Herman Miller: Furnishing Modern Masculinity in Postwar America Â
Madeline Bailis
In 1944, a year prior to the end of the Second World War, architect and design innovator George Nelson began his career at a furniture company sequestered in a small Michigan town—Herman Miller. As men transformed from fighters on the battlefield to victors in the boardroom and home, Nelson sought to create a “program of furniture” that accommodated the newfound economic agency and growing taste of postwar Americans, publishing this collection in catalog form. The 1952 Herman Miller catalog, in philosophy and process, serves as a paradigm and case study that parallels the development of white, heterosexual midcentury masculinity. In a series of curated vignettes of modern offices and homes, George Nelson’s storage systems and slatted bench and Charles and Ray Eames’s molded plywood chairs furnished the American male’s desire to discern taste, gender, and individuality in post-World War II America. In 1948, two years after his arrival as design director, George Nelson created a catalog as a physical advertisement and manifesto of Herman Miller’s design philosophies and productions, pulling the company’s prewar Bauhaus designs into the postwar period and bringing them to the modern man. As the Herman Miller collection of furniture and systems designed by Nelson, Charles Eames and his wife Ray, and Isamu Noguchi evolved, Nelson published a second edition four years later. The catalog presented Herman Miller as postwar institution of taste and flexibility, but also a testament to understand the concurrent masculinity of their ideal customer—the affluent, heterosexual, white American male. The postwar man and the ideal Herman Miller customer were both flexible and modern. Bill Osgerby in Playboys in Paradise characterizes the idealized midcentury man to be financially comfortable and independent. With wealth and character, he manifested these attributes in a
meticulously display of commodity consumption—a calculated balance that insisted simultaneously on aesthetic taste and distinctive heterosexuality.1 The 1952 catalog is also an document that represents the institutional shifts of Herman Miller that parallel the historical development of idealized heterosexual masculinity in the early 20th century. The company was founded in 1923 by D.J. De Pree, a Zeeland native with Dutch roots and deep Christian values, who purchased Michigan Star Furniture Company with the with the financial help of his father-in-law and company namesake, Herman Miller. They transformed a defunct canning factory into a manufacturer of traditional furniture, during a financially stable moment for these self-made men and America, which would become a temple for innovation and design.2 Although the stock market crash splintered the economic framework of Herman Miller and America, ambition and change kept both afloat. During the 1930s, underfinanced, De Pree met Gilbert Rhode--a follower of Bauhaus scripture and the man who introduced modernism to Herman Miller. The combination of innovation in modern design and merchandising practices in individual Herman Miller showrooms on the floors of Wannamaker’s salvaged the company’s finances during the depression.3 The American male, also left weakened and hopeful by the fractured economy, according to Osgerby, did not lose faith in his economic responsibly so that the “structures and ethos of the consumer economy survived” during this financial nadir.4 During the war, as men fought overseas, limited in their contact with their families, country, and individuality, Herman Miller was also temporarily faced limitations in production.5 After the death of Rhode in 1944, D.J. De Pree moved into the postwar
era with an new army of design heroes including Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noghuci, and Alexander Girard, all led by his newly appointed design director, George Nelson.6 For these men, it was the romantic memory of 1920s consumerism, postDepression rebound, and postwar financial renaissance that was responsible for crafting a resilient masculinity that turned to consumerism to provide both immediate fulfillment and heterosexual validation. As the Herman Miller catalog was a vehicle to bring Herman Miller’s prewar heritage as a brand, modern furniture, and Nelson’s prose to the postwar present, print media was also integral to building the masculine consumer. This idealized masculinity had a history tied to printed material that developed prior to the war and pervaded on the pages of widely circulating magazines. Magazines with distinctly male readers like Esquire emerged during the Depression, and though nearly a quarter of the American workforce was unemployed, these pages supplied the American male with patches of cultural ground on which they could stand. In a historical moment when the ability to consume was restricted, Esquire was a “peerless arbiter of good taste…[and] at the center of the formula was a reverence for stylish elegance”7 Both Bill Osgerby and James Gilbert posit that the rise of exclusively masculine print media, magazines like Esquire and, later, Playboy, justified the American male’s attention to image through a strong cocktail of literary sophistication and modern design garnished with Eames chairs and erotica.8 Similar to the offices and homes printed on the pages of Esquire that spoke to refined masculine taste to a select male audience, George Nelson developed the catalog as a tool for architects, design students, and showroom
