On the outskirts of Paris, stowed away inside the city’s administration centres, lie rare examples of authentic French postwar interiors – some of the few extant unaltered schemes, indeed, by the country’s more renowned Modernist decorators and designers. The huge appetite for work in this style has meant that, in many cases, the furniture created for these spaces has been sold off at auction and the rooms refurbished; happily, however, some high-quality examples, conceived as total works of art, are still scattered across the metropolis’s suburbs– particularly those more extensively redeveloped in the aftermath of World War II.
In these decades, public and administrative interiors were taken seriously in France – thanks in no small part to a law that decreed that a percentage of construction budgets be spent on artistic interventions. As a result, they became places where inventive and bespoke furniture, lighting and sculptural features were combined in an ambitious coalescence of architecture, design and art. The works of Joseph-André Motte, Pierre Guariche and Michel Boyer particularly distil the idealism of their moment; one of democratic, vital and richly imaginative public design, where high-profile practitioners would lend their gifts to the municipal.
Take Motte, one of the most celebrated French designers of the 1960s and 70s. He worked on several public commissions, including Grenoble’s much-lauded hôtel de ville, or city hall. Less well-known, however, are the interiors he created for the one in Bondy, a commune on the northwestern edge of Paris, from 1966 to 1969. A few of the building’s rooms remain exactly as he arranged them: the wedding hall, for example, is still outfitted with Motte’s white-leather pews, their heart-shaped cross-sections subtly bolstering the matrimonial theme. Casting the eye skywards, the undulating ceiling is lined with thin aluminium sheets; the effect is organic and strangely spiritual.
The focal point, though, is the room’s sprawling, wall-mounted sculpture – a product of Motte’s collaboration with the artist Pierre Sabatier. The dynamic form of the work, rippling with metal, evokes the idea of evolution; of life expanding outwards in all its turbulence and tranquillity. Exhilarated by the partnership, Motte would go on to work with Sabatier on several major projects, including the Grand-Quevilly town hall in 1975, which resulted in a three-by-nine-metre mural, also for a wedding hall. His own apartment in Paris, too, features works by the sculptor – a testament to a happy creative marriage.
Another collaboration from the period, geared around another hôtel de ville, took place on the city’s southeast border: Créteil city hall, one of French Modernism’s finest achievements in administrative architecture. Situated on Place Salvador Allende, with its bold, wave-patterned pavement by Maurizio Vitale, the building’s glass-lined circular tower appears almost to float beside its low, cylindrical base. It was designed in 1972 by architect Pierre Dufau; the innovations within, however, were entrusted to Michel Boyer.
Boyer began his career in the late 1950s and quickly became one of the decorative tastemakers of the following two decades. Together with designers like Pierre Paulin, stainless-steel-furniture pioneer Maria Pergay and Olivier Morgue – who was behind the chairs used in 2001: A Space Odyssey – Boyer defined the era’s Space Age aesthetic, as well as masterminding the interiors of the Rothschild Bank’s Paris branch and the French embassy in Brasilia.
The schemes in Créteil’s city hall –from its entrance and wedding halls to the restaurant and municipal council room –serve as excellent representatives of Boyer’s style. For the main council room, the designer created a vibrant space with cascading seating facing crescent-shaped central tables. Row after row of jet Eero Saarinen chairs arrest the eye, some of their rounded supports removed to integrate them with the steps of the tiered auditorium. As a backdrop, abstract, Pop art-influenced murals provide a cheery counterpoint to all the lacquered black.
Boyer’s wedding hall, just across from the council chamber, is a visually lighter and more lyrical space, its benches upholstered in rose red and a main table more informally encircled by Warren Platner’s lighter, wire-framed armchairs. Between these two spaces is a large mezzanine hall with a floating bentwood staircase, above which hangs a large abstract tapestry by Op Art trailblazer Victor Vasarely. The building boasts many other small-scale art interventions, which cement the sense of a place generously and painstakingly designed – right down to the expressive handles, crafted by Brazilian sculptor Luiza Miller, on all the exterior doors.
Like Motte and Boyer, Pierre Guariche was another giant of postwar French design who turned a meticulous hand to civic schemes. Born in 1926 to a family of goldsmiths, he studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and later joined the iconoclastic Union des Artistes Modernes, which fomented his interest in experimenting with new materials and democratising furniture through mass-production. Guariche would go on to create furniture and lighting for Mai gallery, as well as companies such as Disderot, Airborne and Steiner; his signature pieces made use of aluminium, fibreglass and plastic. In 1954, he set up the Atelier de Recherche Plastique, along with Motte and the furniture designer Michel Mortier.
After parting ways with his co-founders, Guariche would turn his talents to several private projects and a number of public buildings, including hospitals and offices. In the latter camp, the prefecture of Essonne to the southeast of Paris, completed in 1970 by architect Guy Lagneau, was one of the largest commissions of his career. The vast Brutalist complex –spanning a departmental council, police station and courthouse – is made up of various wings connected via bridges and walkways around a central park and reservoir. Between these sections lies the one-storey prefectural residence; a particular triumph, it is enjoyed by the current incumbent in much of its original glory.
The impressive main seating area, where the prefect welcomes guests, is defined by its Gianfranco Frattini ‘Sesann’ sofas. Behind this zone, a metal fireplace seems to grow simultaneously from the ceiling and the floor. Dreamed up by the Greek sculptor Philolaos Tloupas – who, like Sabatier, created several public commissions during that time – the piece’s singular metal hood, suspended from above, feels at once industrial and organic.
Having survived more or less intact, the Essonne residence and Bondy and Créteil hôtels de ville remain truly eminent examples of French Modernist interior design, still dutifully serving their public an idealistic postwar vision of a better future for all. And long may they continue to do so.
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