He was a designer before being the architect of the ephemeral Grand Palais with a wooden frame or the Russian Orthodox Church with five golden domes in Paris, while waiting for the future UN headquarters in Dakar or the Center Pompidou Seoul. In fifty-five years of career, it is the first time that Jean-Michel Wilmotte, graduated in 1973 from the Camondo school in Paris, returns to the furniture, objects and lighting that have marked his creative career, in a book entitled Designpublished on March 29 by Skira editions (720 pages, 99 euros), with insights from design historian Anne Bony.
Meeting with the Academy of Fine Arts, a jovial and busy man who, managing 270 collaborators (architects, town planners, designers, museographers and interior decorators of thirty-one different nationalities), explains himself while constantly drawing “crobards”to be sure to be understood.
For a long time, you were reproached for being an architect who designed furniture and now, with this work, “Design”, you claim it. For what ?
For a long time, I was discreet about this aspect of my activity, because there was – at least at the time, in France – an insurmountable barrier between architecture and design, which does not exist in other countries. Today, mentalities are changing and the time has come to create a sort of catalog raisonné of all my furniture creations. We identified, with my team, 1,568 references, from the Palais-Royal chair in 1986 to the multicolored Laguiole knife in 2004, via the candelabra for rue Sainte-Catherine, in Bordeaux, in 2000, and the garbage can in Paris. , in 2013. And that’s not counting the ones we’ve forgotten!
It’s the furniture that made you famous in the 1980s…
Yes, furniture is what I broke into in France. As a student at Camondo, I financed my studies by renovating small studios for acquaintances. I gathered maid’s rooms: creating a pocket apartment in 25 square meters had become my specialty. The furniture had to be tailor-made, clever: it had to adapt to the height of the ceiling, that of the windows and the light. Then from two-pieces I went to three-pieces, and more.
At the beginning of 1980, the Ministry of Culture commissioned me, for the private apartments of President François Mitterrand, at the Elysée Palace, a bedroom, a dressing room, light fixtures, a sofa, bedside tables and even the firewall of the fireplace. These objects were created in 1983 in collaboration with the Mobilier national research and creation workshop. It was a springboard: then followed the headquarters of the Superior Council of the Judiciary in 1983, the French Embassy in Washington in 1984, the Grenier à sel in Avignon in 1989 and a number of buildings in Nîmes, such as the Opéra-Théâtre and the Museum of Fine Arts.
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