Editions Norma – serie

Gaetano Pesce traces the visionary collaboration between the Italian designer and American entrepreneur Jay Chiat, founder of the advertising agency Chiat\Day. Through 500 images, rare archives, and previously unpublished interviews, this book explores the creation of Chiat\Day’s New York offices—true laboratories of the virtual office concept. Conceived in the 1990s, this groundbreaking project merges art, architecture, and technology, redefining the very notion of workspace.From Venice to New York, the book situates this adventure within the career of a leading figure of radical design, for whom humanity and diversity remain central to every form of creation. Gaetano Pesce offers a richly documented and visually striking journey into the world of a total artist whose influence continues to shape the way we think about work, space, and creativity today.Text in English and French.

"Abandoned, forgotten form is reborn in the arms of an all-embracing nature, an envelope within which the origin of the human being, of a society gives us a sensibility, a presence of a fertility." - Vincent DubourgA graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Vincent Dubourg is a designer and a plastic artist. In 2004, he caught the eye of Julien Lombrail, founder of the Carpenters Workshop Gallery, where he has been exhibiting since 2006. Present at major salons and shows - the Pavillon des Arts et du Design, Paris; Design Miami Basel - he has received many public commissions from institutions such as Galeries Lafayette, Swarovski, Vienna, the musée de la chasse et de la nature, Paris, and the Sketch restaurant in London, among others.Vincent says that he feeds himself on the capitals like Paris and New York, which he regularly visits, and digests them in his isolated studio in the Creuse department in France. There, he questions contemporary furniture through the prism of nature and the five elements, like a perfect control of metal. With him, buffet, table and chairs become hallucinatory objects shifting between sculpture and functional furniture. A major exhibit will be devoted to him at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York in late 2017. Solo Show, Carpenters Workshop Gallery, New York, November 2017.

This exceptional anthology, which proposes a panorama of the evolution of crafts from 1945 to the present day, brings together a selection of over 70 texts from five continents. These texts are chosen and commented on by Chloé Braustein-Kriegel, a design specialist and critic, and Fabien Petiot, an art historian and designer.This new research is a genuine theoretical and practical tool for specialists and amateurs alike throughout the world. Calling on a huge network of experts, writers, critics, academics, journalists and artists, whose articles have been published in reviews such as Crafts Magazine, The Journal of Modern Art and The Journal of Design History, the authors present a diversity of viewpoints that permit the reader to go into depth on all the aspects of this multiform subject: the relationship between crafts and the many creation fields such as design and architecture, and the place of know-how in today's society. This anthology also makes it possible to place these contemporary questions in a historical perspective. A selection of authors: Charlotte Benton, Andrea Branzi, Alberto Cavalli, Garth Clark, Edmund Wim Delvoye, De Waal, Marie Douglas, Enzo Mari Stefano Micelli, Louise Schouwenberg, Patricia Woods.

Pierre Guariche (1926-1995) was a leading interior architect, furniture, and lighting designer in postwar France. He created a prolific body of work during what is known as the Thirty Glorious Years (1945-1975), a period of economic prosperity and high growth in France. He was an early adopter of industrial materials and production techniques that emerged during the 1950s, and is known for his remarkable lighting fixtures and simple, elegant furniture designs that could be manufactured on a large scale. He worked with innovative companies like Airborne, Steiner, and Pierre Disderot; he co-founded a design collective (Atelier de Recherche Plastique- ARP); and was the artistic director for the Meurop furniture company in Belgium. In advance of Charlotte Perriand in Les Arcs and Marcel Breuer in Flaine, he worked with the architect Michel Bezançon on the creation of La Plagne, the first comprehensive winter sports resort in France. Making use of unpublished archives, this book looks back on a rich itinerary of over 200 interior architecture and design projects, almost as many pieces of furniture, and a series of remarkable lighting fixtures (reissued today by Sammode) which shed light on the modernity and timeless elegance of this remarkable creator. Text in English and French.

