The original of the photograph has been lost, but the workshop manager Jérôme Bescond has carefully preserved a photocopy. The craftsman is seen there, very young and all smiles, in overalls, posing next to designer Pierre Paulin, white shirt and hair. In front of them, an armchair that they had made together. It was the year 2000, and the septuagenarian designer was tired, but he always came early in the morning. “He was the eye and I was his hand,” slips Jérôme Bescond. For weeks, they had corrected the curve of the furniture, checked that the feel of the material was ideal. Around, in the workshop, everyone looked at Pierre Paulin, with a mixture of respect and familiarity.
The man who died in 2009 was then one of the greatest designers of the century, exhibited around the world. And it was here, between these walls, that he designed many of his tables, chairs, sofas, here that he partly invented his curvaceous style, in this room where the noise of the machines drowns out conversations, where samples of materials litter the ground. “My father felt at home surrounded by artisans, explains his son, Benjamin Paulin, he did not think of luxury, but of manual labor. He had found a refuge. »
Jérôme Bescond, 45 years old, today runs what was Pierre Paulin’s lair: the Research and Creation Workshop (ARC), a few rooms, on the ground floor and in the basement, of the immense reinforced concrete building from 13e district of Paris where Mobilier national is located, a few steps from the Manufacture des Gobelins. Upstairs is the headquarters of this public establishment, a state storage facility. Reserves of desks, tables and even armchairs are stored there from which employees of ministries, large public institutions or embassies come to draw. There, we take inventory of Louis-Philippe chests of drawers, we renovate tapestries, and we wonder how to enrich the collections.
The ARC is apart. It is a workshop, as its name suggests, where designers, young or old, famous or not, come to work with a dozen civil servant artisans. Together, they imagine furniture. Since 1964, when the ARC was founded, more than one thousand two hundred. Some creations remain unknown, and their unique copy is found somewhere in the corridor of a ministry. Others become famous, to the point that we often forget that they were imagined here.
Thus the benches of the Louvre Museum, designed by Pierre Paulin, which welcome millions of exhausted visitors each year. Or the salons of the Elysée, imagined by the same Pierre Paulin at the request of President Georges Pompidou then François Mitterrand. The list is long, very long, in fact: the Cryptogamme stools by Roger Tallon, round like electric light bulbs; the Montreal armchairs by Olivier Mourgue, sold in furniture stores, and copied all over the world; the Orria chairs by Patrick Jouin for the Oval Room of the newly renovated National Library of France (BNF), rue de Richelieu; the new France services terminals, everywhere in the country; lighting fixtures, consoles, chaise lounges… All designed here.
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