In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at the work of Alan Buchsbaum.
T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings: Born in London, 1905. Died in Athens, 1976.
Neoclassicism is a fairly dubious tradition. It wouldn’t be wrong to associate it with all that is bad about the nature of Western Empire—powerful men looking to underscore their power by lazily and arrogantly appropriating the aesthetics of perceived Greek supremacy. Just look to the Federal and Fascist exploits of our last century. This vilification, of course, does not extend to the bizarre and awesome exploits of a few mid-18th-century architects and artists (Claude Nicholas Ledoux, Govanni Piranesi, etc.), and it excludes the entirety of ancient interests during the Italian Renaissance. But for the most part neoclassicism is almost an architectural plague, an endless cycle of “knocking off the knock-offs” (to quote John Chase).
But there is a disconnect here: what of the Greeks themselves? When one turns to the actual texts and art, whether Apollonian or Dionysian, one is struck less by their military heft than by the simple beauty of the metaphysical question. Our subject, Terence Harold (T.H.) Robsjohn-Gibbings, was supremely aware of this anomaly and set out to skip the entirety of two millennia of Greek revival. Instead, he went to the source itself in an attempt to materialize, as he put it, “the first recreation of a fifth-century setting in some twenty-five hundred years.” The work turned out to be extraordinarily and profoundly poetic.
The Klismos Chair, circa 1961. Top image: Robsjohn-Gibbings furniture installed at the House of Dolphins on the Island of Delos (left) and his Diphros stool, circa 1961
Left: an alternate version of the Klismos chair. Right: Robsjohn-Gibbings’s first offices, circa 1937
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