October 19, 2010
Designing with Folk Art
The John Deere mural by Alexander Girard photo by: Ezra Stoller/ESTO
If the first John Deere were to walk in at this moment, I believe
he would recognize this building as his own. The honest directness
and the imagination that inspired him to throw aside tradition and
use what in his day was an extreme material — (imagine using
steel for a plow!) — is echoed throughout this building, inside and
outside, from top to bottom — even in the material from which it
has been built.[1]
Henry Dreyfuss
At the June 1964 opening of the Deere & Co. Administrative Center, the new headquarters (in Moline, Illinois) of America’s premier manufacturer of farm equipment, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss offered a dual tribute to its architect, the late Eero Saarinen and to the company’s founder. Outside the auditorium where Dreyfuss spoke, a Cor-Ten steel pavilion displayed the “New Generation of Power,” the line of six-cylinder tractors his firm designed while Saarinen developed the architecture of the building. Inside Saarinen’s structure (Deere’s present) and alongside Dreyfuss’s machines (Deere’s future), was a representation of Deere’s past: the 3-by-8-by-180-foot long multi-media timeline of biographical, industrial and agricultural artifacts accumulated and arranged by artist, designer and collector Alexander Girard. Outside, visible through the sticks of steel, were grassy hills and a pair of ponds sculpted by landscape architects Sasaki, Walker & Associates — an idealized prairie for those machines to clear and cultivate.[2] Company chairman William A. Hewitt created an environment that spurred the architects and designers — all leaders in their fields and experts in corporate-image making — to specifically midwestern, homespun technical and representational innovation.[3] Deere’s engineers inspired Dreyfuss, who suggested Saarinen, whose building — laden with firsts, like the architectural use of mirror glass and Cor-Ten steel — sliced Sasaki’s rugged Illinois landscape as cleanly as John Deere’s revolutionary plow. While the three men’s work was all contemporary, it referenced the rural origins of the site and the company. It was Girard, in creating the mural permanently installed in the building’s display pavilion, who made the link between modern design and the folk past explicit by creating a structure and narrative for the outmoded, traditional and archival objects of Midwestern expansion.
The Hallmark mural by Alexander Girard. Photo by Kristi Ernsting
The Hallmark mural by Alexander Girard. Photo by Kristi Ernsting
Even private offices of the Company’s executives were strippedof fondly treasured items. I remember the good-natured resignationwith which one factory manager parted with an old photograph thatthe Director of public relations spotted on his wall when we stoppedin to talk with him one day in December 1963.[8]
Textiles & Objects shop in Manhattan display Marilyn Neuhart’s embroidered dolls, photo by: Todd Webb, courtesy of maximodesign.com
Textiles & Objects shop in Manhattan designed by Alexander Girard, photo by: Todd Webb, courtesy of maximodesign.com
What is most impressive about Girard’s mural is its material reality. The objects do speak for themselves. An accompanying catalog was to identify certain items, or groups of items, and to put them in historical context, but only a pedant would really require this. There is a historical sweep from left to right, from 1837, the year Deere invented the steel plow, to 1918, the year Deere moved to mass tractor production. Top to bottom, one sees Deere in context, the mundane and the domestic, the historic and the farm, for each decade. The multiple themes and levels of objects float past one another on pegs that stick out from the wall, so that Girard can layer two-and three-dimensional items without hiding any part of an artifact. In her joint biography, Pat Kirkham credits Charles and Ray Eames with inventing the “history wall” as a means of contextualizing a historical subject with objects, but the Eameses’ first three-dimensional mural, A Computer Perspective, was installed at IBM’s Madison Avenue gallery space in 1971.[13] She notes that the couple was influenced by Girard, connected to them via their time in the Detroit suburbs and their designs for Herman Miller. The three also worked together on the 1955 exhibition Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India at the Museum of Modern Art. Girard designed the show, while the Eameses helped arrange the objects and created a short film of the result.