Design

Greta Grossman

July 19, 2015

Today mostly remembered for her elegant and playful Grasshopper Lamp, in the 1950s and ’60s, Greta Grossman was a highly sought-after architect, interior and industrial designer who worked across two continents.

Growing up in Sweden in 1920s, Grossman, as a precocious teen, defied expectations by taking up woodworking, a predominantly male profession at the time. She followed this venture by becoming one of the first women to graduate from the Stockholm School of Industrial Design. Greatly influenced by functionalism, Grossman travelled across Europe, visiting the pioneering Weissenhof settlement and joining the conversations at the Motta restaurant in Milan, a primary meeting place for Milan’s art and design world, where, among others, she befriended the famed designer Gio Ponti.

Back in Sweden, Grossman rose to prominence in Stockholm’s design scene after opening Studio, a store and a workshop, which immediately became the most popular gathering place for young Swedish designers. Grossman herself became the poster-girl for modernism in Sweden, until in 1940, under the dark cloud of the Second World War, Greta and her husband, jazz player Billy Grossman, emigrated to the United States. Once settled in Los Angeles, Grossman opened a store in Rodeo Drive. Grossman played up her Swedish heritage (her business cards read simply Greta Magnusson Grossman: Swedish designer) in order to attract American customers who were awed by Swedish design after the highly-successful exhibition of Swedish Modern at the New York World’s Fair.

Grossman’s personal brand of modernism was never a cold, monochrome one. But once in LA, it fully blossomed by combining a Swedish fondness for color and texture with the opportunities allowed by bright and open spaces of Southern California. With a humanist sensibility, she designed large, airy living rooms which were meant to serve as spaces for dining, entertaining and working, while keeping the bedroom a private haven, removed from the bustle of activity in the rest of the house. Always designing for comfort and practicality, she placed a great emphasis on roomy, multi-functional kitchens, saying: “no architect should be allowed to design a kitchen without running a household for a couple of months! Please, keep us from the ‘rationalized’ kitchens with all their expensive and fancy appliances but without decent cupboards for this and that.”

Grossman’s furniture, too, shows a strong interest in merging functionality and comfort. However, this did little to curb her desire for experimentation, as she enjoyed combining wood with new materials, such as metal and plastic, and playing with bold colors. The most iconic products Grossman designed after moving to LA were the Grasshopper and the Cobra lamp. The Grasshopper, introduced in 1947, is made up of an aluminum conical shade resting on a tubular steel tripod stand and remains her most popular design, while the Cobra won the 1950 Good Design award and was consequently showcased at the MoMA.

Grossman remained a design star in California for the rest of her life—her pieces selling to Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo and Frank Sinatra—while today she is renowned internationally for her significant role in defining the modernist esthetic.

Originally published: Dwell.

Design

Harry Bertoia

July 18, 2015

Recognized worldwide as a genius of 20th century design, it’s hard to believe that Harry Bertoia designed only one series of furniture. His steel wire chairs, designed in 1951, are a masterpiece of structure and transparency and remain a staple in every midcentury inspired home. While most of his contemporaries were interested in the properties of wood and plastic in their designs, Bertoia focused on steel, combining his metalworking knowledge with his interest in sculpture in producing a collection of woven-wire chairs, “If you look at these chairs, they are mainly made of air, like sculpture. Space passes right through them,” Bertoia said.

Bertoia, who was born in Italy and immigrated to the United States in 1930, met Florence Knoll at the famous Cranbrook Academy of Art. While he started working on chair designs in California, collaborating with Charles Eames, another Cranbrook alumnus, he moved to Pennsylvania to develop an original seating collection in 1951. Florence and Hans Knoll encouraged Bertoia to explore whatever he liked, and he was immediately drawn to the idea of utilizing steel wire in developing a new chair design. To further soften the hard shell of the woven-wire, furniture designer Richard Schultz was asked to help Bertoia in coming up with ideas for the upholstery. The collection was introduced by Knoll in 1952 and quickly became a classic. The success of the collection allowed Bertoia to move away from furniture design and devote himself entirely to his art.

Although the products of a single collection, Bertoia chairs remain one of the most popular chairs in home furnishing. It’s hard not to be drawn to the strictness of steel wiring made delicate by the transparency of the grid. The chameleon-like qualities of the chairs allow them to work well in any environment, from dining rooms to outdoor spaces, and they make a bold statement wherever they’re placed. So for those who are wondering how to include these chairs in their home or are just curious about the story of this modern classic, here’s a look at the history of the Bertoia seating collection and some of the Dwell homes that showcase the chairs to their best advantage.

