Thursday 25 February 2010

Greta Magnusson Grossman



Although not aware of her exhibition before my visit to Arkitekturmuseet (which runs until May) I was glad to find it when I got there. Greta Magnusson Grossman was a pioneering Swedish designer, architect and businesswoman whose influences are only just coming to light. Having worked successfully in Stockholm for a number of years she moved to America in 1940. She owned modern design shops in Stockholm and Los Angeles, and can be credited with significantly influencing Southern California with her Scandinavian design aesthetic. Having designed both furniture and lighting for over a dozen companies, her most well known pieces are the Cobra lamp for Ralph O. Smith and her range of dressers and bureaus for Glenn of California.

I really liked the layout of the exhibition designed by Stockholm-based studio TAF. It presented a mixture of old pencil technical drawings and finished pieces presented on simple, elegant podiums. It was nice to see sketches and pencil renders as opposed to computer generated renderings and made me remember the days of T-squares and clutch pencils in technical drawing classes...

-Colm