Design Exhibitions at Three New York Museums

For readers in the world of interior design and furnishings, New York is now offering two not-to-be-missed museum exhibitions, plus another notable one that may be a bit tangential to your interests.

At the Jewish Museum, “Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design,” through March 26

The Chareau show at the Jewish Museum is simply one of the best design exhibits ever, itself beautifully designed and offering among its historical treasures a superb virtual reality experience. The exhibit’s architects, Diller & Scofidio, have done bigger things (like the new Broad Museum in L.A. and their alterations to Lincoln Center in New York), but nothing any finer than their installation here.

Many in the design world know of Pierre Chareau as the designer of the Maison de Verre of 1928-1932, an icon of Early Modernism tucked into a hidden courtyard in Paris. What we may not have known is that Chareau, a designer without architectural credentials, worked with the Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoet to create this brilliantly innovative steel and glass structure, housing medical offices and luxurious quarters for their doctor client.

This house is the high point of the show, which includes virtual reality experiences of three of its distinctive interiors and its garden. The viewer is seated next to a display of the Chareau-designed furnishings for each of these spaces, then looks through a device that offers a 360-degree view, ranging from straight up to straight down, showing these same pieces of furnishings as they would appear at the Maison itself. Another high-technology installation presents what amounts to CAT scans of the house, showing slices through it, accompanied by projected cinematic vignettes of people activating the rooms thus sliced.

Much less known, at least in the US, is Chareau’s extensive output of furniture, lamps and lighting fixtures, even wallpaper — some of it exhibited at the Paris design fair of 1925 that gave rise to the worldwide styles later known Art Deco and Art Moderne. His work is notable for his use of luxurious woods and veneers, as well as rugged bare steel, in his furniture. His lamps and wall sconces are distinctive for their translucent alabaster shading devices. Also displayed are Chareau’s sketches and renderings, as well as analytical drawings of the Maison de Verre by late 20th-Century architects.

There is also ample treatment of other projects of Chareau’s — apartments, a vacation house, a hotel — and documentation of his life and family. He was of Sephardic Jewish background, as was his wife-collaborator Dollie. They escaped from Paris to New York in 1940 before the Nazis arrived. In 1947 Chareau designed a house-studio in East Hampton for the painter Robert Motherwell, fashioning a remarkably complex two-story interior within the envelope of a then-standard Quonset Hut.

Chareau also assembled a collection of relatively modest works by artists such as Picasso and Motherwell. A number of these have been borrowed from collectors and museums for display at this show. (see more images in the gallery below)

At the Museum of Modern Art, “How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior” thru April 23

In line with its ambivalent title, this show focuses on living environments — but not exclusively. And it features the historically sidelined design accomplishments of women (an aspect of the exhibition conspicuously missing from its title). All of the objects and documents are from MoMA’s own collection, many of them recently acquired. The exhibit material ranges from entire rooms to furniture to swatches of fabric, dating from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Many of the designs in the show are the products of the female-male collaborations that have often facilitated women’s entry into the design world. The partnerships represented in the show include those of Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe, Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, Ray and Charles Eames, Aino and Alvar Aalto, Charlotte Perrier and Le Corbusier.

Highlights of the show include the full-scale Frankfurt Kitchen of 1926-28, designed by architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, an influential prototype designed to laboratory standards of durability and convenience for installation in some 10,000 Frankfurt public housing units. Another prominent full-scale display is a recreation of the study bedroom designed by Charlotte Perriand for the Maison du Brézil at the Cité Unversitaire in Paris. The design of the 95 student rooms there was coordinated with the building’s architects, Perriand’s frequent collaborator Le Corbusier and the Brazilian architect Lucio Costa.

A generous display of drawings and enlarged photos vividly portrays the E1027 house, a small vacation retreat in the south of France that Eileen Gray designed to share with her architect-partner Jean Badovici. She spent years studying the sloping site determining how to best to frame its views of the Mediterranean. For the interior, Gray designed sliding doors, storage walls, and multifunctional furniture that could be reconfigured for different uses at different times.

Among its over 200 works, the show also includes:

• iconic furniture and other objects by the wife-husband Eames and Aalto teams
• fabrics and wall coverings designed by Florence Knoll and Anni Albers
• children’s furniture from the 1930s designed by Marcel Breuer
• a 1930 apartment designed by Frederick Kiesler for the American textile designer Margherita Mergentime.
• items and documentation from MoMA’s “Good Design” exhibitions of the 1940s and 1950s
• photographs of Knoll’s 1940s and 1950s showroom in New York and elsewhere, with products offered at the time

A special feature of the exhibition, supported by Knoll, is an “evocation” of Velvet-Silk Cafe, created by Lilly Reich for a 1927 women’s fashion exhibition in Berlin. Amid the furniture of the time and the drapery backdrops she designed, visitors can enjoy a coffee during designated hours for the show’s duration.

At the Cooper Hewitt: “By the People: Designing a Better America”, through Feb. 26

Billed as the first in the museum’s laudable series on “socially responsible design,” this exhibition features 60 projects from all over North America. The emphasis is explicitly on actions and designs that address “the challenges faced by urban, suburban, and rural communities.” Our current needs in the areas of housing, employment, health care, and education are address by data-based displays documenting the inequalities now prevailing.

While the projects included are typically initiated and/or backed by popular groups, it is encouraging to find that the skills of professional planners, architects, and designers have been tapped for most of By the People’s exhibited works. These vary in scale from regional trails and urban parks to a jewelry-making workshop and a jeans factory “with one of the smallest carbon footprints in the world.”

Notable among the projects shown are:

• Rapido Rapid Recovery Housing, a collaboration of designers bcWORKSHOP with non-profit groups and Texas A&M university — easily delivered and erected disaster-relief housing units that can be located on the family’s property and later expanded for long-term occupancy.

• Collinswood Center, Cleveland, designed by City Architecture for the city and a neighborhood group — conversion of an abandoned big-box retail structure into a center for sports, education, and community gatherings.

• Underpass Park, Toronto, a collaboration of several design studios with WaterfronToronto — a “public commons” that takes advantage of an elevated highway structure to provide spaces for year-round activities and links the neighborhoods on either side.

A visitor to the show will find over 50 other commendable efforts to improve individual and community life. It is gratifying to observe that numerous public-spirited design and architecture firms — both young and well established — have cooperated with official and unofficial public groups to make them happen.