After training as a graphic designer in Hungary, the plastic artist Vera Székely (1919-1994), a member of the Székely-Borderie ceramicist collective, tackled work in clay, metal, wood and glass to reach her artistic fulfillment in textiles.From this point on, Vera Székely acknowledged “swimming and dancing in space to leave a trace in it” with her ephemeral installations of bent felt, her stretched canvas structures and “braced sails” that would be exhibited throughout the world, notably at the Biennale internationale de la tapisserie, Lausanne (1981) the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou (1982), the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (1985), the Lunds Konsthall, Sweden (1988). Text in English and French.

A key figure in the Art Deco movement, artist Jean Dunand (1877-1942) stands out for his multiple talents as a sculptor, goldsmith, copper maker, but also lacquerer, bookbinder and decorator. After having excelled in finishing hammer-mounted vases and brassware, he met Seizo Sugawara in 1912 who led him to become passionate about lacquer, which he made his signature on both his vases and his panels, furniture and bindings.At the head of an important workshop, he participated in the major international exhibitions of his time, in Paris in 1925, 1931 and 1937, in New York in 1939, and was regularly exhibited at the Georges Petit gallery and at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. His singularity and the quality of his creations lead him to become one of the most sought-after portrait painters, immortalising personalities in fashion and the arts such as Jeanne Lanvin, Louise Boulanger, Joséphine Baker as well as from the world of finance such as the Lazards, Carnegie or Louis-Dreyfus.Jean Dunand also worked on remarkable sets in France and the United States such as the music salons of Solomon R. Guggenheim, the apartments of Madame Agnès or Templeton Croker, as well as on the shipyards of the Atlantic and Normandy liners which will crown a rich career of more than two thousand works, presented in a repertoire at the end of the book.Text in French.

A real mirror of 20th century creation, Chess Design presents an exceptional documentation on chess games made by artists, designers, architects, and craftsmen: chessboards themselves, but also artist's drawings, execution plans and photographs of archives.By presenting nearly 300 of these chessboards chronologically, the author offers a new perspective on the history of art and its evolution. Art Nouveau, Secession, Surrealism, Fluxus, Pop Art, most of the great movements that are born and follow one another in the Fine Arts find an echo with these chessboards and the 16 pieces that animate them. These chess games also reflect the evolution of techniques and materials used during this period: wood, glass, ceramics will give way, from the 1950s, to steel, plastic and composite materials.At the border between the plastic arts and the decorative arts, these chessboards are made by big names in the art scene, design or architecture – Alexandre Rodchenko, Jean-Michel Frank, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, or, more recently, Yoko Ono, Robert Filliou, Yayo Kusama, Victor Vasarely, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry or Damien Hirst – as by anonymous people. The synthesis offered by the author constitutes a valuable and innovative historian's work, supported by iconography that is both rich and mostly unpublished.Text in English and French.

A major figure in decorative arts during the inter-war periods René Buthaud (1886–1986) developed an interest in ceramics upon finishing his studies at the École des beaux-arts de Paris and the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, before being mobilised for the war. At times figurative and at other times geometrical or abstract, his vases met with great success at the Salon d’automne and the Salon des artistes décorateurs in 1920, where he exhibited works with his friends Jean Dunand and Alfred Janniot. From 1928 his works were distributed by the Rouard gallery, and he participated in most Salons as well as the major events of the time: the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, and the 1937 Exhibition of Art and Technology. Acting as technical director of the Sainte-Radegonde art pottery works for Primavera from 1923 to 1926, he was especially known and appreciated by the public for his great mastery of crackle enamel, a technique he reintroduced in France. Text in English and French.

The life of Gustave Caillebotte is shrouded in legend - untimely death, hidden genius, generous patron of Monet, Pissaro, Sisley and Degas - making him one of the most appreciated and mysterious painters of the Impressionist movement. This biography, written by a descendant of the painter, journalist and producer of programs on France Culture, is illustrated with numerous previously unpublished photographic documents. It takes a detailed look at Gustave Caillebotte's history and career, placing his pictorial work in the context of his family, social and economic environment, for the life of Gustave Caillebotte is above all a lesson in history and geography, that of the Parisian bourgeoisie under the Second Empire and the blossoming of the Impressionist movement in the Ile-de-France region. The biography describes Gustave's father Martial Caillebotte's meteoric rise in the textile industry, his education and pictorial training in Bonnat's studio and at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, his participation in the 1870 war at the age of 22, and his decisive encounter with the Impressionist group, led by Renoir, Monet and Degas. Thanks in particular to family archives, the book revisits Caillebotte's decisive role in the diffusion of the movement, including the organisation of the group's third exhibition, as well as the genesis and presentation of his own works, including the famous Raboteur.

