Ray Eames, 73; Member of Noted Design Team

Ray Eames, collaborator with her late husband in a design firm that produced innovative and philosophical statements in furniture, film, toys, museum shows and architecture, died Sunday.

A part of the widely heralded “Office of Charles and Ray Eames,” she was 73. She died at Cedars Sinai Medical Center of the complications of cancer on the same date her husband had died 10 years earlier.

Charles Eames was a young designer in 1940 who had just created the first molded plywood chair, winning two first prizes in an international competition sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

She was Ray Kaiser, an artist who had studied under abstractionist Hans Hoffman in New York and who had her first showing in 1937 as part of the American Abstract Artists exhibit at Riverside Museum.

She made some drawings of Charles Eames’ chair.

A year later they married and came to California, where she painted covers for Arts & Architecture magazine and began to help her husband with his concepts.

It was a personal and professional involvement that lasted until his death. They worked side by side in an evolvement of glider fuselages, functional furniture, motion pictures that offered the smell of freshly baked bread and motion pictures that offered, on seven screens, a simultaneous look at how Americans live. That latter film was shown throughout the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.

They also designed their home in Pacific Palisades, their office in Venice and an exhibit of the 18th Century which centered on the lives of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and was seen widely in Europe and the United States.

When they entertained, it was not at the home they had built from old industrial parts but at their factory, serving dinner near the drafting tables.

She continued to accrue honors after her husband’s death, among them the Women’s Building Vesta Award for significant contributions in design art and an honorary doctorate from the Otis Parsons Art Institute.

She had just completed work on a history of the Eames office and earlier had co-written, with Philip and Phyllis Morrison, “Powers of 10,” based on an Eames exhibit that dealt with the scales of the universe.

She is survived by a brother, Maurice, a daughter, Lucia Demetrios, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.