Pierre Chareau

Architect and designer, France
Entries A–F 449
The work of Pierre Chareau is emblematic of the confluence of artistic and
technological developments of high-modern architecture and design in Paris in the 1920s
and 1930s. Endowed with talent, charisma, and good fortune, Chareau became an integral
part of a group of progressive artists, designers, and their bourgeois patrons on the Left
Bank. Although Chareau was an influential furniture designer, interior decorator, and
architect of the period, his legacy hinges on his one architectural masterwork, the Maison
de Verre (1932; House of Glass).
Pierre Paul Constant Chareau began his design career at age 16 as a tracing draftsman
for the Parisian office of a British furniture and interior design firm, Waring and Gillow.
During this professional apprenticeship, Chareau also attended the École des Beaux-Arts
from 1900 to 1908. Although he never received a formal degree, he studied a wide
variety of artistic disciplines, including painting, music, and architecture, before focusing
on interior decoration. In 1904, Chareau married Dollie Dyte, a Londoner teaching
English in Paris. This union proved critical to Chareau because it was one of Dollie’s
students, Annie Bernheim, who later became Chareau’s most important patron.
At Waring and Gillow, Chareau rose to the rank of master draftsman before being
conscripted into the French army in 1914. Once he was discharged in 1918, he
established his own design firm in Paris. His first commission was to design the interiors
and furniture for the apartment of Dr. Jean Dalsace and his new wife, Annie Bernheim-
Dalsace, Dollie Chareau’s former student. The Dalsaces also introduced Chareau to their
circle of intellectual compatriots. As a result of his newfound connections, Chareau began
to exhibit his furniture and continued to do so through the 1930s. This early furniture
consisted of massive wood-framed pieces heavily influenced by the Art Deco style. By
1924 he started designing much lighter furniture using metal frames and surfaces. His
work stood at the threshold between the tradition of craft and a modern industrial
aesthetic.
By the mid-1920s, Chareau was well established within a group of designers referred
to in Paris as ens embliers , or architect/ decorators. This group consciously resisted the separate
categori-zation of architect, decorator, and furniture designer. Chareau went beyond
decorating surfaces by removing walls and traditional moldings of existing apartments to
embody new modernist ideals of spatial fluidity and the elimination of ornament. Within
the newly configured spaces, he would integrate fixed furniture pieces in conjunction
with freestanding furniture arrangements. The results were Cubist-inspired assemblages
of volume, surface, texture, and color. After a series of collaborative interior projects
done with designer Robert Mallet-Stevens and others, he received his first architectural
commission in 1926 for a clubhouse in Beauvallon, France, for Annie Dalsace’s uncle.
It is at the Maison de Verre, however, that Chareau most clearly asserts his modernist
vision. The Dalsaces commissioned Chareau in 1928 to design their home together with
the offices of Dr. Dalsace’s gynecological practice. Chareau embodied the avant-garde
spirit by using industrial materials for residential construction such as exposed steel
framing for the structure, translucent glass blocks for the enclosure, and Pirelli rubber tile
on the floor. In addition, Chareau captured the dynamism of modern life by designing a
kinetic architecture that could transform habitation of the space. For example, at the
bottom of the main staircase, perforated metal screens either prevented the doctor’s
daytime clients from ascending the stairs or swung out of the way to invite the evening
guests up to the great room on the second level. The large double-height space at the top
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 450
of the stairs became a center of Parisian intellectual activity: it doubled as a theater for
musical and literary performances while displaying the Dalsaces’s acquired treasures of
modern art.
In 1932 the Maison de Verre won Chareau wide recognition in the national and
international press: it was clear that he had created a unique, forward-looking
architecture. He was invited to join the editorial board of the new progressive
architectural journal L’Architecture d ’aujourd ’hui, a position that he maintained throughout the 1930s. Chareau’s
production and development as an architect, however, were significantly limited by the
worsening economic situation in Europe. To survive, he and his wife began to sell their
painting collection of modern masters, including Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico,
Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso. The only significant commissions that he
received in the period leading up to World War II were the renovation of the LTT
telephone company offices in 1932 and a weekend house outside Paris for his longtime
friend, dancer Djémil Anik, in 1937.
In 1940, Chareau left France for New York to avoid the ravages of war. During the
war, he kept busy by organizing exhibitions for the French Cultural Center. In 1947 his
last significant commission was a weekend house and studio for the artist Robert
Motherwell in East Hampton on Long Island. Here, Chareau adapted a military Quonset
hut for the building’s shell. A long bank of windows inserted along one edge of the large
metal barrel vault and an exposed metal frame supporting the upper level in the interior
were only a crude memory of the promise of an industrial aesthetic achieved in the
Maison de Verre just 15 years prior.
After his death in New York in 1950, Chareau remained a relatively peripheral figure
in 20th-century architecture because of his modest production of built works and the
paucity of a written record or philosophy. However, a renewed interest in Chareau’s work
was evident in the second half of the 20th century, beginning with Kenneth Frampton’s
1969 article on the Maison de Verre published in the journal Perspecta. Subsequently, Marc
Vellay, the grandson of Jean and Annie Dalsace, collaborated with Frampton on the first
comprehensive record of Chareau’s output in 1984. Symptomatic of Chareau’s marginal
status, however, is that Frampton, who has been credited with resurrecting Chareau’s
reputation, did not mention him in his sweeping study of 20th-century architecture, Modern Architecture: A Critical H is tory ,
published in 1980.