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Down to a Minimum - Herman Miller

Ward BennettDesignerDesign history

作者：Herman Miller 来源：Herman Miller

2018-08-08 10:20:50 3594 0 0

NO.:154

When Ward Bennett died in 2003 at the age of 85, the New York Times described him as “a New York designer of furniture, houses and much more, whose clean lines and exquisite materials quietly defined an era.” During a career that spanned over five decades, Bennett designed everything from jewelry and flatware, to chairs and houses. A master of functional simplicity, his fundamental philosophy was that “in life and design, try to pull it all down to a minimum.” Yet a decade after his death, there are no monographs of his work, and though acclaimed as a great American designer—at the height of his career in the 1980s, he received a medal from the American Institute of Architects, and he graced the covers of MetroPOLIS and Interiors magazines—he never became a household name.

Bennett was born in 1917 and grew up in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. His father was an actor-vaudeville performer, his mother a tightrope walker, and the family zigzagged across the country, from Saratoga and Miami to Maryland and California. “There was no culture in the home at all,” Bennett recalled, in an early interview. “I mean vaudeville was about it. When I was growing up, I only remember once or twice seeing my father perform. When talkies came in he was out of work and he never made it, so we lived rather raggedly and moved around a lot….There were some family problems and it was either he or I got out.”

Bennett loved working with flexible, linear materials such as reed—“you get a lovely sweep from reed”—to achieve the graceful lines that are characteristic of his furniture. (His classic 1964 Landmark chair, above, is once again available with a cane back. Photo by François Dischinger.

After leaving home at 13, Bennett found a job as a delivery boy in New York’s ladies’ silk lingerie industry, and began taking a few night classes in fashion sketching, eventually landing a job sketching for the fashion designer Jo Copeland, making 75 dollars a week. At 14, he was working at Saks Fifth Avenue making sketches for bridal gowns, and two years later, he was riding the Queen Mary to France as an assistant for a firm called Joe and Junior (they specialized in styles for teenagers) to sketch the couture collections in Paris. “I was so frightened that I fell down the steps of the first-class dining room right into the Crêpes Suzettes,” he said. “I was wearing my first dinner jacket—really, it was one I had borrowed from a waiter.”

After a stint in the Army during World War Two, he returned to New York, and got a job window dressing and designing furs for Hattie Carnegie, a well-known fashion designer whose clients included Joan Crawford and the Duchess of Windsor. He studied by night with the abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann—“He’d set up a still life, and we would all draw it in black and white charcoal,” said Bennett. “This was merely to explore the tensions within that space. What pushed forward, what came toward you. Basically his big thought, his love, his poetry, was space; what was happening in space. And I’ve been dealing with that ever since.”

He returned to Paris on the G.I. Bill to study sculpture briefly with Ossip Zadkine. (Bennett didn’t like his work at all: “It was too intellectual.”) There, he met one of his heroes, the Parisian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who made a lasting impression. “His studio was like heaven; it was a dream,” said Bennett. “Brancusi had a kind of honesty and integrity, a genius, that made me decide against becoming a sculptor at that moment.” He also became acquainted with the architect, painter, and theorist Le Corbusier, and began to look seriously at modern architecture and its relationship to interiors and decoration.

In 1946, Bennett traveled to Mexico and spent a year with the artist Lydia Modi, designing modernist jewelry that was later exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. Through his friendship with the designer Benjamin Baldwin, he worked on the interiors of Terrace Plaza Hotel in CinCinnati—an important early International Style modern hotel by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which was so advanced in its design, aesthetics, and technology that it was jokingly called “the pushbutton palace.” The hotel had the world’s first “sky lobby,” in addition to stunning interiors, which featured modern art including an Alexander Calder mobile and murals by Saul Steinberg and Joan Miró. (Bennett’s light sconces, installed in the Gourmet Lounge, were hand-forged, hand-cut brass disks that had uncomplicated cutouts that recalled Chinese art).

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