Down to a Minimum

When Ward Bennett died in 2003 at the age of 85, the New York Times described him as “a New York designer of furniture, houses and much more, whose clean lines and exquisite materials quietly defined an era”. During a career that spanned over five decades, Bennett designed everything from jewellery and flatware, to chairs and houses. A master of functional simplicity, his fundamental philosophy was: “In life and design, try to pull it all down to a minimum”. Yet a decade after his death, there are no monographs of his work, and though acclaimed as a great American designer – at the height of his career in the 1980s, he received a medal from the American Institute of Architects, and he graced the covers of Metropolis and Interiors magazines – he never became a household name.

Bennett was born in 1917 and grew up in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. His father was an actor-vaudeville performer, his mother a tightrope walker, and the family zigzagged across the country, from Saratoga and Miami to Maryland and California. “There was no culture in the home at all,” Bennett recalled, in an early interview. “I mean, vaudeville was about it. When I was growing up, I only remember once or twice seeing my father perform. When talkies came in he was out of work and he never made it, so we lived rather raggedly and moved around a lot… There were some family problems and it was either he or I got out.”

After leaving home at 13, Bennett found a job as a delivery boy in New York’s ladies’ silk lingerie industry, and began taking a few night classes in fashion sketching, eventually landing a job sketching for the fashion designer Jo Copeland, making 75 dollars a week. At 14, he was working at Saks Fifth Avenue making sketches for bridal gowns, and two years later, he was riding the Queen Mary to France as an assistant for a firm called Joe and Junior (they specialised in styles for teenagers) to sketch the couture collections in Paris. “I was so frightened that I fell down the steps of the first-class dining room right into the Crêpes Suzettes,” he said. “I was wearing my first dinner jacket – really, it was one I had borrowed from a waiter.”

After a stint in the Army during World War Two, he returned to New York, and got a job window dressing and designing furs for Hattie Carnegie, a well-known fashion designer whose clients included Joan Crawford and the Duchess of Windsor. He studied by night with the abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann. “He’d set up a still life, and we would all draw it in black and white charcoal,” said Bennett. “This was merely to explore the tensions within that space. What pushed forward, what came toward you.” Basically his big thought, his love, his poetry, was space; what was happening in space. “And I’ve been dealing with that ever since.”

He returned to Paris on the G.I. Bill to study sculpture briefly with Ossip Zadkine. (Bennett didn’t like his work at all: “It was too intellectual.”) There, he met one of his heroes, the Parisian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who made a lasting impression. “His studio was like heaven; it was a dream,” said Bennett. “Brancusi had a kind of honesty and integrity, a genius, that made me decide against becoming a sculptor at that moment.” He also became acquainted with the architect, painter and theorist Le Corbusier, and began to look seriously at modern architecture and its relationship to interiors and decoration.

In 1946, Bennett travelled to Mexico and spent a year with the artist Lydia Modi, designing modernist jewellery that was later exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. Through his friendship with the designer Benjamin Baldwin, he worked on the interiors of Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati – an important early International Style modern hotel by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which was so advanced in its design, aesthetics and technology that it was jokingly called “the pushbutton palace”. The hotel had the world’s first “sky lobby” in addition to stunning interiors, which featured modern art including an Alexander Calder mobile and murals by Saul Steinberg and Joan Miró (Bennett’s light sconces, installed in the Gourmet Lounge, were hand-forged, hand-cut brass discs that had uncomplicated cutouts that recalled Chinese art).

Bennett drew upon his fashion background as a pattern maker, preferring to design a chair by working directly on a cardboard armature. For this reason, he loved working with flexible, linear materials such as reed – “you get a lovely sweep from reed” – to achieve the graceful lines that are characteristic of his furniture (his classic 1964 Landmark chair, with a sculptural quality expressed through the exposed wood frame, is once again available with a cane back.) “Starting with the pitch, I then work with muslin, a staple gun and cardboard,” Bennett explained. “Say, for instance, I wanted to make a lower chair into a high-back chair. I would take a couple of strong photographic clips and a huge piece of cardboard, and clip it on. And then I would start drawing on the cardboard to get the shape. It’s an armature – no different from sculpture, or even making dresses.”

The design for Bennett’s 1979 Shellback chair was similarly culled from various references and combined the natural imagery of a shell with nods to Art Nouveau and Josef Hoffmann, and was upholstered in a hand-sewn, channel-backed leather or fabric. During the mid-1970s, when desks where being stripped down to a drawer-less table-desk, Bennett turned to the luxurious era of the Art Deco as a way of restoring some old-fashioned ideals into the form (he included a kneehole and a bank of drawers on either side for a desk he launched in 1977.) The sophisticated Rolled Arm Sofa, with its solid form and crisp upholstery, lends an almost sculptural presence to any space, and the popular Bumper chair, for example, designed in 1964 and now reissued by Geiger, is based on the George Washington swivel chair, with its short bucket seat, nice sweep and good lumbar support. “Chairs should be short in the seat,” Bennett stated, “because then the feet rest on the floor and pressure is removed.” 

Taking inspiration from everything from an evening dress by the fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet or Claude-Nicholas Ledoux’s eighteenth-century gates of Paris, to the Temple of Horus in Egypt or a Victorian leather chair, Bennett believed well-designed and well-constructed furniture of all periods could co-exist happily side-by-side. “I do not know why one should eliminate the past,” he stated. “Any mixture is possible as long as each piece is good. It is just as right to have English eighteenth-century furniture as it is to have pre-Columbian sculptures – provided they are both beautiful or basically contribute to the total environment… We should be able to use old, good pieces as part of our design vocabulary, within a modern background of design.” And by simplifying the lines of historical pieces, he was able to transform them into truly original works.