Alexander Girard - máXimo - The source for products and designs by Alexander Girard, Alexander Calder and Marilyn Neuhart.

The following essay was written in 1975 by the textile designer, Jack Lenor Larsen. It was published in the DESIGN QUARTERLY #98/99 by the Walker Art Center, in conjection with its exhibition NELSON EAMES GIRARD PROPST: The Design Process at Herman Miller.

ALEXANDER GIRARD

Alexander Girard is one of the great colorists, pattern givers, environmental and exhibition designers of our time. These media – his joy in them and ours – is his message. Girard's statement is based upon an underlying personal humanism expressed through color and pattern, folk art and total design. He calls for spontaneity and for a fresh consideration of emotional content, for easy, fun filled simplicity in which a good replenishing environment is not a matter of size and cost, but of the integrity of its parts. He has never implied that everyone should live with the hallmarks of his style, but – through ample demonstrations – he has urged each of us toward a more personal and expressive way of life.

Girard's unique position in 20th century design is based in part on the fact that fabric design is only one aspect of his expression. More than most of us in fabric design, he is aware that the role of fabric is a supporting one. That Girard is an interior architect of great stature has influenced his fabric design in a variety of ways. First of all, architectural commissions have presented the challenge of fresh requirements – far beyond the conventions of a fabric collection per se. Often these commissions have provided the impetus for a bold departure in Herman Miller's fabric line. Girard's interiors, widely published, are often perfectly orchestrated demonstrations of how to use his fabrics effectively.

As his own best client for fabrics, Girard describes the genesis of his cloths and colorings:

The simple geometric patterns and brilliant primary color ranges came to be because of my own urgent need for them on current projects. As you will remember, primary colors were frowned upon in those days; so were geometric patterns. I had the notion then, and still do, that any form ofrepresentational pattern, when used on folded or draped fabric, became disturbingly distorted, and that, therefore, a geometric pattern was more appropriate for a draped fabric. Also, I was against the concept that certain fabrics were ‘suited' to certain uses – like pink for girls or blue for boys!

Their wide availability was assured as Herman Miller put them into their collection – in a variety of cloth types. Most often these enriched colors and concise patterns went into the Miller collection “use tested” by Girard's interior and exhibition assignments. Later on, for easy correlation by a broader, international Miller staff and client list, the Girard color schemes and pattern complexes became highly systematized.

For almost two decades, Girard's designs for Miller included selections from his famous Mexicotton series. His endless variations on related stripes, checks and solids primarily within the confines of one weave, one yarn and one density prove his innovative prowess. Such exercises often stultify; Girard responded to this discipline as do great poets to the structure of the sonnet form. On more than one occasion, as in his installations for The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Museum of Modern Art and Georg Jensen, he has also been the designer for exhibitions that featured his fabric designs.

In discussing the meaning and influence of Girard fabric and particularly Girard color, his relation to Dorothy Liebes and Jim Thompson^* is both necessary and helpful. Although Mrs. Liebes is dead and Mr. Thompson disappeared, and despite their being older than he, these three Americans who revolutionized our sense of color and cloth had much more in common than their respective predilections for Chinatown, Siamese and Mexican pinks. All three popularized vibrant, pulsating color by making it available in fabric form. Although Girard's concern is the deepest, broadest and most durable, he shares a keen interest in ethnic expression and in infusing American culture with the spice of an exotic expansiveness.

Both Thompson and Girard trained as architects; Mrs. Liebes was particularly involved with the architecture of her native California. Possibly because of this, the three were not so concerned with fabric structure as with fabric color and texture. (if Girard had ever devoted himself to the complexities of fabric construction he undoubtedly would have dwarfed us all.)

However, Girard's printed fabric statements have given us a broader range of expression. Although he was the only one to rival Dorothy Liebes as colorist or as major fabric influence in the important postwar design revolution, Girard's approach has been different from hers. While Mrs. Liebes simultaneously handwove for potentates of the establishment and promoted a variety of commercial interests, Girard funneled all his fabric work through Herman Miller. The result has pure – if warm, colorful and personal – design-by-the-yard, available worldwide through courageous retailers and the best architects and interior designers.

