DESIGN HERO: Alexander Girard

THE WORK OF MID-CENTURY design hero, Alexander Girard (1907-1993), is getting harder and harder to ignore. The latest Girard re-edition is a set of new trays for Vitra, the company that has been working on reissuing designs from Girard’s archives since inheriting them upon his death. But then again, why would you want to ignore it?

With a folky take on modern, Girard was well before his time. A contemporary of Mies van der Rohe and the Eames, who when his friends were pioneering Modern furniture design and architecture in California, moved from Michigan to New Mexico to focus on a wholly new type of design.

Girard was into loopy-loo, vital colour and ethnic pattern and themes - such as the Mother & Child motif seen on the Vitra tray above, and the Madonna Plyprint, pictured right - before it was considered acceptable to indulge in such things, and on his death he left over 100,000 folk objects to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. It was Girard who coloured much of Charles Eames’ work, becoming Herman Miller’s textiles director in the 50s under creative director George Nelson.

All but forgotten for a number of decades, Girard is back in the spotlight thanks partly to Eckart Maise, the enthusiastic director of interiors at Vitra - who says that going through Girard’s archives was like “a discovery: his work is immensely rich and vibrant.” The first Girard-Vitra reissue was a collection of hand-painted wooden folk ‘Dolls’ inspired by Girard’s own hand-made personal collection created for his own home. The three Vitra tray designs, meanwhile, including Eden below, £44 from The Lollipop Shoppe, all showcase Girard’s way with both figurative ethnic themes and pure colour.

Says Eckart Maise, the appeal of folksy modern design such as Girard’s today is that we all want a story and a bit of humanity behind our design objects:  ”People want to know which cow their milk comes from - it’s the same with design.”

Girard himself put it quite well when, in describing his work, he coined the term ‘aesthetic functionalism.’ We’ve had enough of pure ‘form follows function’. We are not simply machines that sleep, eat, and drink, he said. We see, touch, and remember - activities that “are of far greater importance and in far greater need of consideration than our purely practical functions in life.”

*Girard’s initial six prints on Ply - manufactured by Columbia Forest Products, are available from www.utilitydesign.co.uk or www.scp.co.uk. There are also a number of new designs for Autumn 2009 - including the Hand with Flower print above. For further details and international stockists see Columbia Forest Products