Alexander Girard

Background

Alexander Girard (1907-1993) was an architect, interior designer, furniture designer, industrial designer and textile designer. Herman Miller says he was born in New York City and raised in Florence, and educated in Europe as an architect; Wikipedia adds that he studied in London and at the Royal School of Architecture in Rome and opened a studio in New York in 1932, moving it to Detroit in 1937. He began practising architecture and interior design in the late 1920s.

Signature Style

In 1952 Girard became director of design for Herman Miller's textile division, at a time when fabrics for offices tended to be utilitarian and pattern-less. With primary colours, concise geometric patterns and a touch of humour he brought joy and spontaneity to his designs, and during his tenure he created more than 300 textile designs in many colourways, together with wallpapers, prints, furniture and objects. Herman Miller says his sometimes iconoclastic fabrics were inspired by a love of international folk art.

Notable Works

The interior and graphics of the La Fonda del Sol restaurant in New York, which Herman Miller dates to 1959 and Wikipedia to 1960; the Braniff International Airways redesign of the mid 1960s, for which Herman Miller counts 17,543 items from logo to lounge furniture; the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, designed with Eero Saarinen, whose conversation pit he furnished with textiles; and the Girard Flower Table, a brass flower-shaped occasional table from the Miller House that Herman Miller now makes in powder-coated steel.

Legacy

Girard and his wife Susan assembled a folk art collection that Herman Miller puts at roughly 106,000 pieces. Wikipedia says they set up the Girard Foundation in 1962 and that Girard gave the collection to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe in 1978, where the Girard Wing houses an exhibition he designed. He died in Santa Fe on 31 December 1993.