Pierre Chareau,
Floor lamp in cement grit, with four alabaster shades.
Acknowledged for his interior arrangements ever since the 1930′s, Pierre Chareau, French designer and architect, left his mark on the aesthetic spirit of the Grand Hôtel de Tours. Born in Bordeaux on August 4th 1884, he’s been one of the forerunners of modern architecture along with Le Corbusier. Though he had no architect or designer education, he started his career by working for the British furniture firm Waring and Gillow, before setting up is own business in 1919. He owes is success to his architectural style, directly inspired from the Cubist research, and to the use of new materials such as glass and steel, which favored opening and lighting. He was keen on art and collected Picasso’s and Mondrian’s works. He himself expressed his own artistic knowledge through the lamps he designed. In 1925, he earned the Legion of Honor for his taking part in the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, where he showed a bookcase-desk intended for an embassy, which is now exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. Besides his creations, he’s well known for being a co-founder of the International Congress of Architecture, the Union of Modern Artists and the editorial committee of Architecture (french review). He’s also famous for designing doctor Dalsace’s Glass House in Paris in 1930. Nine years later, the Second World War drove him to go settle in the United States. He didn’t come back at the end of the conflict. He passed away in New-York on August 24th 1950, leaving behind him the picture of a talented and educated man, an artist gifted with great sensibility and filled with a certain modernity and avant-gardism.
