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    Women’s contribution to mid-century modern design is “not challenged as much now” says Pat Kirkham

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    Many female designers from the mid-century modern movement are more celebrated now than when they were producing work, says design historian Pat Kirkham in this interview for our mid-century modern series.

    US designer Ray Eames, French designer Charlotte Perriand and architect Lina Bo Bardi are some of the women recognised today for their contributions to the mid-century modern movement, which spanned the mid-1940s to early 1970s.
    Kirkham, a design history professor at Kingston University who has authored books on designers Charles and Ray Eames and 20th-century female designers in the US, argued that a revived interest in mid-century modernism has brought some of these women’s names to the forefront of design again.
    “There are still some architects who don’t see them of value”
    She explained that although they gained commercial success with their designs in the decades after world war two, many of the designers faced adversity in the industry.

    “There were many routes these women took to becoming what they were, and they didn’t come without sacrifices and frustrations – I think they’re very empowering,” Kirkham told Dezeen.
    “The possibility that these women were really good and did some important work is not challenged as much now, but there are still some architects who don’t see them of value, and equally, seeing areas that they hold as women’s work, like interior design, as not as valid as other areas of design.”
    Ray Eames designed furniture with her husband, Charles. Photo courtesy of the Eames OfficeAccording to Kirkham, it was common for women not to be credited for their designs in the mid-twentieth century. These included Ray Eames, who is known for the work she created with her husband Charles Eames.
    The Eameses were prominent figures in the mid-century design movement. They met in 1940 at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where Ray had joined as an abstract painter looking to expand her artistic practice and Charles was an architect on an industrial design fellowship.
    Ray and Charles married in 1941 and established the Eames Office in Los Angeles. Together, they became influential designers in architecture, furniture, graphic design and film, but Ray was often given less credit than her husband.
    Herman Miller furniture sold under Charles Eames’s name
    They designed numerous pieces for furniture brand Herman Miller, including the iconic Eames Lounge Chair in 1956.
    “Undoubtedly, a lot of stuff went out in Charles’s name,” said Kirkham, “Herman Miller furniture was sold for donkey’s years as ‘by Charles Eames’.”
    “Now, Ray seems to almost be as much a household name as Charles Eames used to be.”
    Kirkham also said that Ray, who she interviewed before the designer passed away in 1988, had talents outside of her partnership with Charles. These were often overlooked, but are now being discovered posthumously as mid-century modernism and the Eameses’ work continues to inspire.

    Mid-century modern design “embraced a more human aesthetic while remaining aggressively forward-looking”

    “You get a very different picture if you focus in from the woman’s angle,” said Kirkham. “Just by researching Ray, there is a ton of stuff nobody had bothered with.”
    “Ray’s influence was really strong with interiors – the importance of her to their aesthetic was really crucial.”
    “He was quite an arty type of architect, but he was also hugely interested in the technology,” Kirkham continued. “Ray often said that she felt that one of the things wrong with American education when she was young was women weren’t taught technology – she felt it would have been handy for her.”
    Charlotte Perriand worked with Le Corbusier for 10 years. Photo by Jacques Martin/AChP courtesy of Scheidegger & SpiessPerriand is another designer whose designs have been miscredited. Between 1927 and 1937, she collaborated with architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret on furniture designs, including the LC2 Grand Confort chair and Chaise Lounge, but as a woman, she was not given as much recognition as her male counterparts.
    After 10 years working for Le Corbusier, Perriand “stepped out of his shadow into a successful career of her own,” The New York Times said.
    Perriand continued designing into the mid-century and developed a particular interest in creating shelving. One of her most notable designs is the Bibliothèques modular storage system, produced by French architect Jean Prouvé’s eponymous atelier.
    Perriand furniture allegedly falsely credited as co-designed with Prouvé
    She created further iterations of the shelving under the title Nuage, which were produced by Galerie Steph Simon until 1970.
    Perriand’s family later became embroiled in a lengthy legal dispute over the authorship of Nuage, which they allege had been falsely credited in part to Prouvé after his death.
    Although her collaborations with male designers had, in some cases, left her overshadowed and miscredited, Kirkham believes her ties to Le Corbusier mean Perriand is now more easily discovered than other female mid-century modern designers.
    “In the European modern movement, you often have designers not getting due credit,” said Kirkham.
    “With Charlotte Perriand’s designs for Corbusier in the 1930s, she got reclaimed from history because she was working with a really famous architect.”
    Lina Bo Bardi spent most of her career in Brazil. Photo courtesy of Instituto BardiExtra attention should be focused towards discovering more about the female designers who worked in Central and South America, said Kirkham.
    She explained that people’s interest in modernism often leads them to the designs of prolific European and North American men from the movement, but this could be directed elsewhere.
    “The interest in modernism is still often what drives most of the interest in the male designers, so my sense is that there is still a tonne of women to be discovered,” she said.
    “The work from Central and South America needs much more interest, but the modernism interest comes first.”