consumers which reinforced and sold the utility and necessity of Herman Miller products in the lives of working American men.9 Moreover, the catalog itself became an object imparted with value—reflective of masculine attitudes towards modern design and taste. When released in 1948, the first edition sold at a price of $5. Due to the publication’s immense success and popularity, Nelson decided to raise the price of the second edition, in 1952, and sold it for $10. This increase in price demonstrated that Nelson’s contributions established Herman Miller as a reliable and desirable producer of modern design and taste, like Esquire, in the perception of the midcentury man.10 On the first page of the catalog, unquestioned—like the constructions of masculinity that had been accepted and practiced during this historical moment— George Nelson expressed the philosophy of Herman Miller “to be an attitude so deeply felt that to the best of my knowledge it has never been formulated.”11 This “attitude”—a behavior profoundly engrained and simple in explanation—elevated and separated Herman Miller’s status in the American design industry. In the foreword of the catalog, Nelson neatly unpacks the Herman Miller attitude in five italicized proverbs: “What you make is important; Design is an integral part of the business; The product must be honest; You decide what you will make; There is a market for good design.” With these attitudes in mind, Nelson sought to create a program of furniture “designed to meet fully the requirement for modern living.”12 With these company adages, Nelson established the necessary link between the life of the American consumer and modern design. Nelson understood design was not the only facet to Herman Miller’s success, writing “it would be agreeable if Herman
Miller’s design group could take to itself the credit for this swift success, but other factors were also in operation.” This “other” to design was the consumer—the abundantly spending post-war American. Economic growth in America after the war reached unprecedented levels and was widely attributed to the return of the man, both in the home and in the office. Bill Osgerby attributes the bulk of postwar consumerism to the middle-class male and his family who laid claim to the suburbs. In a ten-year span, beginning in 1948, 85 percent of the 13 million new homes completed were located in America’s suburbs.13 Nelson tied the profitability of Herman Miller to America’s (characterized in retrospect as the male’s) “unprecedented power to buy,” and further, he attributed the public demand for design with “the long, slow development of public taste.”14 Nelson understood the war’s relationship to the mindset and morals of the American male, and furnished this man’s desire for change with innovative design. Reflectively, Nelson wrote in 1975 that after the war “there had been a general feeling that the past had to be swept away and the world changed, somehow, into a better place.” In this “better place” consumers longed for “simplicity” and “sophistication,” both enhanced by “a strong undercurrent of excitement about new technology.”15 For the postwar male, individualized and elite tastes morally cleansed and opposed the blind collectivity established by the fascist governments that initiated World War II and pervaded Cold War politics. According to James Gilbert, the outward display of high or elite culture and taste was also steeped in gender, that it was virile gesture that opposed the effeminate construction of popular culture best objectified through the hard edges of modernism.16 Michael Kimmel furnishes this idea of discriminating taste with
