Eames Spreads by WillSymank5

The Designers of Herman Miller Edited by Donald Albrecht

The Designers of Herman Miller Edited by Donald Albrecht The great postwar modern furniture designs are classics, because they are still great. Herman Miller, the company that led the office revolution, is a name synonymous with the best modern residential as well as contract furniture. Classics by super-designersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, and Isamu Noguchiâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;can still be purchased from the Herman Miller for the Home collection. Their designs, plus the work of more than a dozen other important Herman Miller designers, are described in detail and shown in color and black & white photographs, with original drawings by Nelson and the famous Frykholm picnic posters, all from the Herman Miller archives. This book is essential for collectors, dealers, curators, designers, and other devotees of modernism.

243 illustrations, including 134 plates in color

The Designers of Herman Miller

The Designers of Herman Miller Edited by Donald Albrecht

MIT Press

First printing, 2020 First MIT Press edition, ©2020 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 William Symank Set in varying weights of Palatino LT Std and Frutiger LT Std. 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 2020 745.4’4922—dc20

94-24920

CIP

Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 Part One: Designers of mid-century classics 13 Chapter 1: Charles and Ray Eames 15 Chapter 2: George Nelson 77 Chapter 3: Isamu Noguchi 121 Part Two: Designers of other Herman Miller classicsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;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 Chaper 10: Tom Newhouse Chapter 1 1: Geoff Hollington Chapter 12: Bruce Burdick Chapter 13: Stephen Frykholm Chapter 14: Other Designers: Paul Laszio Fritz Haller Poul Kjaerholm Verner Panton Jorgen Rasmussen Peter Protzmann Ray Wilkes Tom Edwards

125 127 133 143 149 155 161 165 167 173 179 191

Conclusion 203 Bibliography 209 Index 215

Design Is a Method

of Action

Donald Albrecht

1. A set of questions asked by the Musee des Arts Decoratifs was the basis of the Eameses’ section of the exhibition "Qu’est-cequele design? (What Is Design?)," held at the Louvre in 1969. When asked if design is “a method of general expression,” Charles Eames answered, “No—it is a method of action.” 2. This August 26, 1954, letter is in the possession of Lucia Eames, Charles’s daughter; © 1997, Lucia Eames dba Eames Office. In 1975 Fortune magazine reported that Charles Eames drove a 1955 Ford convertible for eighteen years before he gave it away, and Ray drove a 1960 model for twelve years. Afterward he bought a small Mercedei and she a Jaguar sedan, Walter McQuade, “Charles Eames Isn’t Resting on His Chair," Fortune (Februrary 1975), 99. 3. Throughout this essay I use the term “Eameses” in order to reinforce the collaborative nature of Charles and Ray Eames’s design practice.

In the summer of 1954 Charles and Ray Eames needed a new car, Charles had driven Fords since 1929. Together they had owned Ford convertibles since 1941, the year they married and moved to Los Angeles from Detroit. But wanting to buy a car in 1954—when wartime austerity was only a memory for many Americans—was difficult for the Eameses, who considered the automotive industry’s new two-toned models garish. “We believe in the use of standard production models,” Charles wrote Henry Ford II, asking the company’s president to help meet his need for an “anonymous” black convertible with a natural top, an interior of tan leather or good synthetic material, and a minimum of advertising logos. In conclusion Charles thanked the corporate titan “for the many positive things that bear the name of Ford.”2 This simple one-page letter offers a key to understanding the many positive things that bear the name of Eames. Like Ford’s Model T, virtually everything Charles and Ray designed solved a problem. Ford satisfied America’s desire for cheap and easy mobility. The Eameses3 solved more basic human problems, whether posed to them by clients or—as with most creative geniuses—posed by themselves. Bill Lacy, their friend and colleague,4 summed up the couple’s work: “There is no Eames style, only a legacy of problems beautifully and intelligently solved.”5

4. Bill Lacy is currently the president of Purchase College, State University of NewYork. 5. Bill Lacy, “The Eames Legacy,” Los Angeles (June 1989), 77.

