The Designers of Herman Miller by kmak

The Designers of

Herman Miller Donald Albrecht

Split upholstery Armshells with contract and four-leg bases Photo 1976

The Designers of

Herman Miller

Donald Albrecht

MIT Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Designers of Herman Miller/Donald Albrecht.

Design by Kristen Mackay. Set in Rockwell and Avenir LT. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Albrecht, Donald.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7643-1119-3 1. Miller, Herman. 2. Furniture—United States. 3. Designers—United States. I. Title. NK1412.E18K57 2010 745.4´4922—dc 20 94-24920 CIP

Contents

3 7

Acknowledgements Introduction

13 15 77 121

Part 1: Designers of mid-century classics Chapter 1 Charles and Ray Eames Chapter 2 George Nelson Chapter 3 Isamu Noguchi

125 127 133 143 149 155 161

Part Two: Designers of other Herman Miller classics—past, present, and future Chapter 4 Gilbert Rohde Chapter 5 Alexander Girard Chapter 6 Robert Propst Chapter 7 Jack Kelley Chapter 8 Don Chadwick Chapter 9 Bill Stumpf

165 167 173 179 191

Chapter 10 Tom Newhouse Chapter 11 Geoff Hollington Chapter 12 Bruce Burdick Chapter 13 Stephen Frykholm Chapter 14 Other Designers: Paul László Fritz Haller Poul Kjaerholm Verner Panton Jorgen Rasmussen Peter Protzmann Ray Wilkes Tom Edwards 203 Conclusion 209 Bibliography 215 Index

Introduction

Herman Miller Furniture

Leslie Piña

I used to work at home on an uncomfortable old chair, probably from a dining set, in front of a 1950s blond wood desk that did not accommodate a computer and keyboard. It is too difficult to part with the desk, but I recently brought home an Eames Soft Pad Chair with polished aluminum arms and frame, cushioned leather upholstery, a seat with adjustable height that tilts back and swivels, and a sturdy four-pronged pedestal with wheels (I also discovered an ingenious keyboard stand called a Scooter). My husband Ramon looked at the chair, sat down, stood up, sat down again and said, ‘This is a wonderful desk chair.” Then he looked at it again and added, “It’s also beautiful. We could use it just as well in the family room or even the living room.” (He probably forgot that the living room is never used, except occasionally as

a cut-through). Then it hit me why the chair was considered a classic and why it is included in a very distinctive catalog of the “Herman Miller for the Home” line of furnishings. The perception of designers, manufacturers, dealers, and other people who talk about furniture is that there are two disparate categories — contract and residential. Contract furniture is for the workplace and public places away from home; residential furniture, as the name denotes, is for the home. In other words, one is for places where people work, and the other is for places where people live. In the United States (more than in Europe) there is little crossover. To keep this segregation clear, even the styles differ. For the most part, twentieth-century residential furniture has been, and still is, based on historic styles. Even

as we approach the threshold of the millennium, it is no more surprising to see a room filled with uninspired wannabe eighteenth-century lookalikes than it is to see state-of-the-art electronics perched on them. Americans have an uncanny capacity for accepting visual and cultural anomalies. Modernism, the creation of new forms with a conscious effort to avoid historic style and redundant ornament, has found wider acceptance in the area of contract furniture than residential. Even in the early twentieth-century, office furniture, though basically without style, was designed to be utilitarian. The attempt at function was a carry-over from the mechanical inventions called â&#x20AC;&#x153;patent furnitureâ&#x20AC;? in the Victorian era, and it took precedence over style and decoration. After the Second World War, the really alert designers

began to introduce inspired forms of truly functional furniture that even looked original. It was designed from the inside out, and it could be appreciated from the outside in. Plus, it could be mass produced and marketed for huge populations of people in the workplace who suddenly needed furniture to accommodate new ways of doing business and better systems for organizing information. Inspired by what had been perceived as a handful of pre-war tubular steel Bauhaus prototypes and other austere eccentricities, it was the beginning of a revolution. With super-designers and thinkers like George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames on board, Herman Miller was suddenly in the process of reinventing itself and modern furniture. Then in 1968 with the debut of Robert Probstâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Action Office, the first open office system 8

