Pierre Chareau

Book by Taylor, Brian Brace

French designer and architect Pierre Chareau is something of enigma. Outside of his work, he left little writing that tells of his personality or even his design beliefs. La Maison de Verre (the Glass House), Chareau's most celebrated work, does little to dispel the mystery of its creator. Completed in 1932, the house is clearly born of his modernist grounding, but its amalgamation of styles--Moorish, Andalusian, Japanese, even nautical--is a distinct departure from the movement and even from Chareau's main body of work. Like his contemporaries Mies Van Der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, it is believed that Chareau bypassed a traditional education and instead learned his metier on the job, working for a noted British design firm. He first exhibited at the 1919 Paris Salon d'Automne. From then on he became a fixture in the Parisian salon circuit, forming close associations with other artists and writers such as Raoul Dufy and Max Jacob, whose surreal sensibility may have informed some of Chareau's pieces.

Chareau's work was aggressively innovative and distinctly modern: in 1939 he turned packing containers into furniture for the French government. He boldly worked with materials out of context--turning stone into a lampshade--and built on the art nouveau tradition of combining disparate materials such as metal, wood, and glass into a desk or chair. Mobility and transparency are the leitmotifs of his work. Contemporary readers flipping through the pages of this book will find that the screens, built-in furniture, and moving walls of his interiors look very familiar. But in the '20s and '30s, when most of the work was designed, it verged on revolutionary. Chareau's furniture, even his rooms, curve around themselves, fan out into triangular elements, combine clean lines and lush upholstery fabrics. He was at his best when he combined his talents as architect and designer to come up with a bathtub-bookshelf unit, a screened washing area, and a table lamp easily mistaken for a sculpture.

With its usual concern for quality, publisher Taschen has created a high-quality overview of Chareau's work. The clean, informative photos of individual pieces of furniture, interior tableaux, and exterior shots allow readers to carefully investigate the work. And extensive coverage of the glass house, including blueprints and watercolor drawings, is an exciting inclusion. All captions, notes, and text are in French, English, and German. --Jordana Moskowitz