The Essential Interior: Interpreting Le Corbusier is an exhibition of two Northern California furniture designers, Carol Vena-Mondt and Maura Harrington, re-imagining the monk cell of La Tourette, the famous monastery of twentieth century Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier. Each artist has designed four pieces of furniture, a bed, chair, desk and storage cabinet, and placed the furniture into a re-creation of Corbusier’s room. The Essential Interior: Interpreting Le Corbusier will be on view at the Sonoma County Museum, May 2 – 25, 2003.
     In 1953, Le Corbusier was asked by a Dominican priest to design a monastery in the midst of nature, on a small vale that opens out onto the forest at Eveux-sur-Arbresle near Lyon. The Convent of La Tourette is an architectural masterpiece of rough reinforced concrete created as “a peaceful silent dwelling place” for the monks that lived, taught and studied within the communal cloister. The buildings contain one hundred cells, sleeping rooms that also function as places of meditation, study and prayer. Corbusier tried to create an essential interior composed of two opposite forces of freedom and restriction. Each individual room contains a bed, a chair, a desk, a storage cabinet and a window (a brise-soleil or sun-break). Corbusier eliminated distraction in order to uplift the repetitive life of solitude and prayer to a place of spiritual transcendence. “It is the interior which lives.” An atheist, Le Corbusier did not believe that religion by itself could uplift people but architecture could. "Everything that architecture should do, the reason why it should be studied, is for the love of one's fellow man, to give him satisfaction and pleasure."
     Half a century later, this idea of the monk’s cell, a meditative space of silence and peace, is more poignant than ever. In this exhibition, two Northern California furniture designers, Carol Vena-Mondt and Maura Harrington, reexamine Corbusier’s La Tourette. Meditations on form, function and what is “essential,” these contemporary interpretations of Corbusier’s monk’s cell include a bed, chair, desk and storage cabinet designed by each artist for the two 6' x 24' 3" cells.
     Emphasizing aesthetics where Corbusier emphasized function, Vena-Mondt’s response to the monk’s cell is a resonance of Corbusier’s ideas, specifically in the application of human scale and a palette of semi-industrial materials. Corbusier pushed the moral dimension of both furniture and architecture, whereas Vena-Mondt is primarily interested in the formal qualities and the objectness of each piece. Vena-Mondt selected informal Monterey Pine and combined it with elegant black powder-coated steel. She then chose a red rubber chair designed by Komplot Design as a glamorous companion.
     Carol Vena-Mondt’s designs are inspired by the work of architects, Le Corbusier and Richard Neutra, and artists, Jim Isermann, David Blomster and Richard Artschwager, as well as furniture designers Charlotte Perriand and Roy McMakin. Embracing historical sources as a basis for her designs, Vena-Mondt champions refinement. Like one of her sources of inspiration, Florence Knoll, Vena-Mondt’s creative process reflects her involvement with objects as a collector who has spent a lifetime organizing, reducing and clarifying. Her life and work combined are a lesson in design. A furniture designer and art collector from Los Angeles, Vena-Mondt was a partner in Domestic Furniture Co. She now lives in Sonoma County and has opened a furniture/art/design/object store, Vena-Mondt, in Sebastopol.
     In her designs for The Essential Interior, Harrington assimilates Corbusier’s use of rational systems, in this case the idea of the simple module. Each piece of furniture is dimensionally designed to adapt to life in a small room. The arrangement of the furniture is practical and spatially economical. The desk, designed with grander proportions than the original, has no front or back, allowing it to become a table for two when moved away from the wall. The bed can also function as a seating area when separated from the armoire. Affirming her belief that beauty must coexist alongside function, Harrington chose to add contrast to her room by using two kinds of wood, one light and the other dark. The desk and bed are made from elm, chosen for its durability and beauty. The armoire, chair seat and back are dark walnut with a sensuous sheen.
     Maura Harrington’s furniture designs are intended to enhance ordinary life by bringing purpose and pleasure to every day objects. Exploring the relationship people have to a space and the objects therein is critical to Harrington’s work. Synthesizing function and form, her furniture is created with an enthusiastic appreciation of beautiful materials such as responsibly harvested wood and Plexiglass. Harrington’s sources of influence include mid-century designers George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi and George Nakashima. Harrington is the owner of Rubilux, her design firm in Sonoma County, where she also lives. An admirer of the Japanese woodworking tradition, she believes simplicity reveals the essence of necessity. With this essence revealed, the mind is not distracted by the superfluous; one is free to discover “a place of silence and peace.”

Zoey Mondt

Links: vena-mondt.com

Architectural Road Trip

rubilux.com

home