DESIGNERS OF HERMAN MILLER EDITED BY DONALD ALBRECHT
A
A
Designers of Herman Miller
Designers of Herman Miller Edited by Donald albrecht
MIT Press
Fifth printing, 2014 First MIT Press edition, c 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology © 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. Design by Mary Miller Typeset in Centennial LT, Bell Gothic type families Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Albrecht, Donald. The Designers of Herman Miller/Donald Albrecht. 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—dc20 94-24920
CIP
Acknowledgments
3
Introduction Part One : Chapter 1: Designers of mid century classics Chapter 2:
7 Charles and Ray Eames
14
George Nelson
76
Chapter 3:
Isamu Noguchi
120
Part Two : Chapter 4: Designers of other Herman Miller Chapter 5: Classics—Past, Present, and Future Chapter 6:
Gilbert Rohde
126
Alexander Girard
132
Robert Propst
142
Chapter 7:
Jack Kelley
148
Chapter 8:
Don Chadwick
154
Chapter 9:
Bill Stumpf
160
Chapter 10:
Tom Newhouse
164
Chapter 11:
Geoff Hollington
166
Chapter 12:
Bruce Burdick
172
Chapter 13:
Stephen Frykholm
178
Chapter 14:
Other Designers: Paul László Fritz Haller Poul Kjærholm Verner Panton Jørgen Rasmussen Peter Protzmann Ray Wilkes Tom Edwards
190
Conclusion
202
Bibliography
209
Index
215
Contents
Much of the Eameses’ 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, 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 spe-
Relationships
C h a R l e s & r ay e a m e s
Husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames.
1. Charles Eames/ Virginia Stith, 1977.
14
Sofa Compact Photo 1985 by Bill Sharpe, J.D.Thomas
cific 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 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 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
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. 4. Walter McQuade, “Charles Eames isn’t resting on his chair,” Fortune, February 1975, p.98.
15
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 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
16
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, cross-cultural and extra-cultural reference, repetition, and excess. However, as Esther McCoy has pointed out, the interaction between the minimalist 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 aspira5. 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.
“They remained
as enthusiastic about everything they did in later life as in their early years, and they continued to open their home and office to students and admirers.”
tions 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 talETR (elliptical table rod
base), a long, low coffee table with a laminated black plastic top and wirestrut base. Photo 1952 by Charles Eames Office From The Herman Miller Collection 1952 catalog
“La Chaise”, detail Designed in 1948, it was not produced until 1990, by Vitra.
17
Group of unupholstered wire chairs with Eiffel Tower bases Photo 1952 by Charles Eames
18
Display of Eames desks and storage units. 1952 Photo by Charles Eames Office
From The Herman Miller Collection 1952 catalog
ented 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 communicators in the United States, in Western Europe, in Japan, and in India. After World War II Japan paid great attention to American design, and from the early 1950s on the Eameses’ work was publicized there by Torao (Tiger) Saito of Japan Today.6 In India they became near-celebrities after the release of the Eames Report, which considered the question of design in modern India in relation to small industries and the “rapid deterioration in the design and quality of consumer goods.”7
6. Ray Eames and Elaine Sewell Jones, interviews with Pat Kirkham, 1983 and 1991 respectively 7. Eames Report, 1958.
19
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-1960s and later as an outspoken consultant. Nelson found what he called “a glorified 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
The Herman Miller designers with D.J. DePree, assembled for the exhibition the Design process at Herman Miller
76
1975, in the Walker Arts Center.
Partnerships
Ge o r g e Ne l s o n
1. George Nelson, conversation with D.J. DePree (Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller Achives, 1982).
Basic storage, ball clock, Eames chairs
A
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 legend. Students were electrified: one exclaimed to Nelson, “All teaching should be like this.”
78
Although Nelson consistently supported the Eameses, he sometimes resented the fact that they won more respect than he. It’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 bubble lamps. However, Nelson was personally responsible for only the first of these and an early prototype of the last. As head of his own design office he handpicked brilliant talents and gave them the freedom to develop
Left
Pretzel chair Designed by George Nelson in 1952.