Georges Jouve (1910–1964) was a major postwar decorative-arts figure who liberated ceramics from academic rules. Nicknamed “Apollo,” he tirelessly explored relationships between form, material, and light, combining utility and ornament, rigour and play. His wide stylistic range—from realism to abstraction—and his signature black glaze quickly set him apart. This illustrated book traces his career from Nyons and Dieulefit to Aix-en-Provence, highlighting iconic pieces such as cylindrical vases and his collaborations with Janette Laverrière, Étienne Noël, and Mathieu Matégot, including La Saladière and the hotel La Résidence in Saint-Louis, Senegal. Present in the major Salons of his time, Jouve emerged as an agent of modernity and, encouraged by Charlotte Perriand, joined the Steph Simon gallery. Equally at ease with small or monumental formats, he produced vases, fountains, tables, and sculptures, using zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, and abstract forms to make ceramics a vibrant, experimental, and timeless modern art, with lasting appeal worldwide today.Text in English and French.

Miró – Loeb. Correspondence 1926–1936 reveals the exceptional relationship between Joan Miró and Pierre Loeb, his gallerist and close friend in Paris. Through previously unpublished letters, richly illustrated with Miró’s works and facsimiles, the book traces a decade of exchanges during which exhibitions, collaborations, and new visions of modern art took shape. This vivid and illuminating correspondence captures the daily life of an artist and a dealer at the heart of the cultural ferment of the interwar years. It offers a glimpse into the realities of the gallery world, the networks of friendship, and the evolving dialogue between artistic creation and its dissemination in a time of profound transformation. The volume is accompanied by texts by Albert and Sonia Loeb, which place these exchanges within their human and historical context, offering a sensitive perspective on a relationship that proved decisive for both modern art and the life of Parisian galleries in the twentieth century.Text in English and French.

"Building in Lebanon is my way of taking a position with regard to the war." This statement by the French-Lebanese architect Youssef Tohme is key to getting into and grasping Intensive Beirut.This illustrated essay blends reflections on the urban development of the Lebanese capital with the experience gained on the projects of this architect-contractor, engaged in the effort to reopen the debate on architecture in his country. In a place where every situation is never more than a temporary state, the analysis of space is fundamental. The first part of the book examines Youssef Tohme's ideas, illustrated with 25 photos by Ziad Antar, a Lebanese visual artist-photographer. Equipped with a Holga and a Rollefleix, Antar has captured the architect's key projects - St. Joseph University in Beirut (designed with the office of 109 architects), the Villa T and the Villa M in Kornet Chehouane, and the Villa SC in Akoura. The second part, authored by Karine Dana, facilitated exchanges of ideas between Youssef Tohme and important figures of the Lebanese cultural scene such as the architect Tony Chakar, the artist Ziad Abilama and the singer Ahmed de Maschrou.Text in English and French.

From the white plastic bed for the Prisunic catalogue (1966) to the Culbuto armchair issued by Knoll, and from the Lip watch to the private apartments of the Élysée Palace, Paris, (1983), the furniture and objects conceived by Marc Held have been emblematic of the renewal of French design, following the line of Scandinavians such as Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen... With his gallery L'Échoppe on the rue de Seine, Paris, and then with his agency, the designer and architect Marc Held also took part in major projects for IBM and Renault.This book traces fifty years of design, whose success with the public at large has contributed to a great liberation in our style of life. The generosity of his vision has remained faithful to the humanist values that guided his childhood in Bagnolet, where he was born in 1932. Having settled in Greece, on the island of Skopelos, over twenty years ago, Marc Held still continues to build houses and furnish them with his creations, working closely with Greek craftsmen.Text in English and French.