With the design of their own house the Eameses sought to solve the postwar veteran’s need for affordable shelter. Their mass-produced chairs, tables, sofas, and storage units were beautiful yet inexpensive ways to furnish the modern interior and meet the increased demand for flexible, informal living. Their films, exhibitions, and books helped people understand the complex workings of the world around them. As expressed by Charles, the Eameses’ design credo—to bring “the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least”6—resounded in their optimistic faith in modern industry and mass production. And in writing directly to Ford, Charles demonstrated his confidence that industry and designers could join forces and accomplish this uplifting mission. Over the years the Eameses would infiltrate corporate

America as few designers before or since have done. Starting as furniture designers, they became communicators who helped high-technology giants such as International Business Machines (IBM), Westinghouse, Boeing, and Polaroid explain themselves and their products. The Eameses only took on projects they were in sympathy with and only worked with companies whose objectives they shared—objectives that were often in tune with a booming American economy hungry for new consumer goods. The Eameses’ range of corporate work was extraordinary: they received commissions from Herman Miller to design furniture, films, graphics, and showrooms; from Boeing to make a film promoting a proposed supersonic transport plane; from CBS for a series of short films for broadcast about popular culture; from Westinghouse for a film to illustrate the diversity of its product

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

6. “A Designer’s Home of His Own: Charles Eames Builds a House of Steel and Glass,” Life, September 11, 1950, 152. 7. These questions form the conceptual basis and organization of the exhibition that this book accompanies. 8. Certain quotations in this and other essays are from interviews conducted by Eames Demetrios, Charles and Ray Eames’s grandson, with Eames staff, friends, and colleagues.They are part of the ongoing Eames Office Video Oral History Project, © 1995, Lucia Eames dba Eames Office.

9. Another question asked in conjunction with What Is Design? was “What do you feel is the primary condition for the practice of design and its propagation?” “Recognition of need,” Charles answered.

Right Eames products were part of a shift in postwar American taste toward favoring organic over geometric forms.

lines; and from Time Inc. to design lobbies for the new Time & Life Building in New York City’s Rockefeller Center. The Eameses’ protechnology stance also ensured a vaunted position developing dozens of exhibitions, films, and books for IBM over the course of two decades. Charles and Ray Eames were especially well suited partners for America’s progressive industries. When they tackled a project, they did so in a modern, “corporate” way, seeing their products and those of their clients through the multiple lenses of design, manufacturing, distribution, promotion, and use by the customer. Their relationship with their clients was often both personal and professional. Young and successful, the Eameses embodied a forward-looking perspective that fit well within the nation’s expanding capitalist economy. In order to understand the Eameses’ achievements, one must understand the challenges they set for themselves and the processes— both conceptual and technical—they developed in their search for solutions. The Eameses’ work can be viewed as a series of questions they posed to themselves: how to produce affordable, high-quality furniture; how to build economical, well-designed space for living and working; how to help Americans and people from other cultures understand each other; and how to make fundamental scientific principles accessible to a lay audience. Representative projects from the Eameses’ vast body of work illustrate their solutions to these problems, which were often developed in collaboration with clients who shared key goals and provided the means to realize them.7 This work reveals the ambition and scope of the Eameses’ agenda—from the utilitarian chair to more complex issues of human perception, understanding, and knowledge—as well as the overlap of that agenda with corporate America’s.8 Production Models for Modern Living Recognizing the need, Charles Eames once said, was the primary condition for the practice of design.9 At the outset of their careers together, Charles and Ray Eames identified the need for affordable, high-quality furniture for the average consumer—furniture that could serve a variety of everyday

uses. For the next forty years, they continued to experiment with ways to meet this challenge, designing versatility and flexibility into their compact storage units and collapsible sofas for the home; seating for stadiums, airports, and schools; multipurpose furniture for dormitories; and stackable chairs for virtually anywhere. An ethos of functionalism informed all their furniture. “You usually find,” Ray once said, “that what...works is better than what looks good. You know, the looks good can change, but what works, works.”10 The Eameses’ interest in creating functional furniture grew out of the egalitarianism of the Great Depression, when socially committed architects devised “new deals” to alleviate economic hardship through design. New York’s Museum of Modern Art was especially active, promoting new ideas in housing for the poor and middle class and domestic prod-

