GASCOIN

During the post-war housing crisis in France, Gascoin

worked as an interior architect and designer for the French

Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism, designing homes

as well as the furniture to go inside them. He drew on his

long-held love of wood, his childhood fascination with com-

pact and efficient nautical interiors, and his training as an

interior designer and cabinetmaker to create a new standard

for furniture that was rational and utilitarian.

The new concept of a “living-room” (pièce à vivre) was

launched at the “Logis 49” fair in Paris, combining two tradi-

tionally separate spaces for dining and resting or “living” and

placing the kitchen nearby. Forward-thinking for its time, and

driven by a strong social conscience, Gascoin’s democratic

design connected art and industry, bringing together clean

aesthetics, efficient manufacturing processes and common

sense to create some of the first modular and multifunction-

al furniture sets. They balanced utility with elegance, used

coherent design to enable affordability, and have been de-

scribed as “a model of modernity”.

Gascoin was a member of the UAM (L’Union des Artistes

Modernes or the French Union of Modern Artists) alongside

important modernist designers such as Robert Mallet-Ste-

vens, Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé, Mathieu Martégot,

Eileen Gray, René Herbst and Le Corbusier. This was an in-

tellectual movement bound by a philosophy of design that

united function with fabrication. In his own workshop, he

passed his knowledge on to the next generation of interior

decorators and furniture designers, and several of Gascoin’s

apprentices, such as Michel Mortier, Pierre Paulin and Jo-

seph-André Motte, went on to have distinguished careers as

designers in their own right.

Today, Gascoin’s work is being re-discovered by collectors,

curators and designers across the globe, all of whom ad-

mire his quietly revolutionary approach to design. For the

new Gascoin Outdoor Collection, Marcel Gascoin's nautical

upbringing inspired the combination of teak and woven cord,

a perfect material choice for high-quality exterior furniture.

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