Mid2Mod: Lord and Taylor

Showing posts with label Lord and Taylor. Show all posts

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Gilbert Rohde

Gilbert Rohde (1894-1944) was the son of a New York cabinetmaker who became one of the most influential furniture designers of his time. Though not a household name today, he is the designer behind many of the names that we do know today.

In 1923 Rohde turned one of his first job experiences as a political cartoonist into a job illustrating furniture for the Abraham and Strauss department store. He soon turned that talent into furniture design, selling his early work to Lord and Taylor. His style at that time combined the simplicity and rationalism of Bauhaus design with the sense of form and ornamentation of Art Deco, working mainly in Bakelite and chrome.

In 1930 Heywood-Wakefield began using his designs. He had great success with a bentwood chair he designed for the company. In that year, he attracted the attention of Herman Miller, which at that time was on the brink of bankruptcy, because their traditional pieces and historical reproductions were no longer selling. He convinced them that modernism was the way they needed to go, so in a desperate effort to stay in business, they showed his designs for bedroom furniture at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. With their updated image, they stopped producing traditional pieces and began to have Rohde design entire sets of living and dining room furniture. He acted as a design consultant for the company from 1932-1944.

During that time, he designed chrome furniture for the Troy Sunshade Company and also worked for Thonet. His work was exhibited at the MoMA in 1934 and at the New York World's Fair in 1939. He was director of the Design Laboratory in New York from 1935-1938 and was head of the Industrial Design department at the NYU School of Architecture from 1939-1943.

From r20thcentury.com