Living Design
Living Design
The Writings of Clara Porset
Cuban-born and Mexico-based Clara Porset is renowned for her md-century modern furniture and interior design and for her collaborations with architects, such as Luis Barragán and Mario Pani. She was also an accomplished critic and writer. Living Design collects Porset’s essays, reviews, and lectures to highlight her role as an influential thinker, educator, and practitioner. This volume insightfully contextualizes the politics that shaped Porset’s design principles, charts the influence of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College on her work, and reveals the period’s fusion of local adaptations and modernist principles that made Mexico a major centre of modernist design.
At a time when many practitioners believed that design could only be modernized by replacing hand craftsmanship with mechanization, Porset valued both approaches for their distinctive qualities, and urged others to do the same. Through her writings, she encouraged efforts to catalyze local design communities during a period of rapid technological and social change. With essays by historian Randal Sheppard and design curator and scholar Ana Elena Mallet, an introduction by volume editors Zoë Ryan and Valentina Sarmiento Cruz, and explanatory notes on the people and publishing forums in Porset’s circle, Living Design makes available works never before published in English, and with only limited circulation in the Spanish language, in order to recover an important and neglected voice in global modernism.
Living Design: The Writings of Clara Porset is a very welcome contribution to our understanding of Porset’s innovative studio and the histories of design, design education, and everyday life in Mexico and the greater Americas. A large array of illustrations will make this an attractive volume to scholars and design enthusiasts. The contextualizing essays by Zoë Ryan and Valentina Sarmiento Cruz, Randal Sheppard, and Ana Elena Mallet, are well-written and thoroughly researched, and the high quality of Natalie Espinosa’s translations grants greater access to Porset’s writerly voice and her writing as a form of thinking.
The value of this collection of Clara Porset’s writings spanning four decades cannot be overstated. Living Design demonstrates Porset’s significant intellectual and social contributions in Cuba, Mexico, and beyond, and makes a compelling case for her enduring commitment to theorizing and promoting interior design at the intersection of artisanal and industrial fabrication. This volume constitutes an important step toward addressing the historical impacts of women designers and critics whose legacies have been overlooked for far too long.
Clara Porset (1895-1981) was born in Cuba, studied in the United States and France, and primarily lived and worked in Mexico from 1935. Her design of a butaque chair is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and she co-founded the Industrial Design Department in the Faculty of Architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Zoë Ryan is a curator and Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
Valentina Sarmiento Cruz is an independent writer, researcher, interpreter, and translator based in Mexico City.