Architecture

Finn Juhl’s House

July 17, 2015

Although today relatively obscured by the fame of his peers, Arne Jacobsen and Hans Wegner, Finn Juhl remains a central name in the story of Danish modernism. His chairs still impress with their sculptural, expressive forms (his Pelican chairs, which critics dubbed “tired walruses” when they first came out, look avant-garde even today) and the meticulous craftsmanship required to produce them. Finn Juhl and His House (Hatje Cantz), a new book by Per H. Hansen, reevaluates Juhl’s famous design—as well as the best exhibition space of the designer’s work, his own home in Ordrup, just outside of Copenhagen. Remarking that “When I build a house, I don’t like someone else to come in and spoil it,” Juhl made sure to design every detail of his home, and he adjusted the details until his death in 1989.

Although Juhl was educated as an architect, he designed only a few houses. He built his own home in 1941, with the inheritance received after his father’s death. He approached the design of his home primarily as a furniture and interior designer, starting from articulating the interiors and reserving the development of the exteriors for the very end. His idea was that furniture created the room, and the room created the facade.

The 2,200-square-foot home is made up of two buildings connected by a low entrance hall. As one of the early examples of open plan houses, the spaces flow into one another organically, and all the rooms open up to the surrounding garden through large windows and doors, making the outside a direct extension of the interior.

Juhl kept the the inside of the house in a constant state of flux. The furniture and the layout changed throughout the years as Juhl developed new designs and incorporated them into the interiors. In the dining room, for instance, Juhl originally employed Windsor chairs, only to replace them with his own designs sometime in the 1940s and finally settle on his Egyptian chairs in 1949. While he mostly utilized furniture he designed with cabinetmaker Niels Vodder, some pieces he designed specifically for the space, like the famous Poet sofa of 1942. “One cannot create happiness with beautiful objects, but one can spoil quite a lot of happiness with bad ones,” said Juhl, as he kept developing his designs, keeping in his home only the ones he was fully satisfied with.

Juhl’s guiding thought was to foster an interaction between furniture, art, color, and light. Perhaps the best example of his approach can be found in the living room where, above a white Poet chair, hangs Vilhelm Lundstrom’s painting of Juhl’s wife, around a white brick hearth that extends into the room like a rug. The room becomes a medley of light and texture.

Now, as the house has become a part of Ordrupgaard museum, visitors get to experience the effects of this midcentury marvel for themselves.

Full article: Dwell.

Architecture Interiors

Dwell Home Spotlight

April 20, 2015

Full article here.

Moving from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, Brian Crano and David Craig struggled to find a worthy replacement for the sizable Victorian home they left behind. They finally saw potential in the exquisite views offered by an uninspired apartment building in Brooklyn’s Vinegar Hill. The couple ended up buying two apartments on the top floor and enlisted the help of Sarah Zames, of Brooklyn-based General Assembly Design, to help them merge the two into one coherent unit. “They took a developer’s building that was built without anyone in mind and really sculpted it to be exactly what is right for them,” says Zames.

To bring order into the space, Zames divided the apartment in two directions. She pushed all the functional elements—including a bedroom and home office—against one wall to provide more room for leisure, in the form of an open-plan area for entertaining, on the other.

The division is visible in the choice of materials and color. “We used raw and industrial materials on one side and brought more texture and color to the other,” Zames says. “In the public space all the walls are bright whites since they get a lot of great light,” Zames says, “and on the bedroom side we painted the ceiling a dark blue to make it feel quieter and calmer.” Connecting the two is what was once the building’s public hallway, that makes a strong statement of its own with the help of wallpaper from Flavor Paper.

The wallpaper reflects a desire on the architect’s side to create a balance between the natural and the synthetic. Although both the owners and Zames express a preference for natural materials, Zames was careful not to overemphasize their presence. “I think if you use too many natural materials things can end up looking a little bit too ‘country-kitchen.’” In turn, Zames juxtaposed the raw wood and the custom cabinetry with dark colors and wallpapered walls, creating a space full of dynamic details.

Although extensive, the nine-month renovation was guided by a number of small but key decisions. “When we first started working together Brian picked out a copper BlueStar range for the kitchen,” Zames says. The strong presence of the stove initiated a lot of conversations about materials and colors and the final design was revealed as part of the process. “Maybe some designers and architects come with grand, sweeping gestures of how to transform the space, but I think it’s often a series of small decisions that end up making the design,” Zames says.

