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...