Charles & Ray Eames

Eames Office staff wearing cardboard mock-ups of the toy masks
Source: Eames design, John Neuhart, Marilyn Neuhart, Ray Eames, 1989

"Take your pleasures seriously" was an underlying constant in the Eames office, an asterism of design interests focused on making connections between art and science, life and art, work and play. In 1950, Charles and Ray Eames began a series of paper toys. Their first project was a series of masks. The masks, in the shapes of birds, fish and animal heads, were mocked up in cardboard and paper and were intended to be manufactured as die cut shapes to be assembled by the buyer. The project was not put into production but did feed into various other toy experiments.


Ray Eames with an early prototype version of "The Toy", 1951
Source: Eames design, John Neuhart, Marilyn Neuhart, Ray Eames, 1989

"The Toy", was completed in 1951. The Toy was made of a newly developed water resistant, plastic coated paper product. The kit included square and triangular panels, thin wooden dowels with pierced ends and pipe cleaner connectors. The Toy was designed for children, adults and teens to be used as room decoration, to house other toys or to create temporary pavilions for events, parties and amateur theatrics. According to the label The Toy was, "Large-Colourful-Easy to Assemble-For Creating A Light , Bright, Expandable World Large Enough To Play In and Around".

Other paper toys produced by the Eames Office include: the "House of Cards" released in 1952 (still in production by the Eames Foundation: www.eamesoffice.com) a building game of slotted cards printed with nostalgic photographs, textile details and paper patterns, "The Colouring Toy" produced in 1955, a kit that included a series of die cut shapes, butterfly clips and coloring crayons.

For more information on the Eames Office see the monograph "Eames design" edited by John Neuhart and Marylin Neuhart, and overseen by Ray Eames as her last project before her death in 1988. This book is a considered and complete catalogue of the work of the Eames Office. The aim of the book was to establish a, "definitive factual record of the work of the office", in a chronology of projects both major, minor, proposed and incomplete.