Alexander Girard, Shown and Documented

“Alexander Girard: A Designer’s Universe” exhibition at Vitra Design Museum. Photography: Mark Niedermann, courtesy of Vitra Design Museum
“Alexander Girard: A Designer’s Universe” exhibition at Vitra Design Museum. Photography: Mark Niedermann, courtesy of Vitra Design Museum

In the middle decades of the 20th Century, Modern design was in danger of becoming too austere, too dominated by the expression of structure and rugged materials. Alexander Girard, in his wide-ranging design accomplishments, made sure that visual stimulation beyond the dictates of functionalism – bright colors, ornamental patterns, expressions of whimsy – could figure significantly in Modernist environments.

Alexander Girard’s most ambitious interiors are those of the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana (1957; Eero Saarinen, architect; Alexander Girard, interior designer).
Alexander Girard’s most ambitious interiors are those of the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana (1957; Eero Saarinen, architect; Alexander Girard, interior designer).

His extensive accomplishments are now the subject of an exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, and an accompanying catalogue, both entitled “Alexander Girard: A Designer’s Universe.”

The exhibit combines some 400 Girard-designed objects with about 300 works of folk art that he collected. The massive 512-page catalogue is both a scholarly examination of Girard’s life and output, with essays by seven experts in aspects of his career and a handsomely illustrated compendium describing more than 500 individual works, from entire interiors to matchbooks.

The show is intended to travel to other countries. If you can’t get to Weil am Rhein to see it before January 22, it will be on view at to the Cranbrook Museum in Michigan from June 16 to October 8 next year. Global sponsors of both the exhibit and the catalogue are Herman Miller and Maharam, with support as well from Vitra. The catalogue is available through normal book distribution channels (currently offered on Amazon at under $60).

 

2016-1031-girardvitraexhibition3-installationroom2Girard may have been best known for designing textiles, but he was equally adept at designing dishes, dresses, radios, posters, toys, greeting cards, logos, exhibitions, murals, furniture, lighting fixtures and entire interiors. His interiors of the 1930 and 1940s – mostly residential – have disappeared, leaving only some photos included in the show and catalogue.

Much better known, and recalled by some of us, are his now lost Fonda del Sol (1960) and L’Etoile (1966) restaurants in Midtown Manhattan and his Compound restaurant in Santa Fe (1966 – still intact and open for dining). His most ambitious interiors are those of the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana (1957; Eero Saarinen, architect; Alexander Girard, interior designer), now well preserved and open to public tours. Also in Columbus, his somewhat more modest offices for Irwin Miller are intact and can be visited.

2016-1031-girardvitraexhibition4-installationroom1cHe even took on exteriors. For the mid-1960s repainting of the largely 19th century commercial buildings along the main street of Columbus, Indiana, he chose an odd but surprisingly sympathetic range of colors, including orange, pea soup green, buff, amber and sky blue.

And in his 1965 commission from Braniff International airlines, he designed everything from their logo to their flight attendants’ outfits to their boarding lounges to their cabin interiors to the startling and varied treatments of the airplane exteriors in such colors as gray-green and plum.

While producing an amazing amount of design work, he amassed a huge collection of folk art from Latin America, India, Europe and elsewhere. Virtually every product he created, every sketch he made, every letter in his vast correspondence has been preserved in one of several institutions.

Color & materials scheme for Girard-designed restaurant in Midtown Manhattan
Color & materials scheme for Girard-designed restaurant in Midtown Manhattan

Portions of his vast accumulation of designed objects, folk art, correspondence, etc. were donated in 1969 to the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. The folk art exhibition he created in 1980 for the International Museum of Folk Art in Santa Fe remains there, essentially unchanged, while some 90,000 works he collected are preserved in its archives. The landmark Miller House (1957) in Columbus, IN, with all of its furnishings, functions as a satellite of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Many thousands of items still held by Girard at the time of his death were acquired in 1996 by Vitra Design Museum.

La Fonda del Sol restaurant in Midtown Manhattan
La Fonda del Sol restaurant in Midtown Manhattan

Girard’s skills were nurtured through his unusually diverse experiences. Son of an American mother and a father of French and Italian descent, he was born in New York in 1907 but spent his childhood in Florence.

He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London from 1924 to 1929, but he never observed a firm distinction between design and fine arts – or between Modernism and historical tradition. Returning to New York in 1932, he was welcomed as a bearer of much-admired European savoir faire and carried out some interior design commissions.

He then spent the years 1937 to 1953 in the area of Detroit, primarily working for Herman Miller and enjoying the company of the Saarinens and other design stars then teaching and studying at Cranbrook. In 1953, he moved to Santa Fe, which was to be his final and much loved home base until his death in 1993.

 

Weil am Rhein
Weil am Rhein

It’s intriguing that among the hundreds of diverse design works illustrated in this catalogue, many are labeled “environmental enrichment panel,” the curators’ term for something you can display on a wall that is neither quite a poster nor a work of fine art. As with the folk art he collected, many the works he himself produced defy the conventional boundary between design and are.