Chair Person

Clara Porset, the furniture and interior designer, died in May 1981 at the age of eighty-five. Living Design — a collection of her essays, reviews, and lectures — offers hints about her remarkable life. Indeed, how many designers opposed a dictator and had to hide out in a foreign embassy before fleeing their home country? Unfortunately, such smatterings of intriguing biography are provided here only as background for her gathered writings, although these snippets outshine the book’s primary material.

Should we nonetheless read Porset because she is a “neglected voice in global modernism,” as the book’s jacket claims, or even because she’s a talented albeit regional interpreter of a twentieth-century movement? Porset certainly is notable as a leader in a profession dominated by men, especially in Mexico at the time, and as an activist in a machismo-drenched culture that kept most women out of the limelight and at home with the kids. And she became renowned for her Bauhaus-influenced work, including collaborations with such architects as Luis Barragán and Mario Pani.

The book’s editors, Zoë Ryan and Valentina Sarmiento Cruz, describe Porset’s writing style as “quite specific, marked by long sentences and the repetition of ideas.” Translated by Natalie Espinosa, it can make for rather tedious reading. But because Porset’s design work has contemporary relevance, I persevered through hundreds of pages that could have been more inviting — perhaps with additional photography.

Ryan is the director of the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Cruz is a writer and translator based in Mexico City. They have brought together Porset’s thinking — much of it not previously published in English and having only limited circulation in Spanish — and added an introduction and supporting essays by the historian Randal Sheppard and the curator Ana Elena Mallet. These contributions are insightful, but the multiple voices can feel uncoordinated. Their many footnotes will also frustrate even the most design-savvy readers outside of the academy.

Clara Porset was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1895. From a privileged background, she never really explained why she chose to study interior design in the United States and France, beginning when she was thirty. Sheppard speculates “that a life of cinema outings, fashion shows, and parties in Vedado social clubs proved unsatisfying, given her restlessness and intellectual keenness.” But perhaps it was simply time to leave town before she was considered a spinster and an embarrassment among society’s traditional set. Luckily for Porset, it was “a common practice” in Cuba for “affluent families to send their children to study abroad” and so not unusual for her to enrol, in 1925, at Columbia’s School of Fine Arts and the New York School of Interior Decoration. She then attended the Sorbonne, between 1927 and 1929, and worked at Henri Rapin’s atelier in Paris.

When Porset returned to Cuba in 1929, she became active in politics, vigorously opposing the oppressive regime of Gerardo Machado, who had become president four years earlier. Given her active hostility toward Machado, she exiled herself to New York to avoid persecution if not murder. She went back again to the island country in 1933 but fled once more in 1935, when Carlos Mendieta, an equally tyrannical politician, came to power. At that point, she headed to Mexico City, where she would spend the rest of her life. As Ryan and Cruz explain:

The dual role of artist and citizen diplomat must have appealed to Porset, whose socialist instincts were as powerful as her design passions. She quickly got to know the city’s “leading avant-garde figures, including the Mexican renowned museographer Fernando Gamboa and Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera and Xavier Guerrero, whom she married in 1938.” Within a few years, she opened her own studio and “later completed projects that came to define her practice, working across furniture and interior design for private residences and public housing projects.”

What is fascinating, and not strictly from the Bauhaus rulebook, is how Porset “employed local materials and geared her designs to the country’s climate, lifestyles, aesthetic preferences, and cultural traditions.” Her 1952 Totonaca chair, for example, had a wooden frame and resonance with Meso-American sculpture while retaining a modernist sensibility, as did her interpretation of the classic butaque, almost her answer to Mies van der Rohe’s leather and chrome Barcelona chair.

Initially, Porset might have been considered a dilettante. Although she fought against the ruling class, she was from a wealthy family and enjoyed certain privileges, like her studies in New York and Paris. (Her chic personal style, as shown in several of the photographs that are included, certainly speaks to that.) But after decades of unwavering devotion to design and social activism, it was clear she was anything but an entitled amateur. Calling her one would be like calling the American architect Philip Johnson a dabbler. Yes, he started out as a privileged provocateur, but he went on to become one of the most influential practitioners of his generation.

Porset believed in accessible work, but she was burdened by a well-intentioned angst that’s all too common among designers. Her chairs, for one thing, “were made for private homes owned by a few privileged Mexicans who could afford custom commissions.” Thankfully, this didn’t stop her from being a bona fide design evangelist, who advocated for furniture that was within reach of the countless many not looking for a La‑Z‑Boy style. She also championed affordable housing. In other words, she wasn’t a hypocrite. She may have been high-minded, but her writings show she wasn’t insincere. Still, she rarely expressed in words the practical difficulties of bringing minimalism to a public that might not want it or the challenges of realizing good and well-made design on a budget. But then neither did Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier.

Porset’s sensibilities were never going to make the cover of Architectural Digest (she was more of a World of Interiors sort). Hers was not an artificial approach; she was no mere stylist. While her furniture is attractive, if occasionally ungainly, it should be understood by what it represents: a notion of how we might live. It’s not only about the chair we’re sitting on but what that chair represents as the manifestation of the modernist movement — of a better way of living. It’s also about suitable context, whether artistic or social, and how all these various considerations determine the proper means of production. (If she were writing today, Porset might use the word “sustainability.”) She believed in the vernacular and artisanal rather than the rigorous or mechanical imposition of elegance.

Ultimately, Porset embraced the delicate dialectic of modernism and precedent. She was not moved to create status objects. Although there may have been a knowing recognition among her clients, it wouldn’t exactly have been virtue signalling. Rather, they commissioned work that reinforced a sense of doing the right thing: disciplined, austere, and making a point.

It can be so distressing to visit the homes of people who have the means to surround themselves with the best of the best but who don’t live intimately with all that expensive stuff. Perhaps a decorator chose it. Perhaps it’s lovely. Perhaps it’s neutral — something no one can hate. But it has no relevance to the owner other than its utility, superficial style, or obvious expense. This kind of interior design is not personal and definitely not a realization of a utopian vision. Clara Porset fervently believed in transforming society and building stronger communities. As she maintained in her writing, values and design were intrinsically connected. How daunting it would be for her to find clients in 2025.