Alexander Girard is a serious, principled man. He has the wisdom to keep in front of him the certainty that “they” – the client, market and public – will always, in the long run, accept his design criteria. His early statement of “...being able to make a living doing things I want to do, in the way I want them done,” has bolstered many. He accepts market reality as a climber accepts risk; it is always there, not to be disregarded, but not the primary condition of the ascent.

Unlike Dorothy Liebes and Jim Thompson, he is a showstopper who always leaves the arena before the curtain calls. He leaves nothing to be explained. Alexander Girard is a perfectionist, both in his clear concepts and in his meticulous execution of them. Even in the areas of product design he does not work his way through problems, but in the best architectural tradition anticipates them, then follows up – gently and thoroughly.

Girard is a humanist, a student of the visual forces that move people and especially of those that delight. He is Puck, a bright boy with many toys and games to share, magician and fairy godfather. He adds fun to the most matter-of-fact. Always in person, and most often in his work, the humor is as slyly thrown away as a boomerang. Through the corner of his eye he awaits our reaction.

Sandro Girard must finally be given credit for his long, single-handed campaign to inject the lively human qualities of joy and spontaneity into what has probably been one of the driest, most sensually impoverished chapters in the history of design. All through the four decades when architectural catholicism has been measured by the omission of any aspect which is not intellectual, when serious environmental design has not corrected people's alienation from their senses and often sensibilities, but has made a headstrong plunge into judgmental intellectualism, Girard was first and loudest in suggesting the alternative of lively personal expression.

THE RESTAURANTS

Over a ten year period in New York (1956-1966) three “food assignments” electrified a public which had primarily know Girard as a fabric-designing insider of the new purist cult and as an exhibition designer for the Museum of Modern Art. There, even more than his installations for the Good Design Shows, his brilliant, extravagant “set” for Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India, 1955 should have given us a clue to the bombast to follow. In 1956, Just Lunning, president of Georg Jensen, commissioned Girard to design seven table-top environments. This history making demonstration heralded a whole new attitude toward the sensual and social pleasures of dining. His welcome message was that giving pleasure has no rules, but important elements are surprise and spontaneity, ritual and nostalgia, consideration and celebration, design and form. Sandro Girard's underlying proposition was becoming clearer: he was urging us to celebrate, not stifle with intellectualized precepts, areas that innately belong to the senses. In these areas, more is more.

In the postwar years New York was the only great metropolis without important new clubs and restaurants. Other American cities had them of necessity; San Francisco opened several each year. Manhattan had – and still has some excellent chefs serving in intimate rooms without artificial flowers, neon light or Muzak, but no distinctive new spaces or expressions of an evolving lifestyle were evident. When the Four Seasons pompously, ceremoniously opened in the lofty spaces of Mies van der Rohe's bronze-clad Seagram Building in 1959, the ice broke; two years later, when La Fonda del Sol opened in the then new Time-Life Building, the ice melted. So did the critics and public. New York was once again a restaurant capital.

While the Four Seasons was an attempt to reinterpret, in contemporary terms, dining in the grand manner, Girard's approach at La Fonda was revolutionary. Its design was grand – total, expansive, complete to the buttons on the waiters' jackets – but the spirit was as inclusive as a fiesta. Families came; so did actors, designers, executives, foreigners and young people out on a “big date.” They came for the exotic foods of Latin America, the joyous folk art celebration, but mostly for the ambience. All these ideas were Girard's; from the Spanish-American concepts to the exposed grills of sparkling tile, to the exotic china, evocative menus, and the extraordinary, articulated brass sun itself. High overhead stretched an acre of the best ceiling lightgrid yet designed. Beneath it the bar was enclosed in adobe, pierced for vignettes of the most extraordinary folk art ever to grace commerce. The windows were screened with golden layers of tautly stretched ribbons. These ribbons warp knit of such improbable combinations as jute and Lurex, with a dozen or more variations, were – then as now – without precedent or peer.