Left Grouping of chairs from the Herman Miller Collection 1952 catalog Photo by Charles Eames Office Right Detail of Eames’ molded plywood dining chair

10. Ray Eames, interview with Ralph Caplan, February 24, 1981, Venice, California, Herman Miller archives, Zeeland, Mien. 11. Edgar Kaufmann’s father had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build him a house in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, in 1934; the result was Fallingwater. Kaufmann wrote to Barrin January 1940, and the competition was inaugurated on October 1, 1940. An exhibition related to the competition was held at the museum from September 24 to November 9, 1941.

ucts that were well designed and affordable. When Eames and architect Eero Saarinen won first prize in the museum’s 1940 “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” competition, they and their colleagues advocated collaborations between designers, manufacturers, and merchants to create mass-produced furniture for the American family of moderate income. Edgar J. Kaufmann, jr., a representative of his father’s trend setting department store in Pittsburgh,11 had proposed the idea for the competition, and twelve department stores planned to market the winning pieces. (Three companies, including the Haywood Wakefield Company, were set to manufacture the furniture, but the outbreak of war canceled the program.) Eames and Saarinen’s winning entry included a sectional sofa, molded-wood chairs, and modular units that formed benches, cabinets, desks, and tables. The chairs were produced by a manufacturing method new to furniture: a light structural shell consisting of layers of plastic glue and wood veneer molded into softly curving three-dimensional forms. In their technical innovation, aesthetic brilliance, and social purpose, these chairs prefigured the Eameses’ future furniture designs.

The organic design competition also propelled Charles and Ray into full-fledged membership in a coterie of architects, designers, curators, and other tastemakers who would become influential after World War II. The war had democratized modern architecture and design, as thousands of new armament factories and mass-produced houses for defense workers were built across the country. Their functionalist aesthetic came to embody the architecture of an optimistic Pax Americana. Military victory brought power and prosperity, thrusting Americans, their government, and their business corporations into an international spotlight. For many, modern design symbolized the country’s new political and technological prowess. The machine-made gridiron of the steel and glass office facade—free of nationalist symbols and prewar traditions— became the established emblem of a new world order based on international business and finance. A leading generation of postwar architects and designers—such as Saarinen, Eliot Noyes, Alexander Girard, George Nelson, and the Eameses—merged this postwar aesthetic with their own sophisticated sensibilities. The result was a humane, mass-produced modernism that appealed to Amer-

ica’s corporate and institutional elite. The design equivalent of the suave and elegant Gregory Peck in Hollywood’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the style struck a middleground between dollars-and-cents propriety and material luxury. Objects and fabrics made by hand tempered the machine-made. Buildings and interiors were colorful without being garish, progressive without being radical or threatening. To this mix the Eameses added their own effervescent whimsy and playfulness, a “look” that was visible as early as their demonstration room for the Detroit Institute of Arts’s exhibition For Modern Living, one of many postwar efforts that sought to convince middle-class homeowners to buy products of contemporary design. The Eameses’ room featured an artfully random arrangement of a kite, a Mexican mask, and a pot of paper flowers, all hung from a rectangular grid of pegs. Such grids were one way contemporary designers positioned “natural” or handmade objects within the framework of manmade modernity. The “ESU” (Eames Storage Unit) made its public debut here as well. Its off-the-shelf materials and modular design contrasted dramatically with displays of straw baskets, clay pots, stones, and starfish. This collagist aesthetic of organized clutter—the studied contrast between old and new, rich and humble, foreign and familiar, mass-produced and handcrafted—became the Eameses’ signature. The Eameses had designed the ESU for the Herman Miller Furniture Company in Zeeland, Michigan, which began marketing the unit in 1950. By the time of the Detroit exhibition, they had already enjoyed a four-year relationship with the company. Herman Miller had entered the then-untried market for modern furniture in the early years of the Depression for “moral” reasons. George Nelson, later director of design for the company, remembered that “Gilbert Rohde, a pioneer New York industrial designer [and Nelson’s predecessor], convinced D. J. De Pree, head of Herman Miller, that it was dishonest to manufacture period reproductions. De Pree, a deeply religious man committed to carrying his beliefs into everything he did, accepted Rohde’s argument and in the mid-1930s switched production to pieces representing what he and Rohde considered ‘honest’ design.”12

