Design Talks

Observations on design

Modernist icon: Charlotte Perriand at the Design Museum

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Nargess

Charlotte Perriand La Cascade residence, Arc 1600, 1967-1969 © AChP

‘There is art in everything, whether it be in action, a vase, a saucepan, a glass, a sculpture, a jewel, a way of being,’ writes Charlotte Perriand, in a quote that perhaps best captures the spirit of the maverick designer who helped shape the story of modern design. Over the long arc of her career spanning much of the last century, Perriand made furniture and objects, and designed interiors and buildings that helped shape and advance modern life – especially for women.

Her tubular steel furniture includes the Chaise Longue Basculante and the Fauteuil Pivotant – both much revered and copied today. Her bibliotheques for architect and engineer Jean Prouvé’s metal workshop altered how we view bookshelves. In her role as an architect, Perriand made inventive modular kitchens for Le Corbusier’s brutalist Unité d’Habitation residential housing project in Marseille. Later in life she took on the budding mass tourism industry with thousands of prefabricated apartments at the grand Les Arcs ski resort in France.

Perriand was fearless and her approach to design always inventive. Now a new exhibition at London’s Design Museum explores the creative process and ideas behind her work. Charlotte Perriand: The Modern Life (19 June to 5 September 2021) charts her journey through the modernist machine aesthetic to natural forms, and from modular furniture to major architectural projects. Featuring large-scale reconstructions of some of her most interesting interiors as well as original furniture, her photography and personal notebooks, the curators immerse viewers in Perriand’s colourful world to great effect.

Born in Paris in 1903, Perriand studied furniture design at the École de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs. Soon after graduation, the functional studio apartment she designed for herself replete with a mini deco bar, nicknamed Bar sous le toit, caught the attention of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret and so began a decade of working with the duo at their atelier exploring machine aesthetics. By the 1930s, Perriand had gravitated more towards nature and organic forms, an aspect that became more pronounced after her return from Tokyo where she had been invited as an advisor for industrial design to the Ministry for Trade and Industry.

Perriand would continue to collect and document random objects she found in nature – shells and stones, and a large-scale sculptural driftwood she reclaimed in 1970, which features in the exhibition halls. In her personal manifesto entitled Synthesis of the Arts, she looked at merging art, design and architecture in the interior with her friend the artist Fernand Léger creating some fascinating pieces.

A socialist, after the war Perriand became deeply involved with the reconstruction of Europe, where she evolved further her prefabricated modular designs and furnishing to create affordable and adaptable interiors – some of which have been thoughtfully reconstructed for the exhibition. She wrote: ‘Dwellings should be designed not only to satisfy material specifications; they should also create conditions that foster harmonious balance and spiritual freedom in people’s lives.’

Perriand loved the outdoors and was a keen mountain climber and skier with photographs at the Design Museum capturing her adventurous spirit. One of her final and finest projects was Les Arcs, a 1960s ski resort in France where she led an architectural collective. Developed over two decades, the building and dwellings explore her visions on the role of architecture and design in shaping how we live. The building slots seamlessly with the contours of the mountainside and, since it had to accommodate some 30,000 skiers, Perriand worked with prefabricated structures to create thousands of mini apartments which feel warm and generous and are thoroughly modern to this day.

Perriand is one of the few female modernists who has retained her place in the history of design, yet even she suffered from a touch of twentieth century chauvinism. Her work was often overshadowed by her more famous male collaborators, namely Le Corbusier who allegedly didn’t even acknowledge her work despite using her radical prefabricated kitchens in his Unité d’Habitation. ‘She was long overshadowed by her male counterparts,’ agrees chief curator Justin McGuirk, ‘but this exhibition presents her not just as a brilliant designer who deserves wider recognition – she was also a natural collaborator and synthesiser. There is so much to admire not just in her work but in the way she lived her life.’

The Design Museum joins a slew of exhibitions and publications hoping to re-address women’s place (the missing link) in the story of art and design. This can only be a positive thing. The history of design will certainly benefit in richness and gain context from weaving in the vital role of women (and the likes of Perriand) in forming its narrative – something that could expand and explode even further, become even livelier, if it includes creatives from outside the western world, and not just as a side note.

‘Charlotte Perriand: The Modern’ at the Design Museum in London sheds a timely light on the life and work of one of the pioneers of modern design and architecture

‘Elegantly radical’, is how the exhibition describes Perriand, a term that feels fitting. For, despite her courage at working alongside and often ahead of her male counterparts, bending metal and making impossible inventions possible, her work retains a subtle elegance. And it is full of adventure and wonder. ‘A definition of the word art is the application of new knowledge to ordinary, everyday objects,’ she says animated in a video which concludes the show. ‘There is no reason not to do things artfully. You could equally say that a peasant who improves his wheelbarrow has made a work of creation. Art is everything. It is wonderful.’

Images: Charlotte Perriand on her chaise longue basculante B306, 1929, perspective drawing of the dining room in the apartment-studio, bookcase for the Maison du Mexique, 1952 – all © AChP/ ADAGP; Perriand’s ball-bearing necklace 1927 and Fernand Léger’s Nature morte, le mouvement à billes 1926, cantilever bamboo chair 1940, chaise longue with pendant lamps 1958 by Isamu Noguchi © Design Museum; Perriand’s La Cascade residence, Arc 1600, 1967-1969 © AChP; exhibition installation © Design Museum

Marvin Rand captures south California’s unique modernism

Posted on April 10, 2018 by Nargess

Los Angeles was a kind of utopian dream in the mid-twentieth century. The sunny southern Californian city had attracted an open-minded set – experimental filmmakers, independent artists, writers and patrons of design came here for it offered freedom of expression. This coupled with urban growth and industrial expansion led to a period of exceptional architectural innovation.

