Girard's moment in the sun
An excerpt from Phaidon’s Alexander Girard: Let the Sun In, a comprehensive dive into the world of the designer and founding director of Herman Miller’s textile division
Written by: Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee
Foreword by: Molly Singleterry
Photographs and scans from Girard Studio and by
Todd Oldham and Jason Frank Rothenberg
Published: October 29, 2024
In 1952, Alexander Girard introduced his first collection as the founding director of Herman Miller’s newly formed textile division. Included was a wide range of solids and versatile textures, geometric patterns like stripes and double triangles, in colors that would dazzle and delight. “People got fainting fits if they saw bright, pure color,” he once said. Like many of their peers, Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson struggled to find upholstery fabrics for their designs that felt right: Most of the offerings were muted, monotone, modest. The Eameses encouraged founder D.J. De Pree to establish a textile division, helmed by their friend, Girard, to complement the innovative furniture Herman Miller manufactured. “I see my role—and have always seen my role—with Herman Miller as one of adding to what they have, making things more palatable,” he said.
In just two decades, Girard created more than 300 unique designs that disrupted the status quo and redefined what felt “modern.” The expansive textile program was like a flexible tool kit, offering endless variation through combination and use. But it was only one piece of his creative puzzle: Like the Eameses and Nelson—and Gilbert Rohde before them—he had grand ideas that touched many parts of the company, including marketing, sales, specification tools, and promotional materials.
As you’ll read in the following excerpt from Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee’s monograph, Let the Sun In, Girard’s interests were varied and his output eclectic. Not only did he create immersive experiences for Herman Miller like the Textiles & Objects Shop in New York, but he also built a rich life for himself and his family, first in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and later, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The designer's studio life blurred the lines with his personal life, as his intimate circle of friends entailed a who's who in the art and furniture worlds. This excerpt focuses on Girard's studio spaces, with an eye toward his design process and his output, which spans a glorious array of disciplines and mediums. After all, he said, “I have no favorite material; anything can be used to create beauty if handled well.”
During his more than fifty-year career as an architect, artist, and designer, Alexander Girard’s own studios were expertly conceived spaces that could serve multiple purposes at once; drafting tables, libraries, material storage, and an exhibition space all existed together in harmonic function. Girard thrived having his studio space either in his home, adjacent to it, or not too far away from where he lived. His workspaces were inseparable from his personality; they were perfect embodiments of the way he saw the world and moved through it. These workspaces were in constant flux–he shifted the positions of half walls continually to accommodate each project’s needs, redesigned desks and storage structures frequently, and used one studio to showcase a rotation of art exhibitions. In addition to his flexible use of these spaces, Girard’s studio designs revealed his unique gift for organizing information without losing the aesthetics of it—evident in his boxes of textile samples that were so attractive they could almost be art objects, and his enchanting drawers full of compartmentalized matchbook covers (a vision to behold).
Girard’s workspaces exemplified the way he used his design skills to lead others to see what he saw. In his Michigan studio on Kercheval Place (designed in the 1940s), he hung a few bamboo window blinds not on windows but in midair to delineate planes that helped establish privacy. Except for a few chairs made by his friend Charles Eames, Girard’s studio furnishings were, from floor to ceiling, designed by him. The materials he used for desks, shelving, and walls were mostly inexpensive, but the results were always fetching. In Girard’s Sante Fe studio—designed when he was already quite successful and could have afforded more lavish supplies—he made abundant use of humble plywood. This was decades before the material came into vogue. He was enamored with plywood’s impossible-to-mimic patterns and textures, and he treated it (and salvaged wood) with the utmost respect. He designed desks, cabinets, and shelving from plywood. He also installed large plywood panels on the walls, as if wallpaper, celebrating the wood’s unique striations.