Throughout La Fonda del Sol, color and light were used to create a dozen moods. So were the spaces, from horizontal and open to those enclosed by parapets and canopies. Fabrics, particularly a variety of striped Miller wools, supported this orchestration. Miller solid colored upholsteries varied the hundreds of Eames dining chairs – the one constant, unifying denominator. When Girard's “other restaurant,“ L'Etoile (commissioned by Jerome Brody, who when with Restaurant Associates, had been in charge of realizing La Fonda) opened five years later in New York, its contrast with La Fonda and with all that the world had come to expect from Girard was pure genius. Virtually without color, without Latin or folkloric overtones, its mood was cool and chaste. The dramatic understatement, involving light and surface, gull grays with sparkling whites was, although it predated the revival of Art Deco, reminiscent of pre-war Parisian urbanity and particularly of the French liner, Normandie.

Although L'Etoile and La Fonda have long since closed, they deserve more focus than these few lines. For these environments were more than food and décor, more than a business; to thousands of people who experienced these spaces, it was a life-expanding revelation that creative, zestful informality was more convivial than “company manners.” That this quality of design was out of a museum context and in actual use made it that much more influential. However, the most important statement, more durable than the totality of the planning, the props, or the color was the assertion that the prime concern of environmental design was how people feel in a space. This is Girard's message and main contribution.

At a time when modern architecture was rapidly becoming a larger, more standardized aspect of the corporate establishment, the success of La Fonda whetted our appetites for more romantic, diversified interiors, particularly in non-work areas. We wanted to see more Girard design. This opportunity came when a Herman Miller showplace, T & O (Textiles and Objects) opened on Manhattan's East 53rd Street in 1961. The textiles included new ranges of non-geometric handprints and earthy wool upholsteries. Since the objects were lavish folk art pieces selected and displayed by Girard, the inter-relationship of textiles and objects was inevitable.

His total design for Braniff International, 1965, brought Girard's design (and Braniff) to the attention of a very broad audience. It startled a generation into the awareness that even the look-alikes of mass transit could – through color and pattern – achieve metamorphosis. While other designers wondered where to put which exterior color, Girard bathed entire planes in the sunniest of hues – and a variety of hues at that. Similarly he color-structured all the field equipment. While other sought the “right” upholstery, Girard employed a dozen related geometries so that the whole interior sang as a choir. He designed the graphics and terminal lounges complete with folk art collections. In airline history, this was Camelot.

SANTA FE

That Girard the architect, collector, graphic and exhibition designer lives in an area so distant from major clients is exceptional but not extraordinary. But for a fabric designer to be this distant from market and media and, more importantly from the dozens of independent producers and services is without precedent. Isolation from production and market is not to be recommended to anyone starting out, but Girard has several advantages that have made his Santa Fe sojourn possible. For one, his career and particularly his Herman Miller contract were secure when he moved; for another, his move from the relative remoteness of Gross Pointe, Michigan must have been easier than to have orbited out of, say Manhattan. But three of Girard's qualities are more significant. His broad range of talents and skills and his wisdom in not wanting to go the large design office, high overhead route so common to his time has reduced his necessity for business travel. His extraordinary ability to communicate quickly, briefly, precisely by mail, gives far-away clients the confidence of being very much in touch – in touch with a responsible, comprehensible man. To Girard this ability gives accuracy, maneuverability, and a life-style that sustains creativity.

The Girard Foundation was established in Santa Fe to formalize and permanently house not only a vast, unique collection of dolls and toys, but related segments of folklorica and ethnic expression as well. While the heart of the Girard collections is of the very order of things that normally escape preservation, their celebration of ornament and play are, in this grim world, momentous.

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