Creators

Vladimir Kagan

(1927- )

“Chairs are uniquely the best expression of design. They encompass more of the challenges by which I live and work than any other single component of furniture.”
-Vladimir Kagan

"Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, I hear them all at once. What a delight this is! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream."
-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Until now, this column – so accurately named Creators for its focus on the lives and work of the legions of individualist, visionary, groundbreaking furniture and interior designers, architects and craftspersons – has been a column without a voice. That is to say, it has been a column that writes of “one” (rather than “he,” “she,” or “I”), with utmost respect for its subjects; the rarified, elevated collective whose non-conformist, unrestrained, wonderfully eccentric and often profound visions have changed the way we see and experience the world in which we live.

Thus it was with the same respect, though in this instance fueled by the singularity of the moment, that the column’s author picked up the telephone and called Vladimir Kagan.

Vladimir Kagan: Living legend, modern master, magician of imagination, the virtuoso of modern furniture-making.

When Kagan called her “my darling” as he greeted her, she was smitten beyond. “Tell me everything!” she wanted to shout, yet restrained herself. “Tell me about your beautiful book,” she began. “Why did you write it?”

“It’s called The Complete Kagan,” he answered, “but it’s really the abridged version. It would have been seven hundred pages long otherwise. One reason is to help once and for all to identify and separate all the “Kaganesque” designs attributed to me that are not mine.”

“You remember so much from your early life in Worms-on-Rhine,” she said. “Learning to swim in the river at the age of three, your teacher walking along the boardwalk above attached to you by a fishing rod. And there’s that photo of you and your father, crossing the frozen Rhine. You even describe what looked like a tea sieve when given ether before having your tonsils removed. That’s a tremendous amount of detail for such a little boy.”

“I know. It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Vladimir replied.

“You even still have the drawings of the Nazi soldiers and swastikas you made when you were nine years old,” she said. “And that you were able to save them when your family had to finally flee Germany before being deported is even more amazing – aside from the fact that you all made it out alive.”

“We were lucky,” Vladimir said.

Lucky, a slight word to describe an exodus that led the family to New York in 1938, and Vladimir’s father, Illi Kagan, to find work with James Mont, a Greek furniture designer. Earlier in his own life, Illi had aspired to be a sculptor and apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker at the age of fourteen, later marrying Vladimir’s mother, a tomboy with film star looks, who was eighteen years younger.

So began the long-held European tradition of a son following in his father’s footsteps when Vladimir became a young man. He studied architecture at Columbia University at night while learning to work with wood at his father’s cabinetry shop. And always, Vladimir drew. The river. Branches. The park. Leaves. We need only look at his work to see the lines of nature everywhere in it.

“Tell me more about that quote. The one that opens your book – about chairs being the best expression of design.”

“Well, an architect can have a lot of fun. We can talk about Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry – they can do these outrageous things with their buildings, but they don’t have to function. They just have to be spectacular. A chair has to function. That’s the most complicated thing to create, something you can sit on, something pretty to look at, not just a piece of sculpture, but it also has to be very uniquely functional, which prescribes very limited rules. The dimensions of a human body predetermine what the chair should look like. And if it deviates too much from that it ain’t going to be comfortable.

“And so that to me is the challenge and it’s also… enchanting in a way. It’s like writing a piece of music. You go to Mozart or Vivaldi and all their beautiful music and you see who can do a piece of music subsequently… and it would never come out as good as Mozart. In other words, when you achieve something good it’s very hard to improve on it. I certainly admire people that come up with great chairs that are different and that still fulfill the functional aspect and then qualify as a work of art, a piece of sculpture, but primarily quality as a functional utility.”

“Is there anyone designing today you can name who does that?”

“Ron Arad. He’s an Israeli architect and he’s brilliant! Not everything he does is totally comfortable but it’s exquisite – it comes out like a beautiful piece of music. I can speak more about architects I like than furniture designers,” Vladimir laughs.

“If you look at the eighteenth-century furniture – if you look at Chippendale – it reaches a prime of perfection in elegance, in function, in use of materials. And we all try to build on that to create something modern and something different but it still has to fit the primary purpose of being comfortable. To me, the challenge I took… a Chippendale, when they designed furniture for people in hoop skirts and silk stockings, it was a different kind of sitting. You sat upright, people were shorter than they are today and we have to encompass the new lifestyles and new proportions of the human body. We are six inches taller than we were two hundred years ago – and fifty pounds fatter! All of that plays into it.”

“Let’s go back to the preface in your book for a moment. Tom Ford wrote of how your furniture changes the landscape of a room – that you’re an architect as much as a sculptor. You seem to be a person that never stops.”

“I can’t stop! When I’m really enjoying what I’m doing I can’t stop. We have a small twenty-two foot sailboat. It’s very wet and it’s very uncomfortable – and we race! But to me, at this stage in my life, the most important piece of furniture – let’s qualify that – the most comfortable piece of furniture, is my bed. At the end of the day when my back hurts and it’s exhausting, that is the best piece of furniture I own. A good comfortable bed is everything.”