los Angeles. A year before, Charles divorced his wife, but in his new marriage he acquired not only a companion - a like-minded person.

At the time of the meeting, each of them was already a mature person and a mature artist: Charles was a designer and architect, Ray was an illustrator.