Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 - 1928)

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in Glasgow in 1868 and died in London on 10th December 1928. His personality is one of those that characterize the period immediately preceding the Modern Movement.
His name is mainly connected with the design for the Glasgow School of Art: he was the animator and most authoritative exponent of the group known as the “Glasgow School” and he distinguished himself principally because he recovered the most authentic values of the Scottish idiom and of neo-Gothic taste.
The group, also named “the School of Ghosts”, became known throughout Europe – in Liege in 1895, London in 1896, Vienna in 1900, Turin in 1902, Moscow in 1903, Budapest etc.Besides the School of Art, the most interesting works are undoubtedly: the “Windyhill” house at Kilmacolm (1900), the “Hill House” at Helensburgh (1902-3), the arrangement of the Derngate house, Northampton (1916-20), and the decorative work in Miss Cranston’s Tea-Rooms in Glasgow. Among the furnishings of his decorative interiors, it is above all the chair – an object of special attention in the “Cassina I Maestri” collection – which represents the focal point for coordinated spatial action.
Within it, the controlling force of the composition is always resolved, sometimes articulated in fluent and delicate forms, at other times in severely geometric forms.

Charlotte Perriand (1903 - 1999)

Charlotte Perriand full membership of that avant-garde cultural movement which, from the first decades of the twentieth century, brought about a profound change in aesthetic values and gave birth to a truly modern sensitivity towards everyday life. In this context, her specific contribution focuses on interior composition, conceived as creating a new way of living, still today at the heart of contemporary lifestyle.

In the sphere of twentieth century furnishing history, the advent of modernity made possible the entrepreneurial audacity of this true reformer of interior design. At the beginning of her professional career she was acclaimed by critics for her Bar under the roof, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1927 and constructed entirely in nickel-plated copper and anodized aluminium. In the same year, when she was just twenty-four years old, she began a decade-long collaboration with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, at the famous design studios at 35, rue de Sèvres in Paris.

Eckart Muthesius (1904 – 1989)

After studying architecture in Berlin and London, Muthesius started working for the architectural firm James & Yerbury before joining Sir Raymond Unwin. He worked also with his father, Hermann Muthesius, founder of the “Deutscher Werkbund”. In 1929 Eckart Muthesius met Prince Yeshwant Rao Holkar Bahadur in Oxford, who later became Maharadscha of Indore. The Maharadscha asked him to design his palace “Manik Bagh”, which means “Garden of Rubies”. Within four years this palace became a masterpiece of Art Décoratif. Palace furniture and lamps were designed by Eckart Muthesius. He integrated those with furniture by Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier, Ruhlmann, Louis Sognot, Charlotte Alix, and carpets by Ivan da Silva-Bruhns. Eckart Muthesius became the official consulting architect for the Board of Planning and Restoration for the State of Indore in 1936 – 1939. When the WorId War II started he had to leave India and returned to Berlin to work as architect. Today the “Manik Bagh" palace is used as the Ministry of Finance headquarter. The interior was auctioned by Sotheby Parke Barnet at Sporting Hiver in Monte Carlo in 1980 – homage to Eckart Muthesius.

Eileen Gray (1878 – 1976)

This Irish artist was one of the pioneers who created what we now call modern design during the 1920s and 1930s.The lone woman in this pioneering Valhalla, her name is pronounced in the same breath as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. Her tubular steel furniture was revolutionary in its day, and is now accepted as classic. In the second stage of her creative career, Eileen Gray switched to architecture and continued producing masterpieces. She was an artist of epoch-making significance. Her career culminated in 1972 with her appointment by the Royal Society of Art in London, as Royal Designer to Industry. And her legendary Adjustable Table E 1027 has been added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1978.

Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885 - 1940)

Born in Stockholm Erik Gunnar Asplund plays a central role in the development of Scandinavian architecture and design of twentieth century.

His work has influenced architects and designers such as Alvar Aalto, Erik Bryggman, Arne Jacobsen, Jørn Utzon.

He graduated in 1909 and journeyed in Europe and USA.

The works of years 1911 - 1930 are permeated by neo-classical language, the so called “modern classicism”, based upon a free integration between classic and vernacular themes. 1930 is the year of the Stockholm Exhibition, the year of his transition from a highly personal, free and eclectic experience to the Modern Movement, personally interpreted.

Franco Albini (1905 - 1977)

He was a major figure in the Rationalist Movement, excelling in architectural, furniture, industrial and museum design.
After receiving a degree in architecture from the Politecnico di Milano in 1929, he worked with the Ponti and Lancia design studios. His work for the magazine Casabella also played a key part in his development, marking his conversion to the Rationalist Movement and his becoming its spokesman on the Italian cultural scene.
When he set up his own practice in Milan in 1931, he took on the challenge of workers’ housing and continued in this vein after the war, thanks to the opportunities offered by the reconstruction projects he worked on with Franca Helg from 1952.
During the 1940’s, Albini expanded his collaboration with Cassina, which started with chair designs that paved the way for his signature style. He also pursued his furniture designs with other firms, such as Poggi.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 - 1959)

Wright was born on June 8th, 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin, USA.

Before his birth, his mother was determined that the child she was carrying would become the greatest architect of all time. A teacher herself, she discovered the Froebel system of education, known as the “kindergarten gifts”, according to which a child was taught to draw using basic geometric shapes and forms.

His father was a preacher and musician and taught his son to listen to music as “an edifice of sound”. At the age of twenty he ran away from home and travelled to Chicago in pursuit of architecture, where he discovered the work of Adler and Sullivan, applied for a job, and worked directly under Louis Sullivan for nearly seven years. In 1893 he established his own practice. His work in and around Chicago from 1893 to 1909 heralded a new concept in architecture. The “Larkin Building” and “Unity Temple” saw innovations in design and engineering, made possible by the technology and materials of the twentieth century.

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (1888 - 1964)

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, born in Utrecht on 24 June 1888, seems possessed of two personalities, each so distinct that one might take his work to be that of more than one artist. The first personality is that seen in the craftsman cabinet-maker working in a primordial idiom, re-inventing chairs and other furniture as if no one had ever built them before him and following a structural code all of his own; the second is that of the architect working with elegant formulas, determined to drive home the rationalist and neoplastic message in the context of European architecture. The two activities alternate, overlap, and fuse in a perfect osmosis unfolding then into a logical sequence. In 1918 Rietveld joined the “De Stijl” movement which had sprung up around the review of that name founded the year before by Theo van Doesburg. The group assimilated and translated into ideology certain laws on the dynamic breakdown of compositions (carrying them to an extreme) that had already been expressed in painting by the cubists: the “De Stijl” artists also carefully studied the architectonic lesson taught by the great Frank Lloyd Wright, whose influence was widely felt in Europe at that time.

Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was born at La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Swiss Jura, in 1887; he died in France, at Cap Martin, on the French Côte d’Azur, in 1965.

Early in his career his work met with some resistance owing to its alleged «revolutionary» nature and the radical look it acquired from its «purist» experiments; in time , however, it won the recognition it deserved and it is still widely admired. His message is still being assimilated by an ever increasing number of people in the profession, but his far-out avant-garde attitudes should be interpreted with due consideration for the use of rational systems in his planning method, evidenced by extremely simple modules and formes based on the functional logic.