his “Goldilocks Dilemma,” where American middle-class men searched for commodities—such as a molded plywood Eames chair, a firm slatted George Nelson bench, and storage system—that were “not too something yet not too much the other side.”17 In an era colored by sexual and political anxiety, the masculine need to assert taste and individuality in the postwar period collided with the neutrality, functionality, and technology attached to modern design. After the introduction, the following 115 pages of the 1952 catalog, though seemingly genderless, visually demonstrate Herman Miller’s ideal consumer as the white heterosexual male who could assert and manage his masculinity through aesthetic and spatial choices. Leafing through the pages of the horizontally oriented catalog, the panoramic display and sightlines of the photographs evoke the feeling of walking into a new room. With each page, it seems like George Nelson is walking the viewer through his ideal world of design solutions—explaining each system, part, piece, and finish and their place in the lives of the working and fatherly man. For example, on a page printed with a photograph of a living room (Figure 1), the downward angle of the image emulates human vision on the picture plane. Without a discernable ceiling, the space between the viewer and photograph mimics distance similar to the view from the railing guarding of a split-level home in this semi-aerial view. The arrangement of objects—the open magazine and skewed pillow on the couch, the unfolded drop-down desk with a pen and paper, and the pulled out chair—creates a lived-in feeling, where the viewer could easily sit down on the couch or desk and finish reading an article or writing a letter. Nelson’s tour is organized in titled sections: storage, sleeping, dining, leisure, and work. Instead of titling these sections with prescribed room names,
Nelson’s use of active verbs enforces his attitude towards flexibility and design that accommodates the requirements for modern living, and notably, the activities of the working and decision-making postwar male. Although the male is Herman Miller’s target consumer, throughout the catalog, there is a notable absence of men. Excluding the portraits of George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi, and Charles Eames, there is not a single man interacting in the photographed spaces, yet there are many examples of women, who play an inactive role. They punctuate the pages Herman Miller collection in spaces or activities contingent on a male’s presence, emphasizing male utility and gender differentiation. Like accent rugs or typewriters, the female figure gains semiotic status as characters of spatial function, proportion, and masculine distinction alongside images of executive office prototypes and desks. For example, on page 86, which described the utility and measurements of a small desk, alongside the line drawings of the piece, an image of a young ponytailed woman writing at the desk appears in the upper left (Figure 2). In this profile view, she sits, looking down at a piece of paper on the desk’s empty surface. In the space between her face and the paper, a thin black line penetrates her activity and marks a measurement of thirty inches. To the right of the front right leg, another pole of measurement reads “29 ½,” shared with the leg of the adjacent line drawing, bridges and flattens this photograph to a blueprint style and scale. In this rendering, she serves as a marker of space and size alongside pages of executive desks, ultimately becoming a tool to facilitate the existence of these objects in the lives of their male customer. Beyond curating a reality for the masculine customer, this decorative use of women underscores the flexibility of the Herman Miller collection in relation the strict
gendering of the postwar male. The desk—a neutral object for work—becomes masculinized or feminized, an executive crunching numbers or a secretary masked with numbers, depending who sits behind it. Nelson’s writings for Herman Miller and system descriptions consistently employ the term “flexible.” Flexibility in design meant modular and movable and functioned within a gendered and spatial binary. Although Nelson’s designs were malleable in function, their flexibility was distinctly gendered. In deconstructing the masculinity of the heterosexual midcentury male, the obsessive need for distinction in taste and sexuality that stabilized this idealized was linear. This persists throughout the catalog, an attribute most clearly exercised by Nelson’s storage systems and platform bench. Nelson’s storage units literally reconstructed and defined the function of space and came into existence at the end of the war. In 1945, Nelson reimagined the wall as a spatial solution for postwar home, an idea published in Architectural Forum and which ended D.J. De Pree’s search for a new design director. Nelson came up with a prototype for a “Storage Wall,” a storage system built into walls between rooms, as an economical and efficient way to open up floors in the new homes of returning veterans. He understood that the depth of the average wall, about six inches, could accommodate the size of most household objects. As the economy grew stronger, people were purchasing more, and therefore needed a solution that would free floors and surfaces of clutter, transforming walls into fitting spaces for display.18 Nelson expanded this storage solution into a modular system of cabinets, shelves, and drawers known as the Herman Miller system of Basic Storage Components (BSC).