    Lina Bo Bardi wins Venice Architecture Biennale’s Special Golden Lion award

    Bo Bardi is one of the better-known South American designers of the mid-century. Born in Italy, she moved to Brazil with her husband after a trip to Rio de Janeiro in 1946.
    Based in São Paolo, Bo Bardi became a Brazilian citizen in 1951. In the same year, she completed her first built architecture project with her own home, Glass House, and designed the iconic Bardi’s Bowl Chair.
    Kirkham named Cuban-born Clara Porset as another designer of particular interest. Porset spent time studying in Paris and the US and although she returned to Cuba, she was forced to leave the country in 1935 because of her involvement in the Cuban general strike.
    Clara Porset was the only woman to work with Mexico’s most established modernist architects. Photo by Archivo Clara Porset Dumas via Wikimedia CommonsFinding refuge in Mexico, the country’s culture and vernacular furniture influenced many of her designs, including the wood and woven wicker Butaque chair.
    The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) described Porset as a “design trailblazer” and claimed she was the only woman known to have worked with the most high-profile Mexican modernist architects, including Luis Barragán, Max Cetto, Juan Sordo Madaleno and Mario Pani.
    “New names are being uncovered every day”
    Kirkham believes it is important to correct the errors of the past that allowed some women’s mid-century modern designs to be overlooked.
    With widespread interest in mid-century modernism today, she explained that some people are revisiting old documents and discovering more female designers from the movement.
    “One of the interesting things is that mid-century modern was not popular in the 1980s,” said Kirkham. “There is a huge revival of interest at the moment.”
    “It’s an important legacy, and new names are being uncovered every day,” she continued. “They’re very empowering, and I think they’re very empowering among young design students.”
    The top photo of Kirkham is by Casey Kelbaugh courtesy of the Bard Graduate Center.
    Illustration by Jack BedfordMid-century modern
    This article is part of Dezeen’s mid-century modern design series, which looks at the enduring presence of mid-century modern design, profiles its most iconic architects and designers, and explores how the style is developing in the 21st century.
    This series was created in partnership with Made – a UK furniture retailer that aims to bring aspirational design at affordable prices, with a goal to make every home as original as the people inside it. Elevate the everyday with collections that are made to last, available to shop now at made.com.

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      Interior designer Iris Apfel dies aged 102

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      American interior designer, fashion influencer and “geriatric starlet” Iris Apfel has passed away at the age of 102.

      The death of the multidisciplinary creative, who was recognised for her flamboyant personal style, was announced on her Instagram account with an image of Apfel in her trademark oversized glasses.
      Apfel, who worked in the interiors and fashion industries throughout her career, shot to international fame in her 80s and 90s after New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited a show of her eclectic clothes and accessories in 2005.
      Titled Rara Avis: Selections From the Iris Apfel Collection, it was the first time the museum had dedicated an exhibition to someone’s wardrobe.
      Born Iris Barrel in 1921 in Queens, Apfel studied art history at New York University and art at the University of Wisconsin.

