Alexander Girard’s Design Story.

As lovers of good design objects and curators of a concept store, we are constantly in search of design icons. We’re a little bit obsessive about it and are forever discovering objects that we love, that inspire us and that usually have a pretty good story behind them. Sometimes, through this obsession, we uncover hidden stories that we just have to share.

And here’s one: Vitra’s wooden dolls, designed in 1952 by the American architect and designer Alexander Girard. They’re currently sitting on the shelf at Fount and their hand-painted, vibrant and quirky design opens the door to a pretty amazing character in Girard.

Alexander Girard’s magic wasn’t simply that he was a good designer, it was his endless curiosity and desire to seek out inspiration. An obsessive collector and curator of folk art, he was constantly traveling the world, which in the 1950’s was a much different adventure than what it is today, and his trips revolved around gathering cultural objects that fascinated him.
Here’s a list of some of the places he went, (again, this is via the 1950’s version of international travel, the one without booking.com, google maps, instagram, airline websites or just the internet and digital media in general.): Mexico India, Italy, Peru, Guatemala, Poland, Romania, Japan, Sweden and Scandinavia, France, Greece, North Africa (Morocco).
Through these trips and his constant gathering of items he acted like a sort of cultural and visual translator, taking elements from traditional craft and reimagining them in his own design practice.

Deeply inspired by handmade traditions, he was fascinated by the small details and big ideas embedded in everyday objects. His process revolved around collecting and cataloguing folk art, not just for preservation, but to reinterpret it in his own way, transforming it into design. His collection of folk art, built up over decades of international adventures across 100 countries and 6 continents and totaling over 100,000 pieces was eventually donated to the Museum of international Folk Art in Santa Fe, where it still sits today.

And if his travel wasn’t interesting enough, his home was another level.

A purposeful move to Santa Fe, which at the time was nearly as remote as some of the places he travelled, gave him space to create a home that sounded equally as fascinating as his designs. As told through his profile on the Vitra website:

“Using his expertise in exhibition design, his home was a constantly rotating display of his own designs, folk art, contemporary pieces and antiques.”

An even better example of not just how interesting his home was, but of his influence and impact on the world of design and craft in general, was the visit of the Rolf Fehlbaum, the son of Vitra's founding family, to his house in the 1960’s. A letter back to his parents after the visit described the house as “the most fascinating house he had ever seen in the United States.”

Lessons for the now.

In a world where conversations around culture, craft, and sustainability feel more urgent than ever, Girard’s work sat at the boundary between craft and an emerging modern design practice, but still carried the remnants of a slower, more intentional way of making. His work is especially relevant to our team in its reminder of how research and getting out from behind your desk is an integral part of any design practice because it can lead to the discovery of meaning, identity and ideas that can transcend trends.
Each object of Girard’s is a small story of both what the physical object is, its inspiration and also how it came to be, allowing them to live way beyond design trends and ideas of what’s cool and what’s not. And that’s what resonated with us and what we make - the idea that the story behind the object, the story that it tells and the work that was done to get there, is critical to the item itself. Yes, it means it’s more work to get to the end result, but ultimately it is more rewarding and builds something that will last longer through a deeper connection.