Living Design: The Writings of Clara Porset gathers short articles by a largely unsung Cuban-born interior and furniture designer, many translated into English for the first time. Initially published in Cuba and Mexico between 1930 and 1965, the pieces are framed here by short editorial introductory essays from contemporary academics.

Like many affluent Cubans of her time, Clara Porset studied abroad in early twentieth-century New York and Paris, where she encountered modernism in its myriad forms and became an early and impassioned advocate of interior design. She was loath to call this new field “interior decoration,” arguing that the term diminished this work’s artful shaping of light and space. 

Porset’s writing indexes a particular moment, a shift in aesthetic sensibilities as “art” came to be recognized in visual formats beyond painting and sculpture. As mass production grew, objects needed to be deliberately “designed” for manufacturing, changing the perception of this work from traditional craftsmanship to industrial creation. The arrangement of commodities in space also began to take on an artistic heft. Thus Porset, very much a product of this moment, was being intellectually bold when she proclaimed that “there is design in everything” – because, by this new sensibility that recognized intention in any act of creation, it suddenly was.

Her writing style is informal, even chatty, unpacking architecture, furniture design, and domestic space with spare, mostly unadorned prose. In the essays introducing each section, the volume’s editors do a good job of framing Porset’s work and significance for today’s reader. 

That said, the stridency of her once-novel takes makes it hard for some of her early essays to resonate with a contemporary audience that now takes the values she argued for as a given. It’s not necessary, for example, to convince anyone today that furniture can be beautiful as well as comfortable, or that industrial production can accommodate folk art aesthetics. Even when she’s attempting to be playful, her pedagogical arguments occasionally grate, as in the short essay outlining the “rules” of salon furniture placement, where she delves  in some detail into which configurations of chair-couch-coffee table do and do not work. Her work is stronger when she writes about her contemporaries, from high-profile architects like Walter Gropius to lesser-known specialists like metalsmith Edgar Brandt or Brazilian rug weaver Da Silva Bruhns, with a care and attention that betrays a sprawling curiosity.  

Some of Porset’s writing about the social role of design still feels relevant, especially her thinking on the connections between folk craftsmanship, regionalism, and the role of mass design in domestic life. She was an early and vocal advocate for the value of local Indigenous design practices. Much of her later furniture creation practice, for example, consisted of iterating on traditional Mexican forms like the butaque, the low-slung ergonomic chair that’s most strongly associated with Porset’s legacy several decades after her death. 

This collection gathers Porset’s oeuvre into a single volume; however most readers won’t need a collection this complete. Some of her essays offer insights that might intrigue anyone who’s interested in design history, but the bulk of the book would appeal more to readers with a deeper intellectual investment in the history of interior design or Mexican and Caribbean modernism. 

That said, the framing essays by the book’s editors and guest contributors do an excellent job of situating Porset’s enduring significance. While she may not be a household name, even among those who follow interior architecture and furniture design, this collection will surely help to enshrine the legacy of this early twentieth-century female public intellectual and leader in an emerging field, many of whose perspectives have proven quite timeless.mRb