Charles & Ray Eames Chapter One

Pat Kirkham

Much of the Eamesesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; work stands in the best tradition of the design reform movement (which argued for making high-quality everyday objects available at reasonable prices), and also in the best tradition of modernism (which, from the 1920s on, offered a vision of harnessing new technologies, industrial production, and relevant design to the service of humankind). Charles and Ray Eames belonged to a generation of designers who, before, during, and immediately after World War II, were determined to make the world a better place in which to live but were not wedded to a narrow or solely stylistic definition of modernism. Without ever losing sight of their serious objectives, the Eameses brought to their products a lightness of spirit that, to a degree, disguised their commitment and dedication. Their furniture, 16

their films, and their exhibitions delighted the eye, the mind, and the spirit; they also worked well. The Eameses’ work was often innovative, although they always insisted that designers should innovate only as a last resort.1 They reveled in the particular constraints of specific briefs and in the rationalistic search for the best possible solution to the problem at hand, yet they produced work that has been described as poetic. If, as Frank Lloyd Wright said, the poetry of architecture

Sofa, arm chairs, and love seat

is that which touches the heart,2 then it is not difficult to understand why Paul Schrader and others have referred to the work of the Eameses in that way.3 It was not simply their liberal use of hearts and flowers, their direct appeal to what they perceived as universal truths and the inner humanity of people the world over, or even the power of their ideas and the exquisiteness and affectivity of their compositions and imagery that made many of their products so memorable; as in a

1.Charles Eames/ Virginia Stith, 1977. 2.Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (London, 1977), p. 362. 3.Paul Schrader,“Poetry of ideas,” Film Quarterly, spring 1970, p. 10. See also Blueprints for Modern Living, p. 52.

Preliminary drawing for Eames ganging stacking shell chair showing measurements and details. 1955

symphony, the whole was much more than the sum of the parts. In their passion to convey their enthusiasm to others, the Eameses “shaped not only things but the way people think about things.” 4 Their films, exhibitions, and multi-screen presentations show them to have been at the forefront of new thinking about the most effective and pleasurable ways of communicating knowledge to large numbers of people. Their exhibitions and multiple-image shows, in particular, reached large and largely appreciative audiences. Their design work was respected by the cognoscenti and, at the same time, popular in the sense of being seen, used, enjoyed, and admired by many. In this they achieved the modernist designer’s dream of enriching the lives of ordinary people with quality

4.Walter McQuade, “Charles Eames isn’t resting on his chair,” Fortune, February 1975, p. 98. 18

DCW (dining chair, wood)

and LCW (lounge chair, wood) Painted molded plywood Photo 1981 by Bill Sharpe

Split upholstery Armshells with contract and four-leg bases Photo 1976

“La Chaise”. Fiberglas, iron rods, and wood. Two thin fiberglass shells are glued together and separated by a hard rubber disc, and the resulting cavity is filled with styrene. Designed in 1948, it was not produced until 1990, by Vitra.

objects produced by means of the most up-todate technology. The multifarious influences on the Eameses’ work, including ideas drawn from the Arts and Crafts movement, from Frank Lloyd Wright, from European modernism, from Japanese architecture and design, from “primitivism,” from contemporary fine art, from the “Romantic” interior, from Californian modernism, and from a belief in the pleasures of work, have been traced. No matter what the sources, the end result was invariably distinctive and informed by a concern with structure; for the Eameses, designing a chair, an exhibition, a film, or the front page of a newspaper was as

much about structure as was designing a building. Despite this, there was not a single aesthetic formula that related to every area of their work; the architecture, for instance, favored the geometric forms of International Style modernism, whereas a great deal of the furniture was more plastic in form. Their buildings and many of their furniture pieces were minimalist, yet their films, multi-screen presentations, exhibitions, toys, and decorative arrangements of objects drew on addition, juxtaposition, fragmentation, crosscultural and extra-cultural reference, repetition, and excess. However, as Esther McCoy has pointed out, the interaction between the mini-

5. Esther McCoy, “Charles and Ray Eames,” Design Quarterly 98/99 (1974 –75), p. 29. There is also a direct link between the design process of looking at a problem from the scale above and the scale below (a process Charles Eames learned from Eliel Saarinen) and the film Powers of Ten.