Born into the American aristocracy, Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux abandoned high society to pursue an artistic career. Starting her training with Constantin Brancusi, she then arrived in Paris in 1919, following her marriage to French diplomat and writer Pierre de Lanux. She soon met the designer Eileen Gray. Eyre took over Gray's research on laquer and continued experimenting with innovative materials not previously used in furniture, namely cork, amber and linoleum. With Evelyn Wyld, she created a literary universe in which the poetry of her rugs, blended with furniture and lamps in totally new ways, all in an environment of muted shades and modern comfort. An ambitious artist in the Surrealist Paris of the interwar years, she wanted to believe in a peaceful future. But the crash of 1929 and World War II sounded the death knell for the career of this fresh new talent, ensuring that her creations became the rarest of objects. A bridge between the pioneering Eileen Gray and the rational Charlotte Perriand, like them, Eyre de Lanux drew inspiration from Japonism. Neither poor, nor stripped bare, her rare architectured interiors have remained secret until now. Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux is a recognised name but a forgotten talent. With Eileen Gray, Eyre de Lanux, Charlotte Perriand and Maria Pergay, the four cardinal points have now been identified.

This book is a unique and comprehensive illustrated dictionary of French Art Nouveau Ceramics.A census conducted in 1901 indicated the existence of some 209 producers of pottery in France, employing a total of around 5,800 full-time labourers. This great activity stimulated a parallel development in the arts, including the search for new expressions in art pottery, giving birth to l'art nouveau, a great and eclectic synthesis of a number of other art styles. Largely through British arts and crafts, and the work of artists like the Manxman Archibald Knox, it reached far back into the prehistory of Celtic art. To this were added later medieval elements, through the gothic revival championed by William Morris.The need for renewal, breaking away from the neo-Classical and academia, which was the realm of the upper-class culture, was largely theorised by John Ruskin, who searched elsewhere for inspiration. Thus did British art nouveau also partake of Chinese and Japanese styles, though never in so forceful a manner as did the French aesthetic. France, on the one side, looked back to the swirling and frivolous eighteenth century Rococo, primarily through the influence of the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, influential aesthetes of the mid-nineteenth century.The book focuses especially on artists working stoneware or grès, faience, and terracotta. It aims to provide a general survey of the many artists working in these areas, and includes brief accounts of the ceramics work of sculptors and painters whose wider output is already well known.

Olivier Gagnère appeared on the French design scene in the 1980s.  Through his contact with the Memphis group of Ettore Sottsass in Milan, he developed his spirit of fantasy, great formal liberty, all with a touch of humour. In Japan, on the island of Kyushu, he immersed himself in the ancestral craftsmanship of the porcelain makers in the studios of Arita. He designed his earliest pieces of furniture for Artelano and Pierre Staudenmeyer's Galerie Néotù. He went on to collaborate with the Galerie Maeght to create works in Murano glass and with the Galerie Edition Limitée for works in earthenware. In 1994, his designs for the interior of the café Marly, in the Louvre, brought him great renown and have led to many collaborations with crystal works Saint-Louis, porcelain manufacturer Bernardaud, En attendant les Barbares... With Olivier Gagnère's artful mastery of every material, he is just as at ease working with porcelain as with iron, crystal, wood, leather or bronze. He blends simple and timeless forms with carefully sized volumes, in a range of bright contrasting colours. Steeped in the most classical traditions, he marks every one of his creations with a gesture, a demeanor that is a signature of his times.Text in English and French.

"It is a rare species, but it exists," as '60s art critic Pascal Renous pointed out on the subject of artistic couples. This designer-decorator duo of Janine Abraham and Dirk-Jan Rol met at Jacques Dumond's studio in 1955. The couple shares the same love of precision, line and plain colours. Their earliest joint creations were first exhibited at the Salon des artistes décorateurs, in Paris. Their furniture, made of wicker, wood and aluminium, twice won prizes at the Salon des artistes décorateurs (a sideboard in 1956 and an armchair in 1958), garnering notice from the public and professionals alike. Jean Royère did not hesitate to use their emblematic Soleil armchair (gold medal at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair) in the decoration of the palace of the Shah of Iran, in Teheran. Their light and functional designs are available today, re-edited by Yota Design.Abraham & Rol were also interior designers and intervened in this capacity for both individual clients and large corporate clients, such as Yves Rocher and Saint-Gobain, with the same precision and sense of composition that define their furniture pieces.Finally, the couple also expressed their creativity through architecture, their mastery of this discipline enabling them to design some twenty houses from the 1960s through the 2000s in the Île-de-France region. Their homes are genuine inhabited sculptures, of which certain have become truly emblematic. Text in English and French

