Bøger af Patrick Seguin

Compact and fluid, robust and delicate, Royère's chairs, lamps, chandeliers, sofas and desks exude a sensuous confidence, suggesting both comfort and alertnessIn 1931, aged 29, Jean Royère (1902-1981) resigned from a comfortable position in the import-export trade in order to set up business as an interior designer. He learnt his new trade in the cabinetmaking workshops of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris. In 1934, he designed the new layout of the Brasserie Carlton on the Champs Elysées and found immediate success, embarking upon an international career that was to endure for nearly half a century. Royère tackled all kinds of decoration work and opened branches in the Near East and Latin America; among his patrons were King Farouk, King Hussein of Jordan and the Shah of Iran, who entrusted him with the interior design of their palaces. The Royère style is a wonderful amalgam of bright, cheery colors, subtly organic forms and precious materials. Compact and fluid, robust and delicate, Royère's chairs, lamps, chandeliers, sofas and desks exude a sensuous confidence, suggesting both comfort and alertness. This superbly produced, linen-bound, two-volume boxed monograph would have made Royère proud. The first volume explores the designer's work across four themes inspired by his creations: "The Vegetal Realm," "The Animal World," The Imaginative Realm" and "Line and Design." In addition to prefaces by Jacques Lacoste and Patrick Seguin, this volume contains interviews with Lorenz Baümer, Béatrice Salmon, and Christian Lacroix--by art historian and journalist Françoise Claire Prodhon--and a chapter looking back to the Jean Royère exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 2008. The second volume opens with a 1963 interview with Royère by Pascal Renous, and then presents the "Jean Royère Repertoire" 380 items of furniture and other creations accompanied by detailed references and illustrations of variants. The volume is rounded off by a sketchbook offering 156 hitherto unpublished Royère drawings. This authoritative and sumptuous publication is the last word on this midcentury master.

Jean Prouvé's Ferembal House was built in Nancy, France, in 1948, as the office for a can factory. Composed of five axial frames clad with wooden panels, set on a tall masonry base and occupying less than 600 square feet in a single raised story, this prefabricated structure was a classic example of Prouvé's advocacy of mobile architecture. Thirty years later, however, the company went out of business and the factory was demolished. Fortunately a Nancy resident had the wherewithal to dismantle and preserve Prouvé's innovative building, putting it into storage. In 1991, the well-known Parisian design gallerist Patrick Seguin traveled to Nancy to locate the Ferembal House. Seguin spent the next ten years raising the funds to renovate it, working in tandem with Prouvé experts, and in 2007 invited his longstanding friend, the architect Jean Nouvel, to undertake a creative adaptation of the House. Drawing on contemporary technical resources, Nouvel brilliantly extended and systematized its fundamental modularity with stackable Ductal blocks and a floor of removable slabs. The results were exhibited in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, in 2010. This comprehensive account of Prouvé's posthumous collaboration with Nouvel recounts the tale of the Ferembal House with archival photographs and plans of the original structure and a detailed account of Nouvel's inspired interventions.