Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Thanks to Google Alert, I got this Instagram photo of the LC2 (Le Corbusier #2) chair in concrete by Swiss designer Stefan Zwicky:

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(You know what they say: gay hairdressers are as common as Zwickys in Switzerland.)

On the chair, then a little bit on SZ.

The LC2 chair was designed by Le Corbusier in 1928 and is widely available from many sources, in a variety of materials and colors for the cushions and frame. For example, from the Cassina site, this copy in black leather and polished stainless steel:

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On to SZ: He was born in Zürich in 1952 and now has his offices there. On his website, he describes himself as an architect / interior architect (rather than as a designer, much less interior designer) and displays his memberships in the BSA (Association of Swiss Architects) and  SIA (Swiss Engineers and Architects).

[Digression: there’s a linguistic point here: The label interior architect has connotations of deep seriousness, while interior designer has connotations of superficiality, even triviality: an interior designer picks a color scheme, chooses curtains and wallpaper and furniture, deploys cushions, potted plants and objets d’art, and so on, but an interior architect is a serious artist, creator, and engineer, not just a shopper. It’s a fine line, though. In his role as the designer of his favorite Zürich bar, the Café Schwarzenbach, SZ made a series of such choices, but he saw those as implementational details for a master plan:

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The Schwarzenbach design on display.

There are plenty of other contrasts of this sort: for instance, a hairdresser merely cuts hair, but (at least as some people see these things) a hair stylist is an artist, the creator of a concept.]

[Another linguistic point. By reading various SZ sites in German, I discovered this nice German word, which has more information in it than its usual English translation: Lebenspartnerin ‘female life partner’ (SZ has one, and she lives in Luzern) — feminine in its grammatical gender, female in its gender reference, both pieces of information carried by the derivational suffix –in.]

A nice head shot of SZ, looking identifiably Swiss (if you know how to judge such things):

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This entry was posted on February 24, 2016 at 12:46 am and is filed under Art, Names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.