Marc Held entered history in 1965 with his famous Culbuto armchair, followed in 1966 by his furniture manufactured by Prisunic. Over a period of fifty years, he created some 150 furniture pieces, notably participating in 1983 in the interior design of the apartments in the Élysée Palace. Beginning in the 1970s, he also designed singular works of architecture, for individuals and for corporate clients such as IBM. At the end of the 1980s he chose to focus entirely on this passion of his when he settled on the Greek island of Skopelos. Interested in vernacular architecture, he dedicated a widely acknowledged book on Greece, Maisons de Skopelos, précis d'architecture vernaculaire published by Éditions Skopelos.net, in 1994, to it.It was also on Skopelos where over a period of thirty years he built eight exceptional villas: Lemonia, Maistros, Nina, Loukas, The Temple, Mourtia, Myrto and Kapsari. Each house is an architectural manifesto in its own right. These eight villas, in spectacular sites beside the sea, built with local materials and in accordance with the construction techniques of the island - all the artisans were from there - with the magical landscapes in which they are integrated, are eight lessons on the notion of genius loci, which so inspired Marc Held's architecture.Photographed by Deidi von Schaewen - with spectacular shots taken via drone-mounted cameras - his eight beautiful villas are also presented with his drawings and plans developed during their conception phases.Text in English and French.

Basketball shoe, tennis shoe, trainer or sneaker, regardless of the name, they have influenced the way we live, and the way we dress, since the early 20th century. Worn by millions of people the world over, sneakers have, in just a few decades, become a mass-market product that transcends gender, age, and social and cultural background. But how did a simple sports shoe make the leap from the pitch to become a genuine fashion accessory or even a piece of art? With over 600 pairs, films, archive documents, photos and personal accounts, this book presents all the facets of this iconic object, from its success with New York breakdancers to the cutting-edge technological research that goes on with that.Text in English and French.

In the 1970s, in the region of the Landes, between Bayonne and Peyrehorade, on the banks of the Adour River, the photographer Jeannette Leroy and the art dealer Paul Haim created a sculpture garden around a modest farm, La Petite Escalère.With the help of the faithful gardener Gilbert Carty, amidst canals, bridges, paths made of railway ties, and many trees and flowers, they installed about 50 works, some of them monumental, by artists such as Rodin, Maillol, Niki de Saint Phalle, Zao Wou-Ki, Françoise Lacampagne, Cárdenas, Mark Di Suvero, Léger, Matta, Zigor… Paul positioned the sculptures, and to help them vanish into the natural environment Jeannette would plant a shrub, a rosebush, dahlias, an oak, a maple, a gingko, a Caucasian walnut… “I don’t want this garden to become ridiculous!” she said.Paul Haim has evoked the bewitching beauty of La Petite Escalère better than anyone else: “The nonchalant visitor will pass from the shade of Les Barthes to the brightness of the Moura, from the freshness of the fountains to the suffocating heat of the forest. Coming around a bush, he allows himselfto be surprised by an unusual presence. Immutable. … Far from the agitations of the world, sinking into nothing-ness, watching the clouds go by, contemplating the places of joy.”Text in English and French.

Graduated from Ecole Boulle and ENSAD, Henri Quillé (1928-2020), settled on the island of Formentera (Balearic Islands) in 1972. There, he built for a mainly international clientele 30 houses of great consistency and is part of both principles derived from vernacular know-how and in those of the great masters of modernity. He says to "pursue" the local architecture, in particular by making extensive use of the Catalan vault, reducing openings to protect against the heat, covering the exterior walls with a lime plaster and sand. A pioneer of ecological housing, he will build a dozen self-sufficient houses.With the architects Felix Julbe and Raimon Torres, he collaborated on the regulatory plan and planning work on the island of Formentera from 1973 to 1976. Combining plans, period photographs and contemporary shots, this book allows this architect and his houses to be given their rightful place in the history of 20th century architecture.Text in French and Spanish.