As works in progress, Girard’s studios remained current—not to the prevailing styles of the design world but to Girard’s tastes, which often predicted industry developments. The use of plywood is only one example of how Girard’s offices foreshadowed trends. In his Michigan studio on Kercheval Place, Girard sectioned rooms in unusual ways and erected low walls. He even installed only the idea of a wall (using studs but no sheetrock). Many of these styles were popular a good ten years later. Additionally, outside every office Girard designed, he installed a new sign to keep pace with his latest design notions. The signs consistently spelled out his name but appeared in a variety of treatments and typefaces. Some were freestanding and bold, while others announced themselves subtly and were almost embedded in his front door. No design or typeface was ever repeated.
In Michigan, Girard’s 1947 Fisher Road studio functioned as a salon. About once a month he curated art shows with a diverse range of fine art, furniture designs, and folk art. Girard moved in a social circle of esteemed artists, and many of his friends helped make his exhibits special by lending their art or connecting Girard to additional artists. He held shows of drawings by Saul Steinberg and put Charles Eames’s furniture on display. Girard frequently showed artists’ work that was outside their usual mode or medium: jewelry by Alexander Calder and Harry Bertoia, textiles by Henry Moore, and more than one show of Picasso lithographs. Girard also showcased the work of unknown artisans, exhibiting their folk art ceramics, weavings, and carvings. For each of his events, Girard designed a chic invitation that was unusually petite: a 2¼-inch square. He placed several typefaces on each invite, setting looping round numbers next to hyper-erect letters for the artists’ names. The tiny announcements were printed in delectable colors and looked like impossibly pretty train tickets you probably wanted to save. The schedule of shows in Girard’s Michigan office space for 1947 was as follows:
January 12–Charles Eames furniture. Lilian Swann Saarinen sculpture and ceramics. Wallace Mitchell abstract paintings. Knoll Associates contemporary furniture. Marianne Strengell woven textiles. Picasso, Rouault, and Matisse prints (sent through courtesy of the Buchholz Gallery).
February 20—A Pan-American exhibit of Peruvian rugs, llama fur rugs, large round trays, pottery bowls, and gourds.
March 16—Pictures and Things. Prints, fabrics, and toys for children and children’s rooms.
April 10—Work by James Prestini.
May 8—Jewelry by Alexander Calder, Harry Bertoia, and others.
June 8—Modern fabrics by Henry Moore (with Ascher London Ltd.).
September 17—Italian crafts in glass, textiles, marble, wood, straw, and ceramics.
November 13—Boxes and gifts from the U.S., China, Finland, India, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, and Sweden.
The kempt state of each Girard office was a result of him liking to focus on one task at a time. He could somehow do this while not losing sight of the many details in the myriad coexisting projects tucked neatly into drawers and shelves. Assistant Karl Tani said of the Santa Fe office, “It was almost like House & Garden was going to come in to photograph his studio because it was so neat. There was just one item on his desk at any one time.” Girard’s neatness was a trait that not everyone around him could mimic. This was okay with him—he was not strict; he wasn’t trying to shut life out. He didn’t, for instance, mind when his large dog, Beau, who was afraid of storms, barreled through the office looking for shelter at the first hint of bad weather, knocking over piles of things on tables and shelves.
In the Santa Fe studio, many of Girard’s precise designs were realized by Doc, a master craftsman and carpenter. Doc was very talented, willing, and clever. He was one of the most capable assistants and helped execute many creative explorations. While Girard never had a large number of people working in his studios, he made sure to have a highly capable staff and leaned into their various talents. When Herman Miller sent a New York photographer to take press photographs of Girard’s furniture line, Doc and Girard constructed a large light-suffusing tent outside the studio and arranged the furniture inside it. Herman Miller hadn’t started making rugs yet, but Girard envisioned a rug for this photograph, so he asked Doc to gather carpet remnants from local shops. Girard selected tan, brown, and black tones, which Doc cut into one-and-a-half-inch stripes and then—in the pattern Girard had devised—glued to a large piece of plywood. The result was a handsome fake that looked absolutely convincing.
