Terrence Cashen Furniture Design Polaroid Photo Archive
Extensive collection of late '60s and early '70s furniture prototypes and scale models in urethane, plexiglass, inflatable vinyl, and aluminum piping from innovative St. Louis designer Terrence Cashen.
Fine in good plus album.
Price: $2,500.00
Terrence Cashen Furniture Design Polaroid Photo Archive
"St. Louis Architect Terrence Cashen has furnished his living room with two dozen 1-ft. by 2-ft. urethane blocks, lit it with two strings of naked light bulbs, and mirrored two opposite walls to reflect blocks and bulbs receding into infinity. Cashen sits, sleeps and eats on them." — TIME, 1971
The characteristically '70s designs of Terrence Cashen showcased a signature mix of minimalist rigor and space-age whimsy: inflatable tables made to be blown up by hair dryer or vacuum cleaner, amorphous transparent vinyl chairs, egg-cup shaped pods, and aluminum-framed lighting systems giving the effect of a cubicle without walls – but all originally designed in shades of grey and white. "The lack of color," Cashen explained to TIME magazine, "makes people more important because they add color." A single color photo sequence provides this album's only flash of red: a cleverly fashioned set of geometric armchairs, rearranged like puzzle pieces into six different snowflake-like configurations.
Cashen's work for Design Media Inc. won him an award from the American Institute of Interior Designers at the 24th Annual International Design Awards, and his "Urethane System," introduced at the 1968 Macy's New York Summer Show, was advertised as a "totally new concept in plastic furniture design." In collaboration with David Suttle, Cashen developed the Lightgrid system of pole lighting for their co-curated 1971 furnishings exhibition, with ambitions of adapting their tubular metal and wall-to-wall foam aesthetic to a variety of home uses just as soon as home-dwellers could be induced to recognize their merits. In a more consumer-friendly venture, Cashen designed the "Multigon" line of modular seating for Jens Risom, and a line of pleasingly spherical tables and "Orb" chairs not unlike the Eero Aarino ball chair, only rounder, somehow.
This album's photos include both scale models and full-size products, arranged for exhibition or in the process of setup. Several furniture groupings are staged in what appears to be Cashen's own home: "Mr. Cashen," the New York Times reported in 1970, "has always used his living room as a design laboratory." A unique collection.
Read more: Cashen & Suttle, Product Environment: Exhibition of New Furniture; "Modern Living: The New Room: No Furniture," TIME, Apr. 26, 1971; Rita Reif, "A Designer's Wife Has to Get Used to Losing the Furniture," The New York Times, 1970.
The Object
[St. Louis, Missouri]: n.p, [circa 1970]. Black post-bound leatherette album, stamped "Polaroid Land Photographs." 141 3.5'' x 4.25'' Polaroid photographs in plastic sleeves, of which six are in color. Album scuffed and missing spine; cover detached. One plastic sleeve of photographs loose. Photographs themselves show very little wear.
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