[14] Later, Girard would help Ray Eames find appropriate items for the couple’s 1965 show on Jawaharlal Nehru. All three were expanding upon ideas about display getting off the wall, pioneered by Herbert Bayer at the Bauhaus and deployed by Bayer at a series of shows at the MoMA in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The most obvious parallel was Bayer’s use of a wider range of vision than had been typically seen in exhibition design: rather than a line of images at eye level, he deployed objects and artwork across the entire visual/vertical plane.[15] George Nelson’s 1953 book Display showed Bayer’s historical work, as well as a number of very similar systems of poles and scrims and shelves simultaneously developed by himself, the Knoll Planning Unit, Alvin Lustig, and others. He reserved special praise for Girard’s 1953 Good Design exhibit at MoMA:
This show is one with no backgrounds: all walls and the ceilinghave been painted black, so that they disappear; within the blackenvelope the exhibits appear, set on, against, into glowingsurfaces of light.[18]
Detail of the John Deere mural by Alexander Girard by: Ezra Stoller/ESTO
A time when imagination and invention sprouted like new corn under a spring rain, exploding from the chrysalis for the old way into a new…To preserve fragments of this time—a collection of souvenirs — …A composite image that perhaps will evoke a mood — inspiring even though nostalgic — better communicated through the eyes than spoken or written.[19]
The Modern Design/Folk Arts opened October 15, 2010 at the State University, New Mexico and runs through December 17, 2010. More info here.
Notes
1. “Opening of the Deere & Company Administrative Center,” pamphlet, 1964. Deere & Co. Archives.
2. For more on Saarinen, see Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht, eds. Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006 and Jayne Merkel, Eero Saarinen. New York: Phaidon, 2005. For Dreyfuss, Russell Flinchum. Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit. New York: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution; Rizzoli, 1997. For Sasaki, Peter Walker and Melanie Simo, Invisible Gardens: The Search for Modernism in the American Landscape, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994 and Louise A. Mozingo. “Campus, Estate and Park: Lawn Culture Comes to the Corporation,” in Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J.B. Jackson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
3. William A. Hewitt, “The Genesis of a Great Building — and of an Unusual Friendship,” AIA Journal 66:8 (August 1977): 36-37, 56.
4. On the Miller House, see Christopher Monkhouse, “The Miller House: A Private Residence in the Public Realm,” in Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future.
5. William A. Hewitt, interviewed by Wesley R. Janz, April 23, 1992. Wesley R. Janz Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. These textiles are no longer extant. Employees used the stairwells as smoking areas, and for vertical circulation from the ground-level cafeteria, so the fabrics were damaged by smoke and spills.
6. “Greeting Cards Were Never Like This: Alexander Girard’s Apartment for Hallmark,” Interiors (November 1962): 100-105.
7. Hewitt to Alexander Girard, letter, June 6, 1963. Deere & Co. Archives.
8. John Kouwenhoven, Reflections of an Era (Moline, Ill: Deere & Co., 1964), 7.
9. Series 53374, Folder C80008. Deere & Co. Archives.
10. “Casual Vices for Girard’s House,” Interiors (January 1953): 76-77.
11. Sharon Lee Ryder. “A Life in the Process of Design,” Progressive Architecture 57:12 (December 1976): 60–67.<
12. “Rural Americana,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat Sunday Magazine, November 1, 1964. Copy, Deere & Co. Archives.
13. Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, [1995] 1996), 266.
14. Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames, 279.
15. George Nelson, ed., Display (New York: Whitney Publications, [1953] 1956), 108-119; Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames, 268.
16. Nelson, Display, 142.
17. See “Display Case for Fabrics,” Industrial Design (July 1961): 66-67 and “Girard’s air conditioned bazaar,” Interiors (July 1961): 78-85.
18. Sarah Williams, “Meet the Neuharts,” The Scout, August 8, 2008: http://thescoutmag.com/features/design/37/meet_the_neuharts
19. Leslie A. Pina. Alexander Girard designs for Herman Miller. Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1998.
20. Girard, quoted in Kouwenhoven, Reflections of an Era, 1. “Rural Mural for a Tractor Maker,” Fortune (December 1964): 144-147.
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Observed
By Alexandra Lange