Peter Graham Harnden was born in London in 1913, where his father, a member of the United States diplomatic corps, was stationed. After living in England, Spain, Germany and Switzerland, he began his architecture studies at Yale University, where he showed a great interest in set design and assembly design. He made frequent trips to Italy, California and Mexico, and in 1938 he founded the Group Studio in Los Angeles, a gallery dedicated to organizing exhibitions on art, architecture, and design. During World War II, he enlisted in the US Army and was assigned to the Information Service deployed in Europe. After the war, he remained in Germany at the Office of Military Government, United States as the head of the exhibitions and presentations programme. In 1949, he was appointed director of the ECA’s Visual Information Unit, a centre installed in the US Embassy in Paris charged with disseminating the Marshall Plan through various exhibitions, publications, and audiovisual productions.

In the following years, Harnden was responsible for the planning, organization, and design of the main US exhibitions that toured Europe touting the advantages of the Marshall Plan, the history of the birth of NATO, and the advantages of productivity. As the leader of an international team of professionals, he was in charge of a number of exhibitions including “Europe builds” (1950), “Caravan of Peace” (1952), “Train of Europe” (1952), “Productivity” (1952) and “Barges” (1952), in addition to setting up various fixed exhibitions such as “Wir Bauen ein Besseres Leben” (1952) and organizing a series of exhibitions aimed at disseminating the benefits of atomic energy. Starting in 1955, Harnden took over the design of the United States’ pavilions for European trade fairs. In 1956, in Orgeval, together with one of his most prominent collaborators, the Italian architect Lanfranco Bombelli, he founded PGHA Peter Graham Harnden Associates, an “international office of architects and technicians specialized in visual advertising and industrial aesthetics.” In the years that followed, they developed, as independent professionals, more than 400 exhibitions that were presented in major European cities. This included the pavilions designed for fairs in Valencia (1955), Barcelona (1955, 1956, 1957), and Madrid (1959), where the rationalist style left an impression on the general public, and especially local professionals, who noted the advantages of the dry construction, the efficiency of the assembly, and the visual possibilities of the advertising.

In 1959, Harnden and Bombelli visited Cadaqués, “the only beautiful town left in Spain”, on the recommendation of Josep Antoni Coderch. Fascinated by the landscape, the geography and the exuberant cultural and social atmosphere in this authentic “island” on the Mediterranean, they decided to buy and renovate Villa Gloria. Very shortly after, in 1962, they settled in Barcelona and founded Harnden & Bombelli. From that point forward, they combined commissions for exhibition designs with other projects of different kinds, notably, a series of homes in Spain, remarkable for their adaptation to the surroundings and an insightful reading of popular tradition, coded through modern values ​​and nuanced by Harnden’s Californian influence as well as Bombelli’s Swiss-based Italianizing take. In the area of Cadaqués, they renovated various row houses in the centre of the town, including Villa Gloria (1959), Casa Staempfli (1960), the House (1961-1962) and Studio (1964-1966) for the sculptor Mary Callery, and the Bombelli House (1961). They also planned a series of new single-family homes in the surrounding area, such as the Bourdeaux-Groult House (1961-1962) and the Fasquelle House (1968-1971), among others, and developed multi-family buildings such as the Pianc Apartments (1963-1964). Other projects worth remarking, in other parts of Spain, include the De Croisset House (Malaga, 1959-1961), the Parsons House (Benissa, Alicante, 1964-1965) and the Metternich House (Daimiel, Ciudad Real, 1970-1973). In just a decade, the work of Harnden and Bombelli established an unprecedented and enriching dialogue between modernity and the Mediterranean tradition, in a kind of Westinghouse regionalism that alternated between passionate respect for the landscape and traditional construction, and the uninhibited display of a certain sense of comfort. Artificially traditional and designed with the sole purpose of going unnoticed, these houses are like exhibitions, organized around genuinely democratic living rooms centred on the ancestral fire of the hearth. On the whole, Harnden and Bombelli’s career, cut short in 1971 by Harnden’s untimely death, constitutes to this day a unique architectural trajectory that unexpectedly cuts across modernity thanks to an unprecedented concurrence between the conditions imposed by the Cold War and the desire to reconnect with an enduring Mediterranean tradition.

Biography by Julio Garnica

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