Louise Brigham, pioneer of do-it-yourself, eco-design and furniture sold flat (long before Ikea)
Reading time: 6 mins
“Whether in furniture, fashion, industrial or interior design, women have made a crucial contribution to the development of modern design, both creatively and commercially. And yet, design history books rarely mention them.”
A hollow presence that the exhibition Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today, on display until March 6, 2022 at the Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein strives to make visible. We thus rediscover the work and the vision of the American Louise Brigham (1875-1956), astonishingly avant-garde and precursor of trends that would only develop many decades later.
Modern design and conquest of the west
Born into a wealthy family in Boston, Louise could have adopted a leisurely lifestyle. But at the age of 18, the American chose to use philanthropy to support social reform in progress. America has entered its progressive era. Women campaigned for their accession to universal suffrage, the reformist Jane Addams opened her first social work center in Chicago in 1889, and reception houses inspired by British "Settlement houses" developed in the major cities of the Northeast. from the country.
Louise studied domestic arts and then design in New York, before engaging in social experimentation: in one of these social houses located in Cleveland, Ohio, she welcomed refugees and the homeless. It was there that she designed and made, for a young mother who could not afford one, a high chair for babies using wooden boxes. Other furniture will follow, and Louise will lead carpentry workshops to share their manufacturing secrets.
Used to transport a variety of consumer goods, mostly discarded or used for heating, crates were found in abundance – Louise Brigham was not the first, it should be noted, to suggest the reuse of boxes. A few manuals were already circulating, proposing their transformation into furniture – generally crudely made to make yourself.
A tradition rooted in the country's history, when crates and wooden barrels were the basic supply of rustic furniture for the farms and "frontier houses" of the adventurers of the conquest of the American West (the name of the chain of Crate & Barrel stores, for "crate and barrel", pays homage to them).
Among the hundred pieces proposed by Louise Brigham, this compact and multifunctional desk for four people, whose legs hide storage. | Image from Box Furniture (The Century Company, 1909)
The modernist influence of Hoffmann, Klimt and Mackintosh
The cooperative workshops led by Louise are inspired by the spirit of those of the founders of the Arts & Crafts, William Morris and John Ruskin; while teaching them to develop useful know-how, it also allows the less fortunate to express their individuality.
The social dimension of his mission is sometimes overshadowed by his sense of aesthetics. A critic wrote of Brigham that her greatest talent was to "create from objects that were not only commonplace but intended to be thrown away objects as beautiful as they were useful", and that as such she should be considered "as a eminent artist.
In Cleveland, Louise discovered with enthusiasm the specific know-how of certain emigrants. Curious to study them, she embarks for Europe. The absence of financial or family pressure (she lost her mother when she was 2 years old, and her father seventeen years later) allows her this luxury. Initially left for two years, she stays there for three more. In Glasgow, she met the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the innovative sisters Margaret and Frances MacDonald.
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In 1907, in Vienna, she found a mentor in the person of Josef Hoffmann, founder of the Viennese Workshops alongside Gustav Klimt and Koloman Moser. Moser, another student of whom, the same year, was named Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, the future Le Corbusier.
In parallel with these exchanges, she trained in various craft schools in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Austria. There she learned cabinetmaking, embroidery, sewing, metal work... An episode would mark her approach in the long term: during the summer of 1906, she visited friends on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Ocean. . The island is almost deserted, with the exception of a camp for coal miners. She plans to make the best of her makeshift accommodation by having furniture made, but the only wood that grows on the island is a miniature arctic willow.
Cut off from the rest of the world for eight months out of twelve, Spitsbergen receives in this summer season the supply that allows its inhabitants to survive the rest of the year. The accumulation of empty crates, mostly used for heating, provides Louise with the opportunity to apply the newly acquired knowledge. The house is gradually being filled with furniture of his own creation, which are admired by visitors. The idea to write Box Furniture was born.
Published in 1909, Box Furniture will be the subject of several reissues and translations. | The Century Company
Ikea Long Before Its Time
Box Furniture – How to Make a Hundred Useful Articles for the Home was published in 1909. The extremely detailed instructions, practicality and illustrations in the book quickly made him popular. We discover, on more than 300 pages, much more than plans for making furniture: she gives advice on how to arrange each room, offers ranges of colors, themes, suggests accessories, a choice of plants...
Louise does not focus on a wealthy elite: she explains how to furnish an apartment for 4 dollars (the equivalent of a hundred dollars today). She takes as an example her own home, furnished from fifty-five boxes of reclaimed wood, and in which she will live for several decades. Called "Box Corner", she receives journalists there who marvel at the nesting or drop-leaf tables, desks with integrated storage and other multi-functional pieces that she has imagined.
Box Furniture blends design theory with social agenda. It seduces the elite as much as the modest circles to which it is addressed: both well received by critics (the New York Times praises Louise on several occasions) and by readers, it will be reprinted four times, before being translated into Danish. and in German.
The city of New York and various charities join their efforts with those of the designer in the creation of workshops, in order to train apprentices. In 1915, no less than 600 young boys devoted their evenings and weekends to following his teaching. Later, the girls will in turn be accepted there.
Furniture made from Box Furniture's plans (neither as polished nor as close to Hoffmann's geometric and slender modernist style as the illustrations in the book suggest) is exhibited in New York, Chicago, and participates in the Exposition Universal of 1915 in San Francisco.
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The First World War came to hinder her mission, but she did not give up her plans. In 1916, Louise married a wealthy industrialist twenty years her senior. Then in her forties, she took a liking to independence and kept her maiden name, attached to that of her husband. It was at this time that she opened her first furniture factory made from reclaimed wood, which would employ returning veterans.
Louise then had the idea, with two partners, of founding Home Art Masters, a furniture company sold by mail order in the form of pieces to be assembled at home using commonplace tools, accompanied by detailed instructions. The adventure was cut short, but foreshadowed years in advance the idea that would be developed by the Australian Frederick Charles Ward, the American-German Kem Weber or, with the success that we know, the Swede Ingvar Kamprad in 1956.
Widowed in 1920, Louise Brigham continued her work (in New York, but also in Venice and Bermuda, where she owned other properties). However, little information remains, apart from an obituary devoted to him by the New York Times in 1956. More than a century after the publication of his book, it was time to salute his pioneering role in the history of design. and its surprisingly current proposals.
Until March 6, 2022, the exhibition Here We Are! Women in Design at the Vitra Museum pays homage to Louise Brigham and other designers forgotten in history.
