WATER URNS
[Floor and Wall Models / Smokers Accessories]
[Habitat Incorporated] Paul Mayén
[Habitat Incorporated] Paul Mayén: WATER URNS [Floor and Wall Models / Smokers Accessories]. New York: Habitat Incorporated, September 1966. Original edition [Catalog #50013 / AIA File 28 B]. Saddle stitched booklet with three ring binder holes [as issued]. 8 pp. 21 black and white photographs and diagrams. Designs and specifications. A very good copy.
8.5 x 11 specification brochure with 8 pages devoted to the line of Paul Mayen-designed Trexiloy ashtrays [aka sand urns] for Habitat. Graphic design by William Eng and photography by John Ebstel. Curatorial information includes model names, finishes, and dimensions.
Paul Mayén (Spain, 1918 – 2000) was an Architect and Industrial designer, founder of Habitat, Intrex and Architectural Supplements, Inc. and perhas most famous for his design of the Visitor's Center at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.
Mayén was trained in New York City, first studying painting at the Art Students League and later earning a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the Cooper Union and a Master’s degree from Columbia. He also taught courses in advertising design at the Cooper Union and New School. Several of Mayéns works are in the permanent collection of the Industrial Design department at the Museum of Modern Art.
In the early 1950s, Mayén met a fellow art student, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., with whom he would share his life until Edgar’s death in 1989. Edgar’s father was the founder of Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh; it was his father who commissioned Wright to build the now-famous vacation house for his friends and family near a waterfall in rural Pennsylvania. In 1955, Edgar inherited the property and Paul and he visited the site together on mountain retreats until the property was entrusted to a conservation in 1963.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Kaufmann worked in the Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art where many of Paul’s lamps, tables, and other furniture remain on permanent exhibit. Another of Paul’s pieces, a red cubical sculpture, is on display on the coffee table in Fallingwater’s living room.
In 1956, Kaufmann and Mayén assisted I.N. and Bernadine Hagan in choosing the furniture for the Hagan’s Frank Lloyd Wright house at the architect’s suggestion. In 1959, Paul designed the jacket of a book about Wright, Drawings for a Living Architecture, which was edited by Giuseppe Samonà.
In 1970, shortly after the first Earth Day, Mayén became an outspoken critic of the growing American habit of buying expendable plastic furniture that was used for only a few years and then thrown away. He claimed that the economic success of plastic furniture relied on the producers creating a mentality among consumers that the items were durable enough to last but cheap enough to replace.
From 1979 to 1981, Mayén oversaw the building of the Fallingwater pavilion which houses a café, gift store, and visitor’s center. When Edgar Jr. died, Paul scattered his ashes at Fallingwater. He died in 2000 and also had his ashes scattered there.