Justin McGuirk on designDesignThe unconventional furniture designs of Ernö Goldfinger – a man better known for his architecture – are a revelation. Which is why Ryan Gander's new art exhibition aims to bring them to lightHidden in the basement of a terraced house on the Kingsland Road in east London, behind a black metal door, is a gallery called The Russian Club. Currently showing there is an enigmatic little exhibition entitled Ernö Goldfinger v Groucho Marx. It consists chiefly of a few plastic stools strewn across the floor, some photocopied pages taped to the walls and a large piece of wooden furniture that's not easy to categorise: a shallow, open cabinet in the shape of a picture frame. Inside this glassless vitrine is a collection of monochrome objects – books with no titles, pictures depicting nothing and a few inscrutable spheres. You could be forgiven for scratching your head.
The show is a collaboration between the designer Michael Marriott and the artist Ryan Gander. Marriott supplied the stools and a document listing some of the design objects that are significant to him – by and large they are irreducible classics by the likes of Achille Castiglioni and Jasper Morrison, with a few humble household objects thrown in. Gander supplied the wooden vitrine and his own document, a transcript of one of his lectures in which he creates a series of free associations that take in everything from John Wayne to the Marx brothers to the modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger.
At first, I couldn't see the connection between the works on display, or between Marriott and Gander, even though there's a clue in the exhibition's title. It turns out to be Goldfinger, the architect of the once despised, now desirable Trellick Tower in Notting Hill – and the man whose name Ian Fleming borrowed for his most single-minded baddie. Marriott and Gander have both been inspired at various points in their careers by Goldfinger's house in Hampstead, 2 Willow Road. It's not the architecture that fascinates them so much as the furniture and fittings, most of which Goldfinger designed himself. In fact the only colour photograph in the exhibition depicts Goldfinger's dining table, a white lino top mounted on the base of a piece of industrial machinery. Intrigued, I decided to pay a visit to Willow Road.
Now managed by the National Trust, Goldfinger's house is the middle one in a row of three that he built on the edge of Hampstead Heath in 1939. He was 37. Born in Budapest, he'd spent the 20s immersed in the avant-garde world of Paris, where he'd studied with Auguste Perret and befriended Charlotte Perriand, Max Ernst and Lee Miller. He moved to London in 1934 with his new wife, Ursula Blackwell of the Crosse & Blackwell food empire. It was Ursula's money that paid for Willow Road – and gave Goldfinger the chance to show off his architectural skills. They spent it wisely, bookending their own house with one to sell off and one to rent out.
From the outside, the modern brick terrace does not appear hugely radical. This is somewhat deceptive, as the houses are supported on cylindrical concrete cores that allow for extremely open, flexible interiors. Goldfinger was an early proponent of open-plan living, deploying foldable partition walls to double the size of a room. But while there is much to write about the house architecturally, it is Goldfinger the designer I am curious about. His buildings, from Trellick Tower in the west to its twin, Balfron Tower, in the east, are exhaustively documented. By contrast, he is almost absent from the history of furniture design – chiefly because he never had any commercial success in that department. Yet the Willow Road house reveals a clever, pragmatic designer who was ahead of his time.
From the moment you enter the house, you can sense Goldfinger's obsessive attention to detail and his unconventional colliding of materials. At the end of the entrance hall is a spiral staircase with concrete steps and an elegant brass handrail. But what does Goldfinger use to thread through the balustrade? A stretch of old rope. It's an idiosyncratic, oddly rustic detail in this refined modernist setting, and one that sets the tone for what follows.
Upstairs, in the living room, I experience a jolt of recognition. There it is, the wooden vitrine that Gander recreated for the exhibition, except here the books and pictures are real rather than ciphers. This framed screen, a device often used by the surrealists for displaying objects, acts as a giant TV, and certainly befits the space better than the clapped-out 80s Sony skulking in the corner. It is the centrepiece in a world almost entirely of Goldfinger's design. There are bent plywood chairs, wood-and-leather safari chairs originally made for Lee Miller in Paris, tubular steel dining chairs, ribbed-glass uplighters and a desk with pivoting drawers. All of these were designed with production in mind, but his only commercial products were a series of storage units and the toys he designed for the Abbatt toy company.
So why talk about Goldfinger's design at all? Because in one aspect – and no doubt unconsciously – he was oddly prescient. Goldfinger had a talent for incorporating readymades into his furniture. The rectangular dining table is brilliantly juxtaposed with its cast-iron machine base. Right next to it is a sideboard that, instead of legs, uses two steel I-beam cut-offs for feet. In these pieces, Goldfinger lets the language of industry and construction into the home. Elsewhere, you suspect, he is simply being resourceful. When he wanted a side cabinet, he took a standard upright one and turned it on its side. He created an adjustable shelving system by drilling holes in gas piping and using steel rods as pegs – Ikea couldn't make it any simpler. Bedside lights? How about two Anglepoise desk lamps bolted to the wall.
This is a far cry from the perfectionist language of high modernist furniture, the squeaky chrome and leather of Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and Le Corbusier, with their emphasis on original forms. Conventional design history normally introduces readymade furniture in the 1950s, when Castiglioni started turning tractor seats into chairs and car headlights into lamps. Perhaps Goldfinger, who was in the circle of the surrealists in the 1920s, was channelling Duchamp and Isidore Ducasse, or perhaps he was simply a witty, observant talent, like Castiglioni after him. Goldfinger may have been a commercial failure as a furniture designer, but I left Willow Road wondering whether he might not be the missing link connecting the early modernist masters and their post-modernist successors.
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