{"id":26459,"date":"2016-04-18T19:33:12","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T17:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/alexander-girard-a-designers-universe-2\/"},"modified":"2016-10-27T12:31:36","modified_gmt":"2016-10-27T10:31:36","slug":"alexander-girard-a-designers-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/alexander-girard-a-designers-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexander Girard. A Designer’s Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alexander Girard<\/strong> (1907 \u2013 1993) was one of the most prolific interior and textile designers of the 20th century. His playful designs attest to a passion for colours, ornamentation and international folk art, with which he shaped the aesthetic of American design in the postwar era and anticipated the globalization of design by decades. In March 2016 Vitra Design Museum will open the first major retrospective on Alexander Girard. The exhibition presents his oeuvre with a never before shown multitude of textiles, furnishings, models, small objects, interiors, personal documents, and drawings. At the same time, it sheds light on Girard\u2019s inspirations and the contemporaries who influenced his creative universe \u2013 from his extensive collection of folk art to his collaborations with Charles & Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen. The exhibition also features Girard\u2019s private estate, which is held by the Vitra Design Museum. Raised in a cosmopolitan family with European and American roots, he grew up in Florence, studied architecture in London, and then lived in New York and Michigan before eventually settling in Santa Fe. Practising from the late 1920s until the late 1970s, he created stunning interiors for restaurants, private clients and corporations, as well as more than 300 textile designs \u2013 mostly for the American furniture company Herman Miller after becoming director of its textile division in 1951. Girard\u2019s clients also included companies like Braniff International Airways and John Deere for which he handled a broad range of design activities \u2013 from interior design, textiles, furnishings and small objects to typography, corporate design and exhibitions. Among Girard\u2019s most well-known works are the interior design of the Irwin Miller House in Columbus, Indiana (1957, architect: Eero Saarinen), his own home in Santa Fe (from 1953) and the legendary restaurants La Fonda Del Sol (1960) and L\u2019Etoile (1966) in New York, where even Andy Warhol was a frequent guest. In 1965, Girard developed the complete corporate design for Braniff, applying his characteristic visual language of vibrant colours and patterns to tickets, the lounge areas, and even the planes themselves. Yet he also created influential works on a much smaller scale, such as his design of the \u00bblove\u00ab motif, which remains one of Girard\u2019s most well known graphic images to this day. An important source of inspiration for Girard was his extensive collection of folk art objects, which he accumulated on his travels through Mexico, India, Egypt and other countries and which ultimately comprised more than 100,000 artefacts. Many of these objects were used by Girard in his interior design projects or in spectacular exhibitions, such as the \u00bbTextiles and Ornamental Arts of India\u00ab show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1954) or the \u00bbMagic of a People\u00ab pavilion he designed for the HemisFair World\u2019s Fair (1968) in San Antonio, Texas, for which he meticulously displayed more than 10,000 of his collected artefacts. Even if Girard\u2019s work is less well known than that of prominent contemporaries such as Charles & Ray Eames, his oeuvre has experienced a revival in more recent years. Girard\u2019s often underestimated significance lies in the fact that he restored what classical modernism had rejected in design \u2013 colour, decoration, opulent interiors. With an ingenious ease, he combined ostensible antagonists: craftsmanship and industry, pop culture and high culture, playful d\u00e9cor with masterful reduction. From today\u2019s perspective Girard, anticipated many developments of the following decades: from the colourful language of postmodernism to the current debates on post-industrial design and the globalisation of our everyday aesthetic. In 1996, the Vitra Design Museum took possession of Girard\u2019s personal estate. The holdings encompass 5,000 drawings and photographs respectively, many never before shown personal sketches, several hundred textile samples, accessories, furniture items and folk art objects. This archive serves as the basis for the exhibition \u00bbAlexander Girard. A Designer\u2019s Universe\u00ab. Further exhibition objects are on loan from the Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe as well as Alexander Girard\u2019s family. The exhibition design is being created by the London-based studio Raw Edges, headed by Shay Alkalay and Yael Mer. Like Girard, the duo\u2019s work is characterized by a keen interest colours and patterns. Over the past years, Raw Edges has achieved international acclaim with its installations for such companies as Kvadrat, Moroso and Luis Vuitton. The exhibition is accompanied by an over 500-page catalogue. The publication provides the first scholarly examination of Girard\u2019s oeuvre in the form of multiple essays, an extensive list of works and a comprehensive biography.<\/p>\n