‘It’s all about the curves’: a 1960s vision of a domestic utopia

At first it resembles a model of a lunar landscape — with white mushrooms sprouting at intervals across its surface. But closer inspection reveals this is a sofa, all 12.25 sq m of it. Named Dune, it is made up of modules 70cm square, some flat, some with an upward slope at the side or corner, joined together to form hills and valleys; the mushrooms are small tables. The seating has been recreated from the designs of Pierre Paulin, along with a whole suite of pieces from “Program”, Paulin’s unrealised 1969 vision of a total domestic interior.

Paulin’s playful but comfortable Tongue chair and Ribbon chair are staples of design museum archives. Now his Program collection is brought to life in a new installation at Château La Coste, a 600-acre sculpture park, hotel and winery north of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. The exhibition has been organised by the park’s management with Paulin, Paulin, Paulin, the company established by Pierre’s son Benjamin and his wife Alice Paulin-Lemoine to promote his father’s legacy.

It is housed in a dazzling white pavilion with views up to the Luberon mountains. The building, from 2010, is the last work of Oscar Niemeyer, the architect whose public buildings defined Brazil’s new capital at the turn of the 1960s.

The Paulins have reimagined the 380 sq m of open gallery space as a house in the hills, the living areas each defined by one or more of Program’s statement pieces, such as Dune or the flowing white fibreglass Miami table, with its built-in seats, in the dining area. Instead of walls, the “rooms” are separated by flexible screens and shelving such as the Module U units, in plywood or plastic, which can be stacked like bricks.

“It divides the pavilion and creates areas and moods,” says Alice. “It allows us to show that Pierre didn’t just create seating, he worked on the whole environment.”

The furniture sits well in Niemeyer’s swansong. The bright green of Paulin’s doughnut-shaped C Club Chair chimes with the rows of Grenache vines that march up to within a few metres of the windows. Shelves and dividers snake through the gallery, mirroring the undulations in the glass ribbon walls and massive cantilevered roof. This shared sinuousness is what inspired the installation. “It’s all about the curves,” says Benjamin.

Huge, heavy, complicated to produce — it’s not for everyone. But it deserves to exist because it’s gorgeous

He believes Niemeyer and Paulin senior were united by more than just a preference for waveforms: “They were both concerned with people and to make things useful in their service. They weren’t egotists.” Both men’s designs display that 1960s space-age optimism born of a confidence that Modernism could change people’s lives for the better.

The finishing touches to the Château La Coste installation are a couple of chairs and standard lamps from another of Paulin’s projects around the same time as Program. These furnished the Elysée apartments so President Georges Pompidou could wow visiting heads of state with France’s style prowess — soft power rendered in three dimensions.

Another standout piece in the exhibition is Tapis Siège (Carpet Seat) from 1980, a 2.1m x 2.1m upholstered mat, its four corners gently tilted to form back rests, resembling an abandoned origami exercise. Like Dune it appears to have grown out of the ground rather than placed on it.

“He saw the future of furniture as the articulation of the floor,” says Benjamin of his father. At a retrospective in 2016 at Paris’s Pompidou Centre his father appeared, he says, “more as a landscape artist than a designer”. Closeness to the ground is perhaps one of the Program seating’s limitations; sitting on the floor, however well padded it may be, is not ideal for older bones.

But at Château La Coste the furniture’s sculptural qualities make it a fitting temporary neighbour for the installations dotted through the park. Many of these blur the line between architecture and land art, including Andy Goldsworthy’s buried dome of oak branches and Ai Weiwei’s meandering stone roadway built of blue Marseille cobbles.

Program was designed for US office furniture company Herman Miller. It was intended to be an ultra-flexible kit that could equip a whole family home, added to or reconfigured throughout the owner’s lifetime. But Herman Miller eventually backed out, perhaps daunted by all that articulation and the boldness of what Benjamin calls “industrialised utopia”. The only examples produced were the prototypes that furnished his childhood home.

The pieces on display at Château La Coste are made to individual commission by Paulin, Paulin, Paulin at a workshop 200km north-west of the sculpture park. “We are pursuing utopia through artisanal production,” says Benjamin.

Furniture brands Artifort and Ligne Roset have reissued Paulin designs, but the couple are dedicated to ensuring the designer’s boldest works have a life outside museums. “It’s huge, it’s heavy, it’s complicated to produce and it’s not for everyone,” says Alice of another previously unissued design, the rippling, ridged Déclive chaise longue. “But it deserves to exist because it’s a gorgeous piece.”

Thanks to Paulin, Paulin, Paulin’s efforts, anyone with the funds can commission their own rare piece of 1960s domestic utopia, or at least view it in Provence this summer.

Until September 3, chateau-la-coste.com

Louis Wustemann travelled as a guest of Château La Coste

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