What I love about so many mid-century designers is how naturally they worked across disciplines, scales, mediums. They never referred to themselves as “multidisciplinary designers”, that’s just what they thought designers did. Alexander Girard has always been a prime example of this: he made fabrics and patterns, designed interiors and exteriors, toys, furniture, graphics, and more. The collection of Girard dolls I have are some of my favorite objects I own. When I saw that Todd Oldham (episode 189), had a new monograph of Girard coming out with design writer Kiera Coffee, it made sense. Oldham, too, is a multidisciplinary designer who worked across fashion, graphics, photography, and more but more than that, I senses a shared sensibility in the playfulness, the boldness, the graphic-quality of their careers. That book, Alexander Girard: Let The Sun In, is now available from Phaidon.

I asked Todd and Kiera a few questions about how they put this new book together, what surprised them about spending time in Girard’s archives, and how to put together a monograph that doesn’t flatten the designer to history. Their answers have been edited for clarity.

Todd, you’ve produced a handful of books over the last two decades on various designers but Alexander Girard’s work feels like it rhymes with your own career the most to me: multidisciplinary and expansive, playful yet formally rigorous, somehow both bold and comforting. What was your introduction to Girard and what drew you to his work? 

TO: Hi Jarrett, thanks for your questions and kind words. Mr. Girard was an astonishing artist. Most choose a more singular path in art making so to make so many commercially experienced art pieces masquerading as restaurants and airlines, along with a truly prolific private practice seems nearly impossible.

I was first introduced to Mr. Girard’s work as a kid flying on his thoroughly reimagined Braniff airline project. I didn’t really know about the idea of a designer at that time, but I sure remember the wild color combinations and the dinosaur skeleton, not kidding, that was in the DFW terminal in the 1960-70s. The orange, red, and orange-red squares of the wool woven lap blankets are still vivid in my memory and I was so happy to find one at auction a few years ago. It’s as beautiful as I remembered. Many years later I was introduced to the Girard family by a friend of my mom’s, Georgia Smith who happened to be Mr. Girard’s last assistant in Santa Fe.

This new book features over 800 images, some of which have never been published before. Tell me a bit about the process of researching, organizing, and curating a book of this scale? How do you think about creating a narrative through this research?

TO: We had the otherworldly pleasure of opening all of the Girard archives at Vitra in Weil am Rhein. We took 3 photographers and one person using 3 scanners at the same time for 10 days and we got thru maybe half of it. With Girard it is really about editing to make the 30,000+ files somehow manageable to the viewer and to not overwhelm them with all of the beauty and ingenuity.