Pierre Chareau: Designer and Architect (Big Art Series)

The French designer/architect is something of enigma. Beyond his work, he left little writing that tells of his personality or even his design beliefs. La Maison de Verre (Glass House), Chareau's most celebrated work, does little to dispel the mystery of its creator. Completed in 1932, the house is clearly born of his modernist grounding, but its amalgamation of styles--Moorish, Andalusian, Japanese, even nautical--is a distinct departure from the movement & even from his main body of work. Like his contemporaries Mies Van Der Rohe & F L Wright, it is believed that Chareau bypassed a traditional education and instead learned his metier on the job, working for a noted British design firm. He first exhibited at the 1919 Paris Salon d'Automne. From then on he became a fixture in the Parisian salon circuit, forming close associations with other artists & writers such as Raoul Dufy & Max Jacob, whose surreal sensibility may have informed some of Chareau's pieces.

Chareau's work was aggressively innovative and distinctly modern: in 1939 he turned packing containers into furniture for the French government. He boldly worked with materials out of context-turning stone into a lampshade-and built on the art nouveau tradition of combining disparate materials such as metal, wood, and glass into a desk or chair. Mobility & transparency are the leitmotifs of his work. To contemporary readers screens, built-in furniture, and moving walls of his interiors look very familiar, but at the time, it verged on revolutionary.

With its usual concern for quality, Taschen has created a high-quality overview of Chareau's work. The clean, informative photos of individual pieces of furniture, interior tableaux, and exterior shots allow readers to carefully investigate the work. And extensive coverage of the glass house, including blueprints and watercolor drawings, is an exciting inclusion. --Jordana Moskowitz