      After graduating, she worked for fashion magazine Women’s Wear Daily before interning for interior designer Elinor Johnson.
      Together with her late husband Carl Apfel, whom she married in 1948, she set up the brand Old World Weavers – a company that specialised in striking textiles informed by things found on the Apfels’ travels.
      Under Old World Weavers, the duo completed high-profile projects such as restoring the White House interiors for nine presidents including Harry Truman and Bill Clinton.

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      The designer became a visiting lecturer at the University of Texas in 2011, where she taught fashion students about textiles and crafts.
      In later life, Apfel became a staple of the fashion industry.  In 2018, toy manufacturer Mattel created a Barbie doll in the designer’s image, although it was not for sale. At the age of 97, she signed a modelling contract with IMG Models.
      Apfel playfully called herself a “geriatric starlet” and described the prospect of retirement as “a fate worse than death” shortly after turning 100.
      Following the news of her passing, designers around the world paid tribute to Apfel’s legacy. “Iris Apfel has become a world-famous fashion icon because of her incredible talent not only as an artist but as an influencer,” said fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger.
      The photography is by Ron Adar courtesy of Shutterstock.

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      in Rooms

      “Homes manifest mechanisms of power via relationships of gender, class and age”

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      The way our homes are designed is intrinsically linked to domestic power struggles, write Charles Holland and Margaret Cubbage.

      What is the relationship between architecture and power? How can buildings – inert piles of stone and steel, glass and concrete – exert power over us?
      The obvious place to look might be examples that clearly aim to control or confine us, such as prisons. Alternatively, power may be found in buildings for political institutions or corporate HQs. There is, however a subtler realm in which architecture exerts control over our lives. That place is one that almost all of us experience: the ordinary domestic spaces that we inhabit every day.
      Our homes shape our lives and inform the dynamics of our social relations
      What can such spaces say about power? Surely the rooms in which we live, eat and sleep are an escape from the hierarchies of the workplace or our increasingly CCTV-controlled public spaces? The home is associated with being a place of refuge but also somewhere to connect, or disconnect from the outside world.

      As innocent as they may appear, our homes shape our lives and inform the dynamics of our social relations. They manifest mechanisms of power via relationships of gender, class and age. Why do we separate functions into separate rooms? Why are some spaces more private than others? These questions are of course culturally specific. Not all societies organise their houses in the same way. And what might seem like an ordinary convention to some might be an unimaginable luxury to others.
      Radical Rooms, an exhibition currently running at the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) Architecture Gallery, explores this knotty subject, examining the micro-territories of our homes. It begins with the plan – the most basic of architectural drawings – and examines the way that the arrangement of rooms in our houses reflects the way that individuals, couples, groups and families organise themselves.

