Pierre Paulin

Born in Paris in 1927, Pierre Paulin spent his childhood in Laon, France, where he learned his passion for design from his great-uncle Freddy Stoll, a sculptor, and his uncle Georges Paulin, a car designer (Bentley, Rolls Royce, etc.) and inventor of the convertible coupé cabriolet based on a 1927 Peugeot model. He became a student at the Camondo School in 1951, and in 1953 he was successful with the Salon des arts ménagers and began a collaboration with Thonet France. Paulin's influences were Scandinavian furniture and the American productions of Charles Eames and Florence Knoll. In 1958, the Maastricht-based furniture company Artifort decided to focus on contemporary furniture and assembled a team of designers, including Pierre Paulin, to develop a range of chairs for Artifort from 1960 to 1970, made of moulded wooden shells filled with Pirelli foam and covered with prefabricated covers in stretch fabric, in soft, rounded shapes and bright colours. In 1961, Pierre Paulin designed the Foyer des Artistes at the Maison de la Radio, and in 1969, he won the Chicago Design Award for the Ribbon Chair, a chair whose shape evokes that of a folded ribbon whose curve forms the backrest.In 1970, Pierre Paulin participated in the design of the French pavilion of honour at the Osaka World Fair. He presented the Amphys sofa, consisting of a base that could be adjusted by the metre, onto which foam strips covered with stretch fabric could be clipped according to the desired length (6 metres maximum). Between 1968 and 1972, Pierre Paulin took part in the fitting out of the Denon wing of the Louvre Museum. In 1971, President Pompidou commissioned him to fit out his private flats at the Élysée Palace: dining room, smoking room, picture room, etc. In 1975, Pierre Paulin founded the design agency ADSA+Partners with Maïa Wodzislawska and Marc Lebailly, which Roger Tallon and Michel Schreiber joined in 1984. He designed the first garden chairs in synthetic resin for Allibert and participated in the design of a new range of products for Calor/Tefal. 1986, he was commissioned to design Airbus aircraft for Air Inter. 1987, Pierre Paulin was awarded the national grand prize for industrial creation. In 1995, Havas Euro RSCG (which had acquired his agency ADSA) “retired” him with the elegance that traditionally befits advertisers.in 2005, Habitat asked him to put two of his chairs in its catalogues: he regained a taste for product design and has been working with Magis, Perimeter and especially Roset since 2006, to reintroduce several old models revisited by new techniques and improved comfort. Pierre Paulin's chairs are included in the collections of MoMA in New York, the Fonds national d'art contemporain, the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, etc…