 

Architecture Published

Adventurous Apartment Building Made of 36 Shipping Containers

December 10, 2014

Three dozen shipping containers find a safe port in a modern apartment building in Mexico.

Full article here.

In León, Mexico, Adrián López Menduett sought to create an architecturally adventurous apartment building. After he bought a parcel in the Piletas neighborhood, the city made plans to construct a road across part of his land, trimming the buildable area to just under 2,300 square feet—about a third of the original footprint. This neccessitated a vertically oriented design. To Mario Plasencia, the architect Menduett hired, shipping containers offered a way to keep costs down, to build sustainably with recycled materials, and to use an unexpected construction method. “The containers helped us get noticed,” Plasencia says. “Bringing people out of their comfort zone is a challenge. Everything here is built with the same materials, colors, and shapes.”

Finding the 36 containers needed to complete the eight apartments—a number determined by the number of parking spaces that could fit on the lot—proved difficult. Plasencia scoured many of Mexico’s ports to get them. He repainted each container in its original hue, creating a prismatic exterior. Most of the interior walls were covered with plaster panels for insulation and acoustics—”but it was important to leave one container wall exposed,” Plasencia says, “to preserve that sense of texture.”

Architecture Published

Tadao Ando’s Reimagined Clark Art Institute

June 1, 2014

The striking Massachusetts museum Clark Art Institute reopens its doors after a decade-long transformation.

Full article here.

The new center at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute opens up before its guests almost imperceptibly, the entrance revealing itself only after visitors have walked down a long path framed by a slab of red granite. The granite parts to unveil a dazzling reflecting pool which unites the three central buildings of Clark’s 140-acre campus. This area is the nucleus of a decade-long transformation of the Williamstown, Massachusetts, museum which brought together the famed architects Tadao Ando, Annabelle Selldorf, and Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architects and finally reopened its doors on July 4th.

The first stop at the reimagined Clark is Tadao Ando’s visitor center. As his other works in the United States, the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis and the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Ando’s visitor center is austere and meditative, a transitional space that points to other buildings rather than draws attention to itself. Granite and glass are the main materials and their primary role, according to Ando, is to draw the eye to the hill that rises above the Clark. The minimalist visitor center is followed by a restrained reconfiguration of the galleries in the Museum Building, where Annabelle Selldorf turned the long corridors of the previous incarnation into smaller rooms, giving the space a more intimate air, appropriate for the museum’s collection which is famous for nineteenth-century American and European art.

Connecting these buildings is a three-tiered reflecting pool, which was one of the main points of contention in the 14-year-long, $145 million transformation of the Clark. Nonetheless, as it oscillates between turning opaque and reflecting the rolling hills above it, the pool is undoubtedly the crowning achievement of the project. Stemming from Ando’s idea it was made a reality by the landscape firm Reed Hilderbrand, which took into account the practicalities of the site and the need for a sustainable solution that could provide irrigation for the campus and withstand the cold Massachusetts winters. In a particularly inspired detail, the pool will become a functioning skating rink in the winter, drawing in even the most reluctant visitors.

And while on a recent trip most guests elbowed their way to take pictures of Tadao Ando, who had come from Osaka for the reopening, the true success of the Clark lies not in its association with the great architect, but in the thoughtful harmony of its many elements. From the unlikely pairing of the original 1955 neo-Classical building and the 1970s Brutalist Manton Research Center to the way Ando’s Visitor Center responds to the sprawling fields above, the Clark is not a conglomeration of disparate elements but a balanced whole. While many elements of the project, such as the time and the money invested, as well the involvement of a famed starchitect, might have resulted in a overambitious muddle, the reimagined Clark is a subtle work, one that successfully presents art, architecture, and nature as nothing short of equals.

Design Published

Design Classic: Jens Risom Collection

April 20, 2014
jens_risom

Jens Risom’s 1942 designs for Knoll were born out of wartime necessity but went on to become signature midcentury modern designs.

Full article here.

Jens Risom’s furniture collection was the first designed for and manufactured by Knoll. Originally known as the 600 Series, it quickly put the new furniture company on the map, and remains one of its most popular designs to this day.

Born in Denmark, Risom left for the United States in 1938. Soon after settling in New York, he met Hans Knoll, who was a year older and had been in the United States a year longer than Risom. The two quickly bonded, aware of the gap in the American furniture market and ambitious to fill it with quality design. “There was no furniture, nothing to be had…everybody was anxious to buy everything they could get their hands on,” Risom recalls.