Alfred Auguste Janniot (1889-1969), a renowned French sculptor of the inter-war period, left his mark on his contemporaries through his monumental work, which embraced and magnified architecture, both in France and other countries. His two main works, the spectacular bas-reliefs for the Musée permanent des colonies (1931) and the Palais de Tokyo (1937), still resonate in people's minds today. He also took part in the great adventure of the transatlantic liners, working on Île-de-France (1926) and Normandie (1935).Winner of the Grand Prix de Rome in 1919, Janniot worked alongside some of the greatest architects, collaborating with Roger Séassal, Michel Roux-Spitz, Albert Laprade, Jacques d'Welles, Wallace Harrison, Jean Niermans and Pierre Patout. Whether round-bosses or monumental "stone tapestries", his many works reveal the artist's classical training acquired at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, as well as an abundant creativity that can be seen at the town hall in Puteaux (1932-1934), the Chamber of Commerce in Châteauroux (1934), the Maison Française at Rockefeller Center in New York (1934), the Bourse du Travail in Bordeaux (1935-1938) and the Villa Greystones in Dinard (1938-1950).Text in French.

As early as 1934 Charlotte Perriand began to reflect on the architectural aspects of leisure activities for all, but it was with Les Arcs, her greatest work, that she completed her reflection on the art of living in the mountains.Alongside the developer Roger Godino, Charlotte Perriand displayed all the facets of her immense talent: design, urban planning, but also bioclimatic architecture, of which she was a pioneer. She had to deal with financial and time constraints in order to design most of the Arc 1600 and 1800. Thanks to her perseverance and growing inventiveness, her integration of architecture into the sites, her innovative and human approach to traffic, and the life she breathes into the resort, especially on the rooftops, she has made it a friendly place, in harmony with the environment. Thus, she designs the interior architecture of more than 4,500 homes, 25,000 beds, for an annual flow of more than one million people. Her wish to combine the art of living in the mountains with housing for the greatest number of people has been largely realised.Text in French.

This beautifully illustrated book of avant-garde art furniture design highlights a generation of creators whose energy and vision made a break with the past. Profiled here are Mark Brazier-Jones, Franck Evennou, Elizabeth Garouste, Marco de Gueltzl, Hubert Le Gall, Thierry Peltrault, Laurence Picot, Andrea Salvetti, and Claude de Wulf. All have been represented since the 1980s by Elisabeth Delacarte, whose Galerie Avant-Scène in Paris continues its mission of promoting these and other extraordinary furniture and jewellery designers to this day.Text in English and French.

As early as 1934 Charlotte Perriand began to reflect on the architectural aspects of leisure activities for all, but it was with Les Arcs, her greatest work, that she completed her reflection on the art of living in the mountains.Alongside the developer Roger Godino, Charlotte Perriand displayed all the facets of her immense talent: design, urban planning, but also bioclimatic architecture, of which she was a pioneer. She had to deal with financial and time constraints in order to design most of the Arc 1600 and 1800. Thanks to her perseverance and growing inventiveness, her integration of architecture into the sites, her innovative and human approach to traffic, and the life she breathes into the resort, especially on the rooftops, she has made it a friendly place, in harmony with the environment. Thus, she designs the interior architecture of more than 4,500 homes, 25,000 beds, for an annual flow of more than one million people. Her wish to combine the art of living in the mountains with housing for the greatest number of people has been largely realised.

Jacques Majorelle (1886-1962) is an emblematic figure of Orientalism. The son of the cabinet-maker Louis Majorelle, he trained at the École nationale des Beaux-arts appliqués of Nancy then in Paris, at the Académie Julian. Majorelle travelled through Spain, Egypt and Italy, starting from 1908. In 1917 he moved to Morocco. There, he developed a singular chromatic language which gave him a place divested of all influences among his contemporaries. Landscapes, bazaar scenes, and portraits, he based his art around the city of Marrakech where he lived, as well as across the rest of Morocco. He gathered inspiration from his many trips to Sudan, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire, amassing a considerable oeuvre of over 1,000 works in which light, colour and a certain viewpoint on exoticism played a decisive role.