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> Lanky, gable-nosed, Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings, proprietor of an elegant Madison Avenue furniture studio, is the author of a peg-legged, web-seated chair, which some fellow experts consider the finest of its kind. Robsjohn-Gibbings (pronounced the way it is spelled) has spent years fashioning tricky, glass-topped tables and elegant gadgets for the Park Avenue trade. Now he wants to design furniture for the workingman. A learned, articulate, 38-year-old U.S. citizen who settled in Manhattan in 1936, Robsjohn-Gibbings has made a careful study of furniture from Ancient Egypt to the present. "The Greeks," he was amazed to learn, "made a good chair design and used it for 500 years. They said, 'Now we have a good chair; let's get on to other things. Let's study philosophy.' The world has not made a more beautiful chair since then." The trouble with contemporary furniture, he declares, is too much variety of design. Says he: "Furniture should be standardized the way cars, refrigerators or telephones are standardized. You don't worry whether you have a Louis XVI kitchen or not."
The three designers turn out furniture that looks very different, but they are furiously united on one point: their detestation of the reproductions and pseudo-antiques now being turned out by the big furniture manufacturers and bought by the public. Says Robsjohn-Gibbings:
"It is tragic to see a vast movement like contemporary architecture gaining in strength and beauty, and becoming an absolute part of our lives, while the entire commercial furniture industry, which should have been a part of this development, has completely failed to grasp the significance of it. Standardization of design has already given you the most beautiful bathrooms and kitchens the world has ever seen. It has given you the best automobiles, the best planes and . . . the best-dressed women in the world. And now standardization is going to do the same thing for your entire house, and make your life a better one to live."