Girard photographed, printed, and cut out groups of people in two scales to include in his 3D models, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, 1940s.
Girard also had an idea for this photograph to include a clock. He chose a typical desk-sized flip clock but hiked it up onto a four-foot stand to make it work proportionally on the set. To render it unique, Girard tasked Doc with creating an intricate covering; he sent him to the butcher to buy large cow bones. Doc cooked the bones down to make them pliable, then sliced them into very thin strips and flattened them precisely. The strips were sliced into one-inch squares that Doc carefully glued together, making a subtly textured bone mosaic surrounding the clock. The result was intriguing, and Girard was pleased, even though most people might not even notice it. Tani said, “You know, that’s the only time that was used, and that clock is, you know, about a quarter of an inch or so on the page [in the published photograph]. But that kind of attention to detail was absolutely incredible.”
As time went on, Girard had increasingly more to keep track of in his studios. Work life brought unavoidable accumulation, which Girard had fun with. For the physical matter, he designed delightful, elegant, humorous, and practical storage. Doc constructed many of Girard’s customized storage designs, including a set of drawers only an inch high, barely tall enough to accommodate a label (every Girard drawer had a label). Girard designed countless drawers for larger objects, too; he needed ample materials to support his unusually wide range of projects that encompassed interior design, graphics, textiles, and product and display design—performed separately and sometimes simultaneously. Girard’s resource materials included differently scaled cutouts of human beings for project mock-ups, drawn or printed examples of interesting fonts, and photographs of books on bookshelves. They also included uniquely carved doorknobs, favorite rubber stamps, multicolored note cards palindromes, paper labels, miniature food, jars of pebbles, Coptic crosses, and typed lists of words that were the same in multiple languages. These were not inconsequential items but were Girard’s artist’s tools. Alluding to his appetite for things, he once joked that he “specialized in being unspecialized.” That was not true; he was very discerning.
At each of his studios, Girard devised specific drawers and files to keep everything accessible. He also designed storage for the growing Archive of his own textile and wallpaper collections. He sometimes stored those samples in slim upright boxes and other times in thick cardboard beer boxes his son put together when he helped out at the office, placing small cuttings of each fabric on the outsides, for clarity.
The most epic storage undertaking Girard put his mind to was for his vast collection of what might be one of the most important collections of folk Art ever assembled. Girard had been amassing handmade work throughout his career, and his folk art archive came from everywhere on the globe. Girard’s assistants interacted with the large store of items at the Sante Fe office quite a lot. Lesly Carr said:
I don’t think he believed in throwing much of anything away … It’s like he had a photographic memory. He could remember specifically and describe perfectly what he wanted you to find. And he would say, “I want the Coptic cross that has this or that,” or you know, “the dent over there on it.” And you would go through the catalog system. All of the boxes were perfectly labeled, and sometimes it would take several hours because there were—using Coptic crosses as examples—hundreds of them. And so you would climb up on a ladder and pull down a box, and then you’d have to go through and unwrap every single item to try to find which one he was looking for.
In Sante Fe, where Girard’s separate workspace was on the same property as his home, his wife, Susan, installed an intercom to call him away from work and stop long enough to eat lunch. In order to keep up with the pace of his projects as well as his own innate curiosity and desire to explore ideas, his studios had to run with efficiency. Those who worked for him said it was a pleasant atmosphere, with high expectations for each person to complete their tasks in a timely manner. When Girard believed that you were capable of doing your job, he left you alone to do it. Spending time with his family was also a priority; his studio was a place of organization and productivity, but his children were always welcome if they wanted to join in on a task. Girard worked at tremendous speed at home on many afternoons—so much so that when the staff came in the next morning, they could hardly believe the progress he had made in that impossibly short amount of time. His ability to work consistently and be decisive about each project allowed a prolific amount to get done each day.
Excerpted from Alexander Girard: Let the Sun In © 2024 by Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee. Reproduced by permission of Phaidon. All rights reserved.
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