Pierre Chareau

French designer and architect Pierre Chareau is something of enigma. Outside of his work, he left little writing that tells of his personality or even his design beliefs. La Maison de Verre (the Glass House), Chareau's most celebrated work, does little to dispel the mystery of its creator. Completed in 1932, the house is clearly born of his modernist grounding, but its amalgamation of styles - Moorish, Andalusian, Japanese, even nautical - is a distinct departure from the movement and even from Chareau's main body of work. Like his contemporaries Mies Van Der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, it is believed that Chareau bypassed a traditional education and instead learned his metier on the job, working for a noted British design firm. He first exhibited at the 1919 Paris Salon d'Automne. From then on he became a fixture in the Parisian salon circuit, forming close associations with other artists and writers such as Raoul Dufy and Max Jacob, whose surreal sensibility may have informed some...