The two embarked on a mission to create simple, inexpensive furniture for American consumers. The resulting collection made two of the few materials widely available during wartime—surplus army webbing and parachute straps—and wrapped them around a supple, curving wooden frame. Aided by Knoll’s entrepreneurial prowess, the collection was quickly became a mainstream staple of office furnishing. But the lounges, armchairs and stools, which made up the collection, also proved immediately successful with broader American audiences eager for simple and functional design.

Risom didn’t have much time to enjoy his successes; drafted in 1943, he spent two and a half years in the army. When he returned, he found there was little room left for him at Knoll. In this time, Hans had married Florence Schust, who, according to Risom, “was a brilliant designer but was not as impressed with the Scandinavian wood furniture as she was the metal furniture from Mies and Saarinen.” Nevertheless, Knoll continued producing the collection without Risom’s name attached to it. In the late 1990s the collection was reintroduced under his name, capturing the attention of a new generation of design enthusiasts.

Design Published

Design Classic: Eames House Bird

April 17, 2014

The small decorative black bird is considered one of the most famous Eames pieces, even though it wasn’t designed by Eames at all.

Full story here.

The story of the Eames House Bird is less a story of Charles and Ray Eames and more one of Charles and Edna Perdew. This husband and wife team from Henry, Illinois, passed on their gun repair business to their son in the 1930s and dedicated themselves to carving and painting bird decoys for hunters. A simple black bird Perdew carved around 1910 became a highly sought-after model by quite a different audience in the 1950s, primarily for its minimal shape and dark color. It was popularized by Charles and Ray Eames, who acquired one on their travels in the Appalachian mountains. The wooden bird became a center piece of the Eames living room and soon started to make an appearance in many of their product photo-shoots. It can even be seen in a 1952 cover of the Architectural Review, a solid shape among a grid created by Eames chairs.

Realizing the broad appeal of this simple decorative piece, Vitra has recently started reproducing them by creating 3D scans of the original. However, unlike Perdew’s versions, which were mostly carved out of pine, the Vitra version is made of solid alder with a black lacquer finish and steel wire legs. Its reappearance has brought the little black bird back to many mid-century inspired homes, where it often perches on top of furniture, elegant and unobtrusive at the same time.

Design Published

Design Classic: Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair

April 7, 2014

A look at Eero Saarinen’s Womb chair, an icon of midcentury modern design.

Full article here.

Unlike Harry Bertoia, who created a single collection, Eero Saarinen produced numerous designs for Knoll that became inextricably linked to the history of the famous furniture company.

Saarinen designed the Womb chair in 1946 at the request of Florence Knoll, whom he met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. “I told Eero I was sick and tired of the one-dimensional lounge chair…long and narrow…” Knoll said, “I want a chair I can sit in sideways or any other way I want to sit in it.”

Saarinen rose to this challenge and created a chair that proved comfortable in a number of different positions. Originally named No. 70, it soon became known as the Womb chair because of its comfortable, organic appearance. “It was designed on the theory that a great number of people have never really felt comfortable and secure since they left the womb,” Saarinen explained.

Apart from its novel appearance, the Womb chair is also highly innovative from a structural perspective. Saarinen wanted to construct the chair out of a single piece of material, and achieved this by experimenting with new materials and techniques drawn from the shipbuilding industry. The final result—a padded and upholstered fiberglass shell that sits on a polished chrome steel frame—combined simplicity of shape with true comfort and flexibility.

Initially released in 1948, the Womb chair quickly became a cultural icon. A 1958 Coca-Cola advertising campaign showed Santa Claus drinking a Coke in a Womb chair. The chair also made an appearance in a New Yorker cartoon as well as a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell.

“Every object, whether large or small, has a relationship with its context,” Saarinen said in 1958. “Perhaps the most important thing I learned from my father was that in any design problem, one should seek the solution in terms of the next largest thing. If the problem is an ashtray, then the way it relates to the table will influence its design. If the problem is a chair, then its solution must be found in the way it relates to the room.” The sculptural form of the Womb chair effortlessly achieves this balance, matching any interior while still drawing the eye to its colors and curves. Today, the Womb chair seems like an almost ubiquitous addition to any midcentury-inspired home. Click through the slideshow to view houses we’ve featured in Dwell in which the Womb chair is a fixture.