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      The exhibition focuses on a history of housing in the UK, mining the RIBA Collection of drawings to find examples where traditional power relations have been subverted and where new ways of living have emerged as a result.
      It also looks at the characters behind the buildings, revealing figures within architectural history that have not always been acknowledged or accurately documented.
      Gender relations are inscribed in the plans of our houses. This is a question of both how spaces are organised – think of traditional male preserves such as the study or the historic association of women with kitchens – and of who owns and authors them. The history of famous houses is often also a history of the famous men who designed them, or the men that wrote about them.
      Houses are innately collaborative ventures
      Radical Rooms shifts that focus instead onto houses that were designed, commissioned or curated (and sometimes all three) by women. In doing so it draws on the work of important historians including Lynne Walker, Elizabeth Darling and others.
      Houses are innately collaborative ventures. We share them and they are extended and added to over time. The history of architecture though is largely a history of individuals, of single authors and buildings preserved as static objects. Prior to the development of discrete roles for architects, clients and builders however, authorship was less clear. This ambiguity might well have allowed (admittedly wealthy) women who were otherwise formally disempowered from designing buildings to exert a powerful influence on the development of architecture.
      Take A La Ronde, an eccentric, sixteen-sided house built on the Devon coast in the late 18th century. The house was built for two female cousins, Jane and Mary Parminter, but its authorship has been the subject of much debate. Keen to find a male architect, historians have traditionally plumped for John Lowder, the son of a relative who would have been just 17 when the house was completed. It is more likely that the house was a collaboration between Lowder and the cousins, who had just returned from a Grand Tour of Europe’s classical architecture.
      Hopkins House uses Venetian blinds to distinguish between spaces for living and work. Photo courtesy of the Historic England ArchiveThe degree to which Jane and Mary Parminter designed the house might be unclear, but their unique way of occupying it wasn’t. Arranged in plan like a clock face, the cousins moved around the house during the day, following the path of the sun. When they died they stipulated that it be left only to unmarried women, an explicit rejection of the patriarchal system of male inheritance. A man eventually did come to live in the house and, revealingly, he was responsible for drastic changes to both its layout and appearance.
      The design of Hardwick Hall, an Elizabethan mansion in Derbyshire, is generally ascribed to Robert Smythson. The house was commissioned though by Bess of Hardwick, an immensely wealthy 16th-century aristocrat. Her involvement in the design of her house, the fourth that she commissioned, extended well beyond the role of client as it is currently conceived. Principles of the house’s layout, its material choices and decorative scheme reflect Bess of Hardwick’s intense involvement.
      Prejudices around authorship have continued into the current era. Take Team 4, a well-known but short-lived collaborative practice from the 1960s that consisted of three women and two men. The subsequent fame of the men – Richard Rogers and Norman Foster – has tended to eclipse the role of the women – Wendy Cheesman, Su Brumwell and Georgie Wolton.
      Field House pursued an interest in dissolving boundaries
      Wolton was the most short-lived member and the only fully qualified architect of the group at the time. She subsequently designed Field House, a radical, steel-framed, open-plan residence that has remained somewhat below the radar of architectural history ever since.
      Field House pursued an interest in dissolving boundaries within the home as well within the discipline of architecture. Its interior was conceived largely as a single, fluid space with minimal separation. The exterior walls were entirely made of glass so that the interior merged with the external landscape. Intriguingly, the house is currently described as dismantled rather than demolished, reflecting an interest in adaptability and moveability on the part of its designer.
      This blurring of uses and of the inside and outside also manifests itself in the Hopkins House in north London, designed in the mid-1970s by Patty and Michael Hopkins. Originally used as their office as well as their home, the house has no corridors and minimal separation of functions. The combination of its delicate steel structure and Venetian blinds helps to subtly delineate the different zones of family and work-life within the home.

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      Some 50 years before, in 1926, Eileen Gray designed an apartment in Paris that consisted solely of moving screens and metallic curtains. The remarkably innovative interior, designed for her sometime lover Jean Badovici, also rejected the discrete division of domestic space into separate functions in favour of a dynamic internal landscape that could be re-made every day.
      Radical Rooms looks not only at power within the plan but at who gets to design those plans. The exhibition provides a platform for the exposure of (mainly) overlooked women designers and architects, revisiting the ways in which women influenced design prior to formalised architectural education. It deconstructs the domestic plan and exposes it as something intimately bound up with the power structures in which we live.
      Radical Rooms: Power of the Plan is free to visit and will run throughout July and between 5-24 September at the 66 Portland Place in London. For more information, see Dezeen Events Guide.
      Charles Holland is a professor at the University of Brighton, the principal of Charles Holland Architects and a former director of London studio FAT. Margaret Cubbage has been curating design and architecture exhibitions for 15 years.
      The top photo is by Gareth Gardner, courtesy of the RIBA.

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