Todd Oldham is talking passionately about the American designer Alexander Girard, and it comes across in cascades of colourful imagery. For Girard designed everything, from rooms to matchboxes, papers, textiles, chairs, the world’s first-ever conversation pit, cutlery, dolls, aeroplanes (real ones) and much else, most of it one-offs that were never sold in shops. ‘He was like a gardener,’ says Todd, ‘constantly growing and moving.’ One of Todd’s earliest memories is seeing Girard’s Braniff International lounge and aircraft at his local airport in Texas, designed from 1965 onwards. Emilio Pucci designed the cabin-crew uniforms – you will surely remember their transparent ‘spaceman’ helmets – but Girard did everything else, including a range of seating fabrics for both inside and outside the planes, tickets, timetables, the logo, the lettering, the lounge furniture, the luggage labels, playing cards, salt and pepper sachets, badges, bar menus, sick bags and ‘occupied’ notices for the lavatories. Everything you can think of, all in the bright colours of the 1960s, an electric contrast to the grey and silver styling of most airlines of the period.
It is hard to think of a pattern-maker with Girard’s scope and energy, even across the golden age of American industrial design in which he worked, from the late 1920s until the 1970s.
Across his entire career, he probably designed something like 35,000 objects – the number of documents and products that Todd uncovered when researching for his recent book on Girard, the massive size and weight of which give some hint of its subject’s output. Much of Girard’s archive was bequeathed to Vitra, but some of it ended up with Herman Miller, because Girard did his more accessible work for that company: you will recognise his ‘Retrospective’ wallpaper of 1952, the one with the line pattern of domes, gables, gardens and windows; later, in 1967, he presented a range of Girard Group furniture.
There was even a fashion collection designed with a young Issey Miyake, but only tantalising fragments have survived. The astonishing thing, says Todd, himself a designer known for his versatility, is that Girard designed at full size, and got it right first time. He then went on experimenting: another version, and then another. What he drew was what was made. It was work that demanded precision, of the kind that he alone could produce. ‘He was flawless,’ Todd adds.
For much of his life Girard, who was born in 1907 to an Italian family in New York but trained as an architect in Rome, worked from the home he built for himself and his wife, Susan, in Santa Fe. He bought two old adobe houses, and added to and decorated them in stages. Girard’s home and its fabulous interior have long gone, and with them that conversation pit, the forerunner of the famous one he later designed for Eero Saarinen’s Miller House in Columbus, but Todd’s team restored photographs, taken by the Girard’s friends Charles and Ray Eames, which testify to his astonishing ability to create complex patterned interiors with horizontal and vertical surfaces covered with coordinated objects he had designed or collected.
There is a wall of blue and ochre; there is a sitting area of red, orange and gold; there is a partition wall in pinks and magentas, which in a night-time photograph turn into reds and pink-browns. Every part of the house, including or perhaps especially the storage areas of the kitchen, was treated as a decorative object. The brilliance of Girard’s pattern-making lies in the fact that the effect is actually very disciplined in spite of the multiplicity of the pieces that make it up, in part through clever framing and organisation, but mostly through his ability to put things together so that they read as an architectural object. One triumphant example is a row of different types of lighting that adorn an adobe wall: the sequence runs from candles on the left to electric light bulbs on the right, with bunches of tapers hanging at the front, all mostly gold, or with flecks of gold.
Girard then set up a studio on the other side of the road, where he was assisted by no more than two craftsmen at a time, as well as by Doc, his indefatigable model maker and long-time ‘secret weapon’. It suited him to be in New Mexico, some distance away from his clients: he was a shy man, and modest, and worked best on his own. Eventually his private collection of objects, which he called his ‘Foundation’, became too big to store at home, so it followed him into the studio building; in time some 100,000 pieces were donated to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. Girard would go anywhere to pick up something that appealed to him. His son remembers a trip round a city in Egypt looking for toys, ending up in a workshop where his father persuaded the joiners to make wooden tops.
If these objects have a dominant flavour to them, it is maybe North African or Latin American, the latter supplying the inspiration for the restaurant interior which brought Girard admirers worldwide, Joe Baum’s La Fonda del Sol in the Time & Life Building in New York in 1960: reds, oranges, pinks and golds. But Girard collected the unexpected, too: matchbooks, in vast quantities; rubber stamps, linocuts, copious fabric samples. Everything was meticulously labelled and stored. He also made a collection of cards with palindromes and pairs of backwards-words – ergo/ogre, emir/rime, and so on – written on them. Why? Just his zest for life. And as his assistant Lesly Carr drily observed: ‘I don't think he believed in throwing much of anything away.’
I ask Todd: is Girard’s work somehow about America? All that colour and verve? ‘No: in his head he always felt Italian. He was a mixture of the Florentine craftsman and the American optimist.’ Yes, pattern-making is optimism, writ large across the wall.
‘Alexander Girard: Let the Sun In’, by Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee, is available at waterstones.com
A version of this article appeared in the December 2013 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
