002-016 Publication of Interiors magazine article, memo from William D. Chambers to Irwin Management Company staff, J. Irwin Miller, and Xenia S. Miller

cc: Harold Hatter

Alexander Girard, one of this country's greatest interior designers for the last four decades is among the few not to have a major public monument of his own design visible for designers’ ready visitation and edification. His Textiles and Objects shop of the early 60s, which was so brilliant a prototype of the glossy, wet wall, bare bulb, bathroom style, has long since vanished along with his La Fonda Del Sol restaurant and all but the concept of his wild-hot-op-multicolored-varigated-piebald design for Braniff International airlines. Other than his commercially available fabric designs and his own folk art museum in Santa Fe, most of his work is tucked away in private residences and offices. And so it is to be hoped that someone will commission Girard to do a major museum, bank, or public interior that will be more permanent and accessible than the commissions he has received in the past.

However, one of his clients is not in the demolition business, but is rather one of the most discerning patrons of architecture and interior design, who has been constant in preserving its continuity, For that client for whom architect Girard designed an executive office suite in 1961, he has extended the earlier scheme throughout the offices of that investment management company. Preservation and continuity are elements of the design concept as well as of the program. Continuing the monochromatic, meticulously detailed scheme insitiuted for the office of the chairman, three additional floors of offices have been updated and refined.

Unlike most of Girard's richly ornamented and sumptuously colored collages of patterns and objects, the detailing and furnishings of these offices is simple stripped and minimal throughout. Also, the color system by this master colorist, is basically monochromatic scheme of tans, browns, beiges, whites, grays blacks, with only occasional splashes of red, orange, and blue. According to architect Girard, “It is all very severe, very quiet.”

The planning
Instead of the open planning that has become virtually predominate in the past decade, these offices are planned as separate enclosed spaces for maximum privacy and quiet. However, sliding doors that slither back into the walls achieve a degree of openness. The office spaces are generally small, with correspondingly compact furniture, and do not vary markedly. L Long corridors are widened to accommodate secretarial desks of a special hemi-hexagon shape. In one area, two of these desks face each other (photo page 000), and seem to lure circulation through the corridor. The large conference room on the second floor is subdivisible by overhead doors into three

Within this system, the mid-wall variations include: plaster expanses 2 ft. 5 in. high or 6 ft. 6 in. and 5/8 in. thick. These plaster

Besides the vibrant color combinations and folk art objects that architect Girard has made his design trademarks, his work has often been marked by radius corners. This motif is the generator of the detailing throughout this project. Radius corners, though used long before he moved to Santa Fe, recall the adobe detailing there. Here, the motif is used at the junctures of floor and base, and cove and ceiling, where a 2 in. radius wood block negotiates the continuous flow of the carpet surfacing, Radius corners are consistent in the plan, and are also used in the design of the furniture--desks, tables, credenzas--in the detailing of the plaster and tackboard variations of the mid-wall areas, and even in

It is this precise detailing that makes these offices so simple-looking and so functionally efficient. It is Girard’s inventive imagination that we continuously admire. As I wrote about a hemi-spherical recess that he designed to be a door stop in the chairman's office 10 years ago, Girard's interpretation “shows the sublime wit that, at rare intervals, elevates interior design to a level of an art.” Of this kind of vision Dr. Samuel Johnson I wrote, “the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second, rational admiration." C.R.S.

Details and furnishings specially designed by Girard include the hemi-hexagonal tan/white plastic laminate secretarial desks with vertical faces covered in carpet; a reception desk with stainless steel top and a carpeted base (see photo, ); sliding doors throughout that operate on recessed barn door tracks (see section and photo ); special contoured plastic/metal/wood door handles (see section and photo ); recessed semi-globular door handle stops; window treatments including pocketed curtains in the dining/conference room (photo ); and striped Mexican cotton shades that pull down on recessed tracks in the offices (photo ); divider panels in the dining/conference area that pull down guillotine-fashion from overhead, and are stored vertically above the ceiling; exposed globe lights on polished chrome socket stems and chrome circular canopies; hanging metal cylindrical fixtures with horizontal dimples, and clear downlights controlled individually by reostats.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY BALTHAZAR KORAB