Designer Marcel Blondel

By Sandrine Oppliger / Interior designer & Chrisitian Geissbuhler / architect

Trained at the Richter School in Lausanne, Marcel Blondel became an interior decorator at the age of 20. His talent as a furniture designer and the quality of his interior layouts were quickly recognised. He caught the attention of the local and international intelligentsia alike, from Marcel Dassault to Pierre Cardin, from the Rothschild family to the Swiss professional classes. Thanks to his talent as a designer, Blondel was able to design a product in front of a client and then have it produced by the leading cabinet-makers of the period.

At the beginning of his career, Blondel’s work was influenced by the great French designers of the time, such as Arbus or Ruhlmann. After the war, however, he was particularly attracted to Italy. He was one of the first enthusiasts of 1950s Italian industrial production and he imported the first collections of Italian design for his new Geneva showroom.

In his interior designs from the period, today’s design classics are very much in evidence: Marco Zanuso’s Lady armchairs for Arflex, Gio Ponti’s or Max Ingrand’s lamps for Fontana Arte, and especially the now mythical P40 armchairs from the Tecno company, directed by the brilliant Osvlado Borsani, with whom Blondel would later become friends.

Geneva’s expansion in the 1950s and 60s, its spirit of modernity and growth, allowed him considerable scope for self-expression. He won numerous interior design and furniture design competitions during this period, for clients such as the ILO, the EFTA, the Danzas agencies and Geneva airport.

The seats at Geneva airport.

An international competition was launched in 1966 to provide the fittings for the waiting areas at the new Geneva air terminal. Thanks to his Italian flair and his already extensive experience of furniture design, Blondel won the mandate.

The competition jury appreciated the intelligence of the structure he proposed: a base of steel beams coated in aluminium, supporting the seats with crossbars – a rational project, a far cry from the work of the cabinetmakers of old.

In 1968, in time for the inauguration of the new terminal, the waiting areas were equipped with this new elegant modular furniture, which captured so well the spirit of the age. The seats and the metal structure were created in Italy by Saporiti – with this project, Marcel Blondel created an essential link between Italian design and Switzerland.