Rohde also taught De Pree a lesson that would later mesh with the Eameses’ philosophy: “You’re not making furniture anymore,” Rohde predicted, “you’re making a way of life— a life style.”13 Rohde and De Pree’s decision to manufacture modern furniture proved prophetic. After the war, when Americans had money in their pockets and were looking for new ideas for a new America, modern furniture became an essential component of stylish offices and institutions. In 1945 De Pree hired Nelson as design director—Rohde had died in 1944— and one of his first acts was to take De Pree to The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition New Furniture Designed by Charles Fames. Fames furniture suited De Pree’s criteria for good and truthful design: “durability, unity, integrity, and inevitability.”14 The furniture was also visually striking, fulfilling Nelson’s recommendation that Miller adopt unusual designs that would attract free editorial coverage in print. Within a few years the collaboration was formed between Herman Miller and the Eameses, who enjoyed wide latitude in developing new furniture ideas, D. J, De Pree’s son Hugh

Detail of the Eames Lounge Chair

12. George Nelson, “Introduction,” in Mildred Friedman, ed., Nelson, Earnes, Girard, Propst: The Design Process at Herman Miller, Design Quarterly 98/99 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1975), 7. Rohde’s earliest modern designs for Herman Miller were featured at Chicago’s 1932 Century of Progress exposition. 13. D. J. De Pree, interview with Ralph Caplan, August 4,1980, Herman Miller archives, Zeeland, Michigan. 14. D. J. De Pre’e and Ralph Caplan.

recalled that the company never did any market studies of what they should produce. Charles Eames “had a good sense of what was needed...of what people ought to have. This was particularly true in chairs; I don’t think that we have ever successfully given Charles a charge and said that we want such and such a product. When we’ve done it and he tried to respond, we’ve gotten something different than we started with.”15 The Eameses’ initiative and inventiveness would set a pattern throughout their careers: they created what they found interesting, followed their instincts, and believed their good ideas would ultimately find a market. Which at Herman Miller they certainly did. At the core of the Eameses’ furniture ideas for Miller were four groups of chairs, distinguished by their unique aesthetic expression of materials and methods of manufacture: molded plywood, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, bent and welded wire-mesh, and cast aluminum. Each was conceived in response to functional and technical challenges. The first three groups were an at-

tempt to create a chair that was a single, body-fitting shell that would be comfortable without expensive upholstery, could be quickly mass-produced, and could be shipped cheaply by nesting the shells together. The cast-aluminum chair was conceived as an indoor-outdoor seat—an all-weather, all-purpose chair that would be both beautiful and durable. The great commercial success of the Eameses’ furniture was in large part due to the pieces’ adaptability to myriad markets—domestic, office, and institutional—as well as their multiple uses within different rooms of the home. In fact, many of the Eameses’ furniture designs grew out of concepts and technical processes developed for the core group of chairs. A molded-plywood table and a screen to be used as a room divider were designed as companion pieces to the molded-plywood chairs. Wire-base tables, designed in the early 1950s, were offshoots of the wire-mesh chairs. The fiberