Charles Ormond Eames, Jr was born in 1907 in Saint Louis, Missouri. By the time he was 14 years old, while attending high school, Charles worked at the Laclede Steel Company as a part-time laborer, where he learned about engineering, drawing, and architecture (and also first entertained the idea of one day becoming an architect).

Charles briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis on an architectural scholarship. He proposed studying Frank Lloyd Wright to his professors, and when he would not cease his interest in modern architects, he was dismissed from the university. In the report describing why he was dismissed from the university, a professor wote the comment "His views were too modern." While at Washington University, he met his first wife, Catherine Woermann, whom he married in 1929. A year later, they had a daughter, Lucia.

After he left school and was married, Charles began his own architectural practice, with partners Charles Gray and later Walter Pauley.



One great influence on him was the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (whose son Eero, also an architect, would become a partner and friend). At the elder Saarinen's invitation, he moved in 1938 with his wife Catherine and daughter Lucia to Michigan, to further study architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he would become a teacher and head of the industrial design department. One of the requirements of the Architecture and Urban Planning Program, at the time Eames applied, was for the student to have decided upon his project and gathered as much pertinent information in advance – Eames' interest was in the St. Louis waterfront. Together with Eero Saarinen he designed prize-winning furniture for New York's Museum of Modern Art "Organic Design" competition. Their work displayed the new technique of wood moulding, that Eames would further develop in many moulded plywood products, including, beside chairs and other furniture, splints and stretchers for the U.S. Navy during World War II.

In 1941, Charles and Catherine divorced, and he married his Cranbrook colleague Ray Kaiser, who was born in Sacramento, California. He then moved with her to Los Angeles, California, where they would work and live for the rest of their lives. In the late 1940s, as part of the Arts & Architecture magazine "Case Study" program, Ray and Charles designed and built the groundbreaking Eames House, Case Study House #8, as their home. Located upon a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and constructed entirely of pre-fabricated steel parts intended for industrial construction, it remains a milestone of modern architecture.

The Eames philosophy was very much entrenched in process. Process to get to the final product often took years of trial and error.

At one time, Charles gave a series of lectures called the "Norton Lectures". At the lecture, the Eames viewpoint and philosophy is related through Charles' own telling of what he called the banana leaf parable. A banana leaf being the most basic dish with which to eat off of in southern India. He related the progression of design and its process where the banana leaf is transformed into something fantastically ornate. He explains the next step and ties it to the design process by finishing the parable with:

"But you can go beyond that and the guys that have not only means, but a certain amount of knowledge and understanding, go the next step and they eat off of a banana leaf. And I think that in these times when we fall back and regroup, that somehow or other, the banana leaf parable sort of got to get working there, because I'm not prepared to say that the banana leaf that one eats off of is the same as the other eats off of, but it's that process that has happened within the man that changes the banana leaf. And as we attack these problems – and I hope and I expect that the total amount of energy used in this world is going to go from high to medium to a little bit lower – the banana leaf idea might have a great part in it."