Parijs, Frankrijk (1929)

Roger Tallon
b. 1929 Paris

Roger Tallon studied electrical engineering in Paris from 1947 to 1949 and then worked as a designer at Studio Avas from 1951 to 1953. He met the industrial designer and theoretician Jacques Viénot (1893--1959) in 1953, and subsequently joined the design consultancy Technès, where he became manager of research in 1960.

While there, Tallon designed numerous innovative products, including cameras for SEM (1957 & 1961), a typewriter for Japy (1960), a portable television for Téléavia (1963), the Module 400 furniture range (1964) and a polished aluminium modular spiral staircase for Lacloche (1966), drinking glasses for Daum (1970) and the Chronograph X watch for LIP (1973). He also worked as a consultant designing Frigidaire refrigerators for General Motors from 1957 to 1964. He began teaching at ENSAD (École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in 1963 and established the multi-disciplinary design consultancy, Design Programmes SA in 1973. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Tallon acquired an international repu-tation for his transportation design, which included work for Mexico City's underground system (1969) and the Corail locomotive (1977) for SNCF.

In 1983, he co-founded the design partnership, ASDA+Partners with Pierre Paulin and Michel Schreiber (b. 1950), and continued designing trains including the high-speed TGV-Atlantique (1988) for SNCF and the Trans-Euro-Star shuttle for Euro-Tunnel (1987). In 1973, he was elected an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry in London, and in 1985 was awarded the French National Grand Prix for industrial design. Tallon is one of France's foremost industrial designers and his highly engineered designs are both materially and structurally innovative. [one media]

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