With infinite possibilities for reconfiguration and matching finishes, BSC provided seamless variability in a modern product—much like the midcentury man-- balancing and asserting individuality while playing a role in a larger system (Figure 3). Within this section of the catalog, where each page shows new settings for Nelson’s static system, an enlarged detail image of a shelved wall shows a bookshelf filled with books and a record player (Figure 4). In this image, the Storage Wall not only a vessel to open up space, but, with visible titles on the spines of books and fronts of records, an opportunity to affirm masculine independence and taste within modern design. Upon closer examination, the books vary not only in size and style, but also in content, which speaks directly to the historical moment and modern man. For example, next to E.B. Whites The Wild Flag, a copy of The City is the People by Henry S. Churchill stands straight, a book published in 1945 that used modernity as a model for progress and postwar in urban planning.19 The Film Sense by Russian filmmaker Sergii Eisenstein—the director Soviet propaganda films such as The Battleship Potemkin who fled to America in the 1930s after his rejection of communism—explores his film theory and progressive editing style appears a few spines over.20 These books not only speak to the modern deconstruction of word, space and image, but as volumes of freethinking males with visions to modernize the postwar world. During this moment of American cultural renewal and political anxiety, George Nelson’s storage system turned blank and genderless walls into flexible bodies that strengthened the muscles of masculine taste and individuality in the postwar period. The plainly utilitarian design of George Nelson’s slatted bench--its elastic use and aesthetic neutrality—also demonstrates modern design as an indicator of tasteful,
postwar heterosexual masculinity. Nelson designed the platform bench in 1945 out of personal need in his office. He wanted a piece of seating that would prevent visitors from overstaying their welcome; thus, he designed an intentionally uncomfortable bench with hard and un-contoured slats.21 In the catalog, the slatted bench consumes two thirds of the open book in a wide-angle photograph, accentuating the rectangular shape of the bench and its horizontality (Figure 5). The parallel slats cast a shadow on the floor. These stripes of light speak to Nelson’s insistence on functionality, affirming the bench’s utility in larger environment. Three assemblages of objects balance on the rows of slats—a fruit filled bowl, a pipe cradled in an ashtray, and a pair of men’s wire frame eyeglasses adjacent copy of Fortune magazine. These objects do not inform the viewer of the specific space, but function system of signifiers for the ideal postwar male. In this arrangement of objects on the slatted bench the absent portrait of a well fed, intellectual, and successful man appears. These objects, permeating into the character of the bench, also appeal to and inform the senses—sight, touch, smell, hearing, and, most notably, taste. Vision is acknowledged in the thin wire frames. The action of lighting the tobacco and flipping through the magazine’s freshly printed pages appeal to smell, sound and touch. Lastly, the sweet pears and grapes in the fruit bowl or the dense flavor of tobacco in the pipe present sensations of palatable taste. This taste functions beyond the sensory and into the ideological, where taste was a maker for male independence. In a 1947 issue of Fortune magazine, Nelson published a survey that revealed his dissatisfaction with the American furniture industry. He found American furniture design to be disjointed, “endlessly and unnecessarily varied”—the antithesis of flexible.22 Considering Nelson’s personal contributions to both Herman Miller and his
standardization of American design, the placement of the publication on the bench quietly acknowledges Nelson in the photograph. The magazine alongside the wise pipe and healthy diet refer to taste through a regimented and calculated individuality, an integral quality in maintaining the idealized masculinity the postwar male.23 Retreating from the intimate portrait of the bench in context, the following pages illustrate, in a slatted composition, the vast utility of the object (Figure 6). In use, Nelson’s bench was a fixed base that transformed in function depending on the parts and systems attached to it and adapted aesthetically to both offices and homes with a myriad of hardwood finishes. Beginning as a flat surface, a singular piece could be a coffee table or, with added upholstered foam rubber cushions, extra seating (Figure 7). Further, the slatted bench was a surface and vessel for objects of tasteful technology and affluence, allowing the male user to assert his financial success from the office and bring home to his family. The addition of a cabinet “equipped with blank face panels in which purchaser is to make necessary cut outs and install his own equipment” or fit a phonograph-radio which transformed the bench into a spectacle of masculine taste. In the space between the speaker and the radio or television, there is set of drawers and open shelf so that these unassigned pockets, like the larger storage systems, become opportunities for display. The flexibility and masculine functionality of George Nelson’s bench is emphasized beyond the catalog and into mass culture in a Herman Miller advertisement from 1950 (Figure 8). In this black and white graphic, the slatted bench takes the form of a guest room unit floating at the center of a curved white shape against a black background. Once again, Nelson’s bench serves as a base system that, as noted in the