malist frames of the Eameses’ buildings and their “varied and rich” contents was similar to that between the structure and the content of their films and exhibitions.5 Eames products were part of a shift in postwar American taste toward favoring organic over geometric forms, and they found success at a time when modernist design was broadening from a movement with aspirations toward the monolithic to a pluralism in which alternative aesthetics coexisted more or less happily. The Eameses eschewed exclusive insistence on a machine aesthetic, which they used only when and where it suited them. The Cranbrook experience was crucial to their joint work; it validated the eclecticism inherent in Charles’s earlier designs while extending his knowledge and understanding of International

Style architecture and design, and it tempered Ray’s more purist modernism. In Eero Saarinen and in Ray, Charles Eames found empathetic and immensely talented collaborators. The furniture he designed with Saarinen certainly proved seminal to the later work of the Eames Office, but it was with Ray that Charles produced some of the most visually interesting and technologically adventurous furniture of the mid twentieth century. For every designer who was influenced by the Eameses in terms of style, there were others who drew strength from their commitments to design as a problem-solving exercise, to quality at every level, and to engagement with a wide range of activities, issues, and commercial contexts. They became well known as designers and 22

George Nelson Chapter Two

Michael Webb

George Nelson’s long, productive life (1908–86) encompassed the birth, heyday, and decline of American Modernism. He made a major contribution to that movement as a writer, advocate, social critic, impresario, and architect. He was “an original thinker,” observes design critic Ralph Caplan, “with a gift for communicating Ideas and finding good people. His office had a consistency of thoughtfulness, even when it was whimsical or humorous,” Nelson’s associate, designer Bruce Burdick, agrees: “George was a unique person who will be remembered for his thoughts and writings about design. His words were more important than the projects.” As design director for Herman Miller from 1945 through the mid-1960 s and later as an outspoken consultant. Nelson found what he called “a glori78

fied cabinet shop” and helped make it an industry leader, a powerhouse of modern residential and contract design. He was passionately involved with this family firm over four decades, sharing the spotlight there with Charles and Ray Eames, Alexander Girard, and, briefly, Isamu Noguchi. He brought these designers to them because he wanted nothing but the best and, as he explained, “I can’t have all the ideas.” “It scared the daylights out of me to pull Charlie into that act because I knew that, if I lived forever, I never could turn out stuff like those chairs he did,” Nelson confessed. I realized it was absurd for me to be director of design because no one was going to direct Charlie.”1 Nelson and Charles Eames were almost exact contemporaries and were often as close as siblings, sharing a passion for excellence and a loathing for compromise and expediency. Communicating ideas was another bond, and they collaborated seamlessly (with the enthusiastic participation of Alexander Girard) on a multimedia educational experiment. First presented at the University of Georgia in 1953 and reprised at UCLA the following year, “A Rough Sketch of a Sample Lesson for a Hypothetical Course” was a one-hour sensory extravaganza that has become the stuff of leg79

CSS with drop front storage unit for Herman Miller, 1965

1. George Nelson, conversation with D. J. DePree (Zeeland, Mich.: Herman Miller Archives, 1982).

Platform Bench for Herman Miller, 1946

Pretzel Chair for Herman Miller, 1958 81

end. Students were electrified: one exclaimed to Nelson, â&#x20AC;&#x153;All teaching should be like this.â&#x20AC;? Although Nelson consistently supported the Eameses, he sometimes resented the fact that they won more respect than he. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easy to see why this happened. The Eames Office designed chairs and tables that resolved basic issues and never went out of style. They solved problems on an abstract level and took as long as they needed to get things right. The Nelson office was under

pressure to respond to immediate needs, and their problem solving often focused on instruments of daily life that have changed over the years, such as typewriters, record changers, and Dictaphones. These are now historic artifacts, and the desks and cabinets designed for them are material for a time capsule. Every design aficionado is familiar with the Nelson classics: the platform bench, Marshmallow love seat. Coconut chair. Sling sofa, ball clock, and

Pedestal Tables for Herman Miller, 1953

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