Marvin Rand was there to capture this spirit. Throughout the post-war period, the native Angeleno photographed the buildings of Richard Neutra, Craig Ellwood, John Lautner, Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright and Rudolph Schindler. He also played a crucial role in helping shape the mid-century Californian modern style, as explored in a new book by Phaidon California Captured.

Rand’s career began in advertising in the 1950s, and it was his friend the design historian Esther McCoy who encouraged him to venture into architectural photography. He enjoyed a close friendship with many of these architectural greats including Craig Ellwood. Some of Rand’s best work includes Ellwood’s most celebrated projects.

The 240 illustrations in California Captured were chosen by the authors Emily Bills, Sam Lubell and Pierluigi Serraino who spent over five years analysing some 20,000 Rand photographs. Together they tell of a photographer who is an artist with his lens. Rand created abstractions out of lines and structures. He framed the clean and clear modernist structures with striking clarity carefully staging the buildings against a backdrop of LA’s dreamy, washed out, vast, open sky, sometimes the blue ocean in the backdrop. Ellwood was fond of sports cars and Rand brilliantly includes these symbols of modernity within the frame as an extension of the architecture.

He photographed high-profile projects like the Salk Institute and LAX Theme building, but also lesser-famed architects and more modest creations such as Douglas Honnold’s drive-in Tiny Naylor, shot at night skilfully abstracting light and shadow. California Captured reveals Marvin Rand as a significant chronicler of post-war Los Angeles and some of America’s greatest mid-century modern architecture.

Nargess Banks

All pictures © courtesy of the Estate of Marvin Rand

Book review: Chairs by Architects

Posted on August 24, 2016 by Nargess

Architects have a fondness for designing chairs. It stems from a long tradition – the pieces of furniture often acting as architectural manifestos, small tokens representing the ideology and style of the architect. David Adjaye says it is like a ‘testing ground for ideas that interest me’. The architect has worked with manufacturer Knoll on a number of projects including the 2013 Washington Skeleton and Washington Skin chairs. Furniture, he notes in an interview in Chairs by Architects, is a background. ‘There is something very powerful and very rewarding about that.’

This latest book by Thames & Hudson features fifty-five examples of work from the beginning of the nineteenth-century until now – chairs by early modernists Jean Prouve, Otto Wagner, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Antonio Gaudi and Walter Gropius, as well as contemporaries Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and David Adjaye.

Each product is placed alongside an example of the architect’s building work. Visually it works as a simple way of identifying the language of design. It is also intriguing to see how these highly accomplished architects tackle a smaller object as such.

Interviews with some of the architects and designers involved helps bring the subjects to life. Chairs by Architects is a book worth exploring.

Chairs by Architects is by Agata Toromanoff and published by Thames & Hudson.

The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

Posted on January 15, 2015 by Nargess

There was so much to admire about Modernism. The art, architecture, design, the ideology of the early part of the last century informed our contemporary life. The automobile, the personal motorcar, too has been pivotal to our modern existence.

To find new ways of living in a world that is so very different to that of the last century, one with its own pressing needs, requires not only an understanding of the past but the willingness to let go. We need to learn from Modernism, admire it even, reflect on it, but not to hold onto it. You could say it is a little like dealing with grief.

This is what I learnt from The Afterlife of Emerson Tang. We normally don’t review fiction here, but Paula Champa’s debut novel straddles the world of fiction and design history – and it feels appropriate for these pages.

Her story evolves around four strangers linked in their quest to unite an engine with its body. Set in the closing years of the twentieth-century, Emerson, a dying eccentric aesthete, and Helene, an ageing artist, battle to find the original engine to a fictional 1954 Beacon. The car, we discover as the story unfolds, has significant meanings for them both.

Narrated by Emerson’s archivist Beth, the journey takes us from New York to Germany where Miguel, the grandson of the now ecological Beacon Car Company, joins the race to locate the missing engine. The colourful, and at times tense, plot travels in time to Italy and the Futurist movement; we experience the famed Mille Miglia road race and visit the Pebble Beach vintage car show in California.

The Afterlife of Emerson Tang examines what it means to live and die, and what happens to our soul once we’re gone. Here the car is the focus of grief – the author has given something as abstract as grief a physical form.

Champa reports on design and cars, and much like me she came to the latter as a novice. Being an outsider in the tightly knitted world of automotive journalism you are struck by the intense passion there is for the car, loved mainly for its past, for its speed and for its power.

The car industry began addressing environmental issues by examining alternative driving solutions in the 1990s, around the time in which the book is set. Yet as exciting as these new developments were for the likes of us, the love wasn’t much shared amongst our peers. Was it the nostalgia of the ‘golden age’ of the automobile; or was it s fear of the future, the unknown?

There may be little sexiness in sustainable transport, yet it is necessary for our survival in this increasingly populated planet. Interestingly enough new generations are less and less interested in the old formula. They don’t see the same romance in gas guzzling, polluting high speed machines.

For them, the car is a high-tech gadget, which needs to multi-task and connect to their other high-tech gadgets… ultimately be more than a mode of transport. They are excited by alternative driving solutions, by schemes that encourage shared transport.

Champa asks us to re-imagine the future through our knowledge and appreciation of the past; to love the Modernist architecture of the early century, understand avant-garde paintings, and admire the beautiful curves of the classic automobile.

The old thinkers, creators and masters thought and created for another time. Today’s world needs its own thinkers and creators.

The Afterlife of Emerson Tang celebrates the excitement of progress, of new life. Emerson and Miguel love the advances of Modernism but realise that the future needs more than the same answers.

I cannot recommend this book enough.

Nargess

The Afterlife of Emerson Tang by Paula Champa is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.