advertising copy, solves “the need for a guest room set-up that’s complete in one unit.” The slatted exposed wood transforms into a luggage rack and a base for a small desk, drawers, and a cosmetic compartment. In the advertisement, the network of thin and dotted red lines veiled over the white shape informs this organic contour as a suitcase. At the top, a series of swift black strokes reveals a hand holding the handle of the luggage, ultimately mobilizing Nelson’s bench in print media, and placing it in transit towards the homes and hotels of America. The midcentury man worked two shifts as an executive powerhouse and family breadwinner and this slatted surface piece supported these roles. Although the role of the breadwinner was heroic, suburbia was a new battleground for men where, according to Osgerby, the largest casualty was masculinity. In this sea of nuclear families and architectural conformity, the postwar man faced a gendered affliction; he was required to support his family, a domestic role in a feminized space, but also the nation’s economy, a salaried and masculine position.24 As he asserted executive power in the office, the uncovered exposed wood served as an uncomfortable bench, and after his commute home, he spent time with his family, confirming his strictly masculine domestic role, watching shows like “Ozzie and Harriet” that gave “dad a boost” on the television set cased in Nelson’s television unit.25 The modular additions transformed George Nelson’s bench into a pillar that supported the male role in suburbia and in the office, but also confirmed his taste and gender. Its ability to function in an array of spaces enabled this piece, and its user, to surpass suburban effeminacy and assert masculine consumerism of technology and distinctive choices in the construction of
midcentury male identity26 In the life of the postwar male, this object’s flexibility translated, not to meaningless fluidity, but continuity and control—signs of an individual. The final section of the catalog is devoted to Eames. Within Nelson’s first two years at Herman Miller as design director, he met fellow design innovator Eames—a man who had “opened a door to new technologies”27 Unlike the Nelson’s wall-moored shelves and bench the Eames plywood chairs float without context, photographed as molded monuments of innovation (Figure 9). On the first page of the Eames section, a kaleidoscopic display of steel frame Dining Chair Wood (DCW) introduces the piece. In an assortment of magnifications tumbling down and across the page chairs float and fall. This smattering of seating eliminates function and their reveals their structure, creating a modernist composition that places focus purely on technique and medium. Although these chairs appear untouched, an island floating in the catalog of grounded photographs, their technological history—ideologically and physically—is tied to the postwar man transition from overseas soldier to homeland hero. Beginning in 1941, the Eames’, inspired by their winning design for a molded-plywood chair, in partnership with Eero Saarinen for the Museum of Modern Art’s “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” created the Kazam machine--a device that, with the use of a bicycle pump, glue, and an electrically heated plaster mold transformed a flat piece of wood into a curved shape. Prior to the Eames’s invention of the Kazam machine there had never been a manufacturing process for molded plywood.28 The Eames’ use of plywood—a lightweight and inexpensive material made into a massively reproducible product—aligned with wartime necessity and economic constraint. During the war, after a meeting with a doctor friend who informed the Eames’
that metal splints were too sensitive to vibration and damaging to healing, they used their technology to create a molded plywood leg splint. Their wartime solution lead to a partnership with Evans Products Company in Detroit, a contract with the Navy, and by the end of the war, a production of about 150,000 splints.29 In transforming the physical state of plywood, the Eames’ process helped renew wounded wartime bodies and manufactured healthy soldiers ready to return to their offices and homes. In 1945, as materials and labor were became more available with the war’s end, the Eames’ were able to put the molded-plywood chair into mass-production at Evans Products, catching the attention of George Nelson and leading to a lifelong partnership at Herman Miller. On the following page of the catalog, Nelson describes the various models of the chairs alongside another boundless and indiscernible landscape (Figure 10). Eames had two categories of molded plywood chairs, the Dining Chair (DC) and the Lounge Chair (LC), both with options for wooden (W) or metal legs (M). Although their names suggest specific function, the adjacent photograph dissolves the possibility of a prescribed spatial utility. The image shows two tables at differing levels, both dotted with bowls. A ring of three chairs surrounds the low table, two LCM and one LCW and a grouping of three DCM and one DCW face the sides of the taller table. Even in Nelson’s descriptions of each model, the utility of the chairs is ambiguous. He describes the DCM as “dining chair—metal legs. Seat 18”. Also an excellent desk chair” or the LCM to have an “angle and height of seat suitable for reading, conversation, and lounging.”30 Instead of determining the room or a person who would use this chair, he suggests actions. In this image of diverse heights, finishes, and styles, and indefinite prose, the Eames molded plywood chair autonomously asserts a streamlined flexibility relative to the
postwar man. The masculinity of the chair emerges not through its contextual function, rather in its intrinsic form as surface and signifier for masculine taste. This externally applied masculinity and autonomy appears in an advertisement from 1955 (Figure 11). Although this advertisement was published three years after the catalog, it underscores the Eames chair as a timeless vessel of design innovation that absorbed and reflected postwar taste and gender differentiation. This long, red advertisement features every variation of the molded plywood series in a landscape of text and illustration. The chairs appear, organized by model and arranged in horizontal white spaces, in groups of four, where the multiple views emulate seeing the chair in the round. Similar to the catalog, there are no humans photographed in relation to the images of the chair; however, etched in thin lines on the image’s surface, a rendering of the life of a postwar, heterosexual man appears. He begins his day in transit, where in the top white shape, a stock chart hangs above his desk and two DCM chairs, while on the right, his wife holds a cup in the kitchen, looking for her husband as he has just left for the office. Below, the couple stand before their pair of DCWs--he smokes a pipe, contemplating the workday, while she asks him what he would like to eat for dinner, soon to be eaten sitting on the molded plywood seat at the drawn table on the right. Next, on a weekend afternoon, he lounges on a LCM, the sipping coffee his wife holds on a tray, while their cat places a paw on the seat on the right. Finally, below, in the evening, his son returns from playing the neighbor’s backyard and plays, sitting on an LCW, with a toy plane while his wife patiently waits in formal dress as he shows her a Herman Miller brochure. In these four windows, the Eames molded plywood chair simultaneously retains neutrality and
supports a gendered posturing. As illustrated in the advertisement, Eames’s massproduced technology transformed modern design and materials into a smooth base, primed for the mediums of taste, sexuality, and gender used to draft masculinity in midcentury America. The nebulous function of the molded-plywood chair transcended the home or office imagined in the advertisement into elite postwar American culture. The chair toured institutions of high-culture in exhibitions in print and display. Appearing in The Museum of Modern Art, in the museum’s first one-man show dedicated to a single designer, and on the pages of Arts & Architecture and Time, it became an object of desire for architects and Americans as a signifier of intellectual taste.31 The plywood chair occupied space in a diagram of “highbrow” taste Russell Lyne’s 1949 book The Tastemakers: The Shaping of American Popular Taste, later reprinted in the April 1949 issue Life (Figure 12). In Lyne’s mapping and ordering of taste he categorized the Eames chair in a definitively masculine and elite tier, he wrote: The real highbrow’s way of life is as intellectualized as his way of thinking, and as carefully plotted. He is likely to be either extremely self-conscious about his physical surroundings and creature comforts or else sublimely, and rather ostentatiously, indifferent to them…His furniture, if it is modern, consists of identifiable pieces by Aalto or Breuer or Mies van der Rohe or Eames…32 In this hierarchy of tastes and in the lives of cultured men, Lyne’s description reinforced modern furniture’s role as a totem for the paradoxical individuality that defined ideal postwar masculinity. As seen, too, throughout 1952 Herman Miller catalog and company progression--from wall to floor, from Nelson to Eames, and battlefield to boardroom—the systems and products, that consciously embraced flexibility, function,
and material, accrued a gendered posturing that coincided and shaped constructions of white, heterosexual masculinity after the Second World War. This masculinity lived on a carefully weighted scale of sexual and social binaries—to be a family breadwinner and independent consumer—the systems and models of the Herman Miller Collection, shuttled between urban workplace to suburban home. As the prose and program of Nelson pervades each page of the 1952 Herman Miller catalog, the white, heterosexual midcentury man remains unseen. With George Nelson’s modular storage systems and slatted bench that clung to walls, providing flexible display space that responded to and reflected economic prowess and taste, and Eames’ molded-plywood chairs that recharged floors, signifying and challenging the pliability of material and gender, a vision of this postwar male appears. As Nelson concluded in the catalog’s foreword “the furniture [can] speak for itself.”
1 Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-style in Modern 2 Ralph Caplan, The Design of Herman Miller (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1976), 11. 3 Ibid., 29. 4 Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise, 3. 5 Concurrent Herman Miller catalogs had illustrated “War Notices” that stated the standstill use of metal bases in the collection. Caplan, The Design of Herman Miller, 29. 6 John R. Berry, Herman Miller: The Purpose of Design (Rizzoli, 2004), 69. 7 Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise, 43. 8 Ibid., 208; James Burkhart Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 200. 9 Walker Art Galleries, Minneapolis and Herman Miller, Inc, Nelson, Eames, Girard, Propst: The Design Process at Herman Miller, Design Quarterly 98/99 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1975), 36. 10 Caplan, The Design of Herman Miller, 36. 11 Herman Miller Furniture Company and George Nelson, The Herman Miller Collection (Zeeland, Mich.: The Company, 1952), 1. 12 Ibid. 13 Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise, 64. 14 Herman Miller Furniture Company and Nelson, The Herman Miller Collection, 3. 15 Walker Art Galleries, Minneapolis and Herman Miller, Inc, Nelson, Eames, Girard, Propst, 8. 16 Gilbert, Men in the Middle, 189. 17 Michael S Kimmel, Manhood in America: a Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 159. 18 Berry, Herman Miller, 61. 19 On the front cover, below the title, a description reads: an approach to city planning by way of an examination of the achievements and failures of the past, the opportunities and difficulties of the present and the possibilities and prospects of the future.” Henry S. Churchill, The City Is the People, Books That Live (New York: Norton, 1962). 20 William Richardson, “Eisenstein and California: The ‘Sutter’s Gold’ Episode,” California History 59, no. 3 (October 1, 1980): 194, doi:10.2307/25157987. 21 Walker Art Galleries, Minneapolis and Herman Miller, Inc, Nelson, Eames, Girard, Propst, 13. 22 Caplan, The Design of Herman Miller, 31. 23 Walker Art Galleries, Minneapolis and Herman Miller, Inc, Nelson, Eames, Girard, Propst, 11. 24 Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise, 72. 25 Kimmel, Manhood in America, 163. 26 Herman Miller Furniture Company and Nelson, The Herman Miller Collection, 16. 27 Walker Art Galleries, Minneapolis and Herman Miller, Inc, Nelson, Eames, Girard, Propst, 7. 28 Berry, Herman Miller, 82. 29 Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995), 211–214; Berry, Herman Miller, 82.
30 Herman Miller Furniture Company and Nelson, The Herman Miller Collection, 92. 31 Berry, Herman Miller, 88. 32 Russell Lynes, “Reprint: ‘Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow’ (1949),” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) 1, no. 1 (October 1, 1976): 150, doi:10.2307/40255171.
Works Cited Berry, John R. Herman Miller: The Purpose of Design. Rizzoli, 2004. Caplan, Ralph. The Design of Herman Miller. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1976. Churchill, Henry S. The City Is the People. Books That Live. New York: Norton, 1962. Gilbert, James Burkhart. Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Herman Miller Furniture Company, and George Nelson. The Herman Miller Collection. Zeeland, Mich.: The Company, 1952. Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America: a Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1996. Kirkham, Pat. Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995. Lynes, Russell. “Reprint: ‘Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow’ (1949).” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) 1, no. 1 (October 1, 1976): 146–158. doi:10.2307/40255171. Osgerby, Bill. Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-style in Modern America. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Richardson, William. “Eisenstein and California: The ‘Sutter’s Gold’ Episode.” California History 59, no. 3 (October 1, 1980): 194–203. doi:10.2307/25157987. Walker Art Galleries, Minneapolis, and Herman Miller, Inc. Nelson, Eames, Girard, Propst: The Design Process at Herman Miller. Design Quarterly 98/99. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1975.