2. Michael Darling, “Ambient Modernism: The Domestic Furniture Designs of the George Nelson Office, 1944–63” (unpublished thesis. University of California Santa Barbara, 1997). 3. Nelson, interview with Mildred Friedman (Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller Archives, 1974). Santa Barbara, 1997).
his ideas in their own way and to work independently on the design of furniture, graphics, clocks, lamps, exhibitions, interiors, an experimental house, and much else. That freed him to meet with clients, deliver lectures, organize a new approach to art education, conceptualize an exhibition, plan another Aspen design conference, or do what he loved best—write. Irving Harper, a former associate of Gilbert Rohde and Raymond Loewy, who joined the office in 1947 and was Nelson’s principal associate for seventeen years, told architecture curator Michael Darling: “George was heavily involved with the first group of furniture, but after that his involvement was more minimal. He used to dream aloud about designs, and his ideas were mostly verbal. George was a great design head, but to call him a great designer is inaccurate and unfair to the other designers in the office. I would call him a Diaghilev of design,”2 Nelson was happy to admit the debt he owed his colleagues, though the practice of the time was to credit the head of the firm for everything that emerged from the office. He was one of a handful of American designers —Raymond Loewy, Charles and Ray Eames, Henry Dreyfuss were others—whose names were celebrated and highly salable. In his later years, Nelson seems to have lost interest in product design, though it continued to subsidize his speculative ventures. “If I had my druthers, [writing] would be the number one activity and the other stuff would be number two,”
79
he told design curator Mildred Friedman.3 “I find I’m getting more and more interested in why things are and what the meaning of this and that is, and much less intrigued by the quality of an object, although I like looking at them.” He joked that his parents had always wanted him to be a writer, and in the final analysis, they won. Everything Nelson did seemed to happen by chance. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, to arts-loving parents of Russian Jewish ancestry, he went to Vale with little idea of what he would do with his life, chanced on an exhibition of Beaux Arts sketches, and decided on impulse to study architecture. He taught himself to draw, graduated, and began what he expected would be a teaching career. Laid off at the beginning of the Depression, he went flat out to win the Paris Prize (a prize offering fellowships and residencies), and, though he failed, the momentum brought him the Rome Prize and a two-year scholarship to study at the American Academy there. While in Europe he met and interviewed several leading modern architects, starting
80
Nelson Platform Bench One of the classics from Nelson’s first collection and the 1948 catalog
with Le Corbusier, and on his return to America, Nelson sold his essays to Pencil Points magazine, supplying a convincing facsimile of the drawings the French master failed to deliver. Those sharply observed profiles led to an editorial post at Architectural Forum. In partnership with architect William Hamby, he radical town house for airplane builder Sherman Fairchild on the upper east side of Manhattan, During the war he taught at Columbia and sketched “Grass in the Streets”— a concept that anticipated the pedestrian shopping mall. He took on a special project at Fortune, another Henry Luce magazine, where he designed the slatted platform bench as a way of deterring callers from sitting in his office for more than fifteen minutes. It failed that test, but became a durable icon; the foundation of another career. Toward the end of the war, he and Henry Wright, his coeditor at Forum, wrote a book, Tomorrow’s House, proposing innovative solutions to everyday needs. Unable to meet his deadline for a chapter on storage, he conceived the Storagewall —an expansion of an ordinary cavity wall to contain all the impedimenta of daily life. This seminal design was published in Forum and later in a splashy Life feature, provoking wide public interest and intense hostility from the furniture trade press, which feared that the invention could ruin the case-goods industry. Those articles excited the Interest of Herman Miller president D. J. DePree, a devout Calvinist with a firm belief In providence and honesty In 1930 sales of heavy reproduction 4. D. J. DePree, memo to Jim Eppinger (Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller Archives, November 29, 1944).
furniture were lagging, and the firm, located in Zeeland, Michigan, faced bankruptcy Gilbert Rohde, a New Yorker who had picked up on European trends in his mid-forties, urged DePree to switch to Modernism and fabricate the cleanlined designs he would supply, arguing that applied ornament and faux historicism were dishonest, He won his case, and the struggling company achieved a unique reputation. In 1944 Rohde died and DePree was shocked by the mediocrity of the furniture experts who applied to take his place. Hoping for another stroke of providence, he invited Nelson to dinner at a Detroit hotel and gave his associates a glowing report of the meeting: “He is recognized among the architects, has a splendid background; is thinking well ahead of the parade; does not want to be limited to the use of wood in planning furniture; believes that more and more units will be built into the house but that a manufacturer of a line such as we have will not suffer for a long time to come… Although I haven’t seen any of his work I am convinced he is a star in at least some of the things he is doing,”4 Nelson protested that he knew nothing of the business and had many other projects on his plate. The long-distance courtship continued until letters of agreement were exchanged in summer 1945 He would be paid $20 for each drawing that was accepted and a 3 percent royalty on the sale of pieces he designed. All other aspects of the agreement were founded on trust; there was never a formal contract.
81
22
Nelson’s wall storage system commissioned by LIFE in 1945. This design landed him his job at Herman Miller. Photograph from Herman Miller Archives
5. Nelson, The Herman Miller Collection (Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller Archives, 1948). 6. Nelson, interview with Ralph Caplan (Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller Archives, 1981).
“...working with him was always joy and at times breathtaking” H u g h De P r e e
Later, Nelson wrote that he “was trained as an architect and found himself in the field of fur niture design as a result of a series of accidents, most of which appear to have been caused by an acute dislike for specialized activity.”5 In fact he was never busier or more focused than during the first eighteen months of his association with Herman Miller. Moonlighting from his jobs with Luce, he collabo rated with Ernest Farmer, a German-born cabinetmaker who had worked with Rohde. “I was busy making doodles of stuff I thought we ought to take a pass at,” Nelson explained, “Then Ernest would draw them up.”6 The new pieces would be “honest, knock-down, and versatile,” as he explained in one of a flurry of memos to Zeeland His industry was astounding, and when he did take time off he reassured an anxious DePree that he had loft Farmer with a stack of assignments. He urged the company to add sales outlets; to run advertisements; and to exploit the latest developments in formed plywood, plastics, and metals. He proposed that Herman Miller consider producing lamps, fabrics, and accessories to set off its furniture and generate additional revenue. Top photographers should be commissioned to shoot new products and room settings. The revolutionary nature of these proposals, many of which were accepted, became clear when Nelson’s report on the furniture industry appeared in Fortune. With characteristic chutzpah he had let the magazine subsidize the research he needed to do for his new job, and his
83
General Books Blake, Peter. No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Dormer, Peter. Design Since 1945. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993. Eidelberg, Martin, ed. Design 1935–1965. What Modern Was? New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991. Emery, Marc. Furniture by Architects. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983; expanded edition 1988. Fehrman, Cherie and Kenneth Fehrman. Postwar Interior Design 1945–1960. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987. Fiell, Charlotte & Peter, Modern Furniture Classics Since 1945. Washington D.C.: AIA Press, 1991. Fiell, Charlotte & Peter, Modern Chairs. Köln, Germany: Taschen, 1993. Gandy, Charles D. and Susan Zimmermann-Stedham. Contemporary Classics: Furniture of the Masters. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1990 (originally McGrawHill, 1981). Garner, Philippe. Twentieth-Century Furniture. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980.
Pulos, Arthur J. The American Design Adventure 1940 – 1975. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Sembach, Klaus-Jürgen, et at. Twentieth-Century Furniture Design. Köln, Germany: Taschen, n.d. Sparke, Penny. Furniture: Twentieth-Century Design. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986. Stimpson, Miriam. Modern Furniture Classics. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1987. von Vegesack, Alexander et. at. 100 Masterpieces from the Vitra Design Museum Collection. Weil am Rhein, Germany: Vitra Design Museum, 1996. Books by or about Herman Miller and its designers Abercrombie, Stanley. George Nelson: the Design of Modern Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Aldersey-Williams, Hugh and Geoff Hollington. Hollington Industrial Design 7. London: Architecture Design and Technology Press, 1990. Caplan, Ralph. The Design of Herman Miller. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1976.
Greenberg, Cara. Mid-Century Modern: Furniture of the 1950s. New York: Harmony, 1984; reprinted 1995.
Caplan, Ralph. Connections: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames, exhibition catalog. Los Angeles: Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, 1976.
Hiesinger, Kathryn B. & George H. Marcus. Landmarks of Twentieth-Century Design: An Illustrated Handbook. New York: Abbeville, 1993.
Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. and Clark Malcolm. Herman Miller Inc.: Buildings and Beliefs. Washington D.C.: AIA Press, 1994.
Horn, Richard. Fifties Style. New York: Friedman/Fairfax, 1993.
DePree, Hugh. Business as Unusual. Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, 1986.
Jackson, Lesley. The New Look: Design in the Fifties. New York: Thames Hudson, 1991.
Herman Miller Furniture Co. The Herman Miller Collection. catalogs. Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller Furniture Co., 1948, 1950, 1952 (also reprinted New York: Acanthus Press, 1995), 1955/56 (also reprinted Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing, 1998).
Jackson, Lesley, Contemporary Architecture and Interiors of the 1950s. London: Phaidon, 1994. Knobel, Lance. Office Furniture: Twentieth-Century Design. New York: E. P Dutton, 1987. Mang, Karl, History of Modern Furniture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978.
Bibliography
Piña, Leslie. Fifties Furniture. Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer, 1996.
Meadmore, Clement. The Modern Chair: Classics in Production. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975.
Herman Miller, Inc. Action Office System. Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, Inc., 1984. Herman Miller, Inc. Reference Points. Zeeland, Michigan, Herman Miller, 1984. Herman Miller, Inc. Burdick Group Pages, product brochure. Zeeland, Michigan, Herman Miller, 1992.
209
Herman Miller, Inc. Herman Miller for the Home, product catalog. Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, 1995. Herman Miller, Inc. Herman Miller Pricebooks: Seating & Furniture. Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, 1995. Herman Miller, Inc. Herman Miller Catalog. Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, 1996. Marigold Lodge. Zeeland, Michigan, Herman Miller, n.d. Hunter, Sam. Isamu Noguchi. New York: Abbeville, 1978. Kirkham, Pat. Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: MIT, 1995. Nelson, George. Chairs. New York: Whitney, 1953; reprinted New York: Acanthus,1994. Nelson, George. Display. New York: Whitney, 1953. Nelson, George. Storage. New York: Whitney, 1954. Nelson, George. Problems of Design. New York: Whitney, 1957. Nelson, George. George Nelson on Design. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1979. Nelson, George. Changing the World. University of Michigan, 1987. Neuhart, John, Marilyn Neuhart, Et Ray Eames. Eames Design. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991. Propst, Robert. The Office: A Facility Based on Change. Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, Inc., 1968. Neuhart, John, Marilyn Neuhart, Et Ray Eames, Action Office: The System that Works for You. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Herman Miller Research Corp., 1978. Propst, Robert, et al. The Senator Hatfield Office Innovation Project. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Herman Miller Research Corp., 1977. Renwick Gallery. A Modern Consciousness: D. J. DePree, Florence Knoll, exhibit catalog. Washington D. C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975.
210
University of Illinois. William Stumpf, Industrial Design, exhibition brochure. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1995. Articles “A Conversation with George Nelson.” Industrial Design (April 1969): 76 –77.
Berman, Ann. “Herman Miller—Influential Designs of the 1940s and 1950s.” Architectural Digest (September 1991): 34 –40. Branson, Michael. “Isamu Noguchi, the Sculptor, Dies at 84.” The New York Times (December 31, 1988): obituary. Caplan, Ralph. “Caplan on Nelson.” ID. (January February 1992): 76–83. “Designers in America: Part 3.” Industrial Design (Oct. 1972): 30–31. “Furniture Best of Category: Aeron Chair.” ID. Annual Design Review 1995 (July/August 1995). Gingerich, Owen. “A Conversation with Charles Eames.” The American Scholar. (Summer 1977): 326–337. “Herman Miller for the Home.” Interior Design (December 1993). McQuade, Walter. “Charles Eames Isn’t Resting on His Chair.” Fortune (February 1975): 96 –100, 144–145. Nelson, George. “The Furniture Industry.” Fortune 35 (January 1947): 106–111. “Business and the Industrial Designer.” Fortune (July 1949): 92–98. “Modern Furniture.” Interiors. (July 1949): 77–89. “Design, Technology, and the Pursuit of Ugliness.” Saturday Review. (October 2, 1971): 22–25. Ostergard, Derek and David Hanks. “Gilbert Rohde and the Evolution of Modern Design 1927–1941.” Arts Magazine (October 1981). “Gilbert Rohde: The Herman Miller Years,” 7-page typescript in Herman Miller Archives, n.d. Pearlman, Chee. “Machine for Sitting.” ID. (September/ October 1994). “Royal Gold Medal for Architecture 1979: The Office of Charles and Ray Eames,” 12-page packet, April 1979. Schwartz, Bonnie. “2 Chairs, 2 Processes.” Metropolis (May 1996). Slesin, Suzanne. “George H. Nelson, Designer of Modernist Furniture, Dies.” The New York Times (March 4, 1986): D26, obituary. “Storage Wall.” Life (January 1945): 64–71. Sudjic, Deyan. “Playfulness.” Blueprint (October 1994):
29–36.
DePree, Hugh, 9, 12
Tetiow, Karin. “Dock’N’ Roll.” Interiors (September 1990): 146–151.
DePree, Max, 9
Tetiow, Karin. “3 Chairs/ 3 records of the design process.” Interiors (April 1958): 118–152. Tetiow, Karin. “25: Year of Appraisal.” Interiors (November 1965): 128–161. Walker Art Center, Nelson, Eames, Girard, Propst: the Design Process at Herman Miller, exhibit catalog. Design Quarterly 98/99 (1975): 1– 64. Wierenga, Debra, ed. “Design and the Office in TransitionPart 1: A Conversation with George Nelson.” Ideas (November 1979): 1–20. Archives Herman Miller Archives. Photographs and written material on designers, products, and the company. Contributors to the database containing material used in this project include Linda Folland, Hugh DePree, Barbara Hire, Will Poole, and Bob Viol. Quotes by designers not attributed to other sources are from the ‘Designer Bio’ promotional sheets produced by Herman Miller. Action Office, 11, 114–115, 143–148 Aeron Chair, 157, 160, 163 Ambi Chair, 190 Baidauf, Fritz, 190 Beirise, Jean, 190 Bevelacqua, Aurelio, 190 Blake, Peter, 19 Burdick, Bruce, 12, 173 Burdick Group, 174–177 Capella Chair, 8 Castelli, Clino, 190
Diamond, Freda, 190 Dubrucq, Virginia, 190 Eames, Charles, 15; philosophy, 19–21 Eames, Charles and Ray, 11, 14–16 Eames furniture: abbreviations, 17–18; Aluminum Group, 62–65; chair bases, 35–37, 40; Chaise, 67; Elliptical Table, 10, 71; Folding Screen, 74; Hang-It-All, 75; LaFonda Table 69; Lounge Chair, 58–62; Molded Plastic (Molded Fiberglass) Chairs, 10, 34–35,41–55; Molded Plywood Chairs, 22– 25,28–32, 42, 55; Molded Plywood Children’s furniture, 26–27; Molded Ply-wood finishes, 17, 30; Molded Plywood Splints, 22; Molded Plywood Tables, 23,31–33; production dates, 18; Segmented Base Tables, 69–71; Sofa Compact, 10, 39, 56–57; Soft Pad Group, 66; Soft Pad Sofa, 68; Storage Unit, 73; Tandem Sling, 67; Time-Life Chair, 65; Walnut Stool, 72; Wire Base Table, 10, 71; Wire Chairs, 36–39 Eames, Ray, 15 Edwards, Tom, 193 Equa Chair, 8, 152, 156–157 160, 163 Ergon Chair, 8, 152, 163 Ethospace, 150, 152–153, 163, 165 Evans Products, 16 Executive Office Group (EOG): Nelson, 11; Rohde, 127 Frykholm, Stephen, 178; picnic posters, 180–189 Fuller, Buckminster, 19 Girard, Alexander, 11, 133–134; Environmental Enrichment Panels, 138–141; furniture, 136–137; textiles, 135 Girard, Susan, 134
Century of Progress, 11 Chadwick, Don, 12, 155–157; and Aeron Chair, 157, 160; and Equa Chair, 156–157, 160; Modular Seating, 158 –159 Chadwick, Gordon, 77 Chicago Merchandise Mart, 11 DePree, Dirk Jan (D. J.), 9
211
A
Albrecht
DESIGNERS OF HERMAN MILLER