This Art Basel Miami Beach, iconic fashion house Louis Vuitton is spearheading “Playing With Shapes,” a Design Miami/ satellite exhibition that brings to light yet another ambitious and historically significant design. Last year, Louis Vuitton reinvigorated Charlotte Perriand’s memorable “La Maison au Bord de l’Eau,” a revolutionary prefabricated vacation home she designed in 1934 but that had never built, on the grounds of the Raleigh hotel. This year, Louis Vuitton is partnering with legendary French furniture and interior designer, Pierre Paulin, to present an unrealized project he designed in 1972 for American furniture maker Herman Miller.
A series of Pierre Paulin’s sketches, as well as “La Maquette,” a project mockup now owned by the Center Pompidou, propose a six-level modular personal living space with moveable functional furniture. For “Playing With Shapes,” Louis Vuitton is recreating the entire six-story maquette in Miami Design District’s Aranda/Lasch building— along with 18 pieces of furniture from Paulin’s original home design—for the first time. Paulin is best known for his innovative rounded chairs that follow the form of the human body, and furniture highlights in the exhibition include a carpet seat and recliner that can be moved around as desired.
Maquette and renderings by Pierre Paulin
Conceived as an “intimate safe house” in response to an ever-changing technological world, the flexibility of Paulin’s modular unit home invites inhabitants to playfully create their own comfortable arrangement within this revolutionary refuge.
Photo by Frederique Dumoulin
This article was previously published in Whitewaller.
