Wright Auction

Beginning in the 1950s, members of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames office would use drafting stools made from affixing shells to various bases. The base of the present lot, the EC118 drafting stool, was developed at the office in 1968. In the photographs above, Barbara Fahs Charles was asked to model with the new design, and, from this time onward, these drafting stools were ubiquitous at the Eames Office. The EC118 shell and base combination was released by Herman Miller in 1970. 

As seasoned veterans of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, Robert Staples and Barbara Fahs Charles together built a life around good design. Business and life partners, they established their own firm, Staples & Charles Ltd., in Washington D.C. in 1973. As one of the earliest firms to exclusively specialize in design and exhibition planning for museums, Staples & Charles Ltd. quickly expanded from working with the Smithsonian to partnering with national and international institutions.

Robert Staples was hired by Charles and Ray Eames in 1957—part-time, to "carve patterns and sweep the floor," as he put it. Though initially reluctant to join the firm (he was still enrolled at the University of Southern California and already had a job drafting aviation parts), Staples would soon abandon his other pursuit to devote himself wholly to the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. During his first seven years there, furniture projects, such as the Aluminum Group and Tandem Seating, were his primary focus, but after spending weeks in India on a project about Jawaharlal Nehru, he found exhibitions to be a more interesting design challenge. Beginning with Mathematica: A World of Numbers...and Beyond, which opened in 1961 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles, Staples worked on each of the major Eames exhibitions.

Barbara Fahs Charles would become a member of the team in 1967, acting as researcher and coordinator for several of the Eameses' later exhibitions, including Photography & The City: The Evolution of an Art and a Science and A Computer Perspective. She has written extensively on museum and exhibition design, including contributions to the Washington Post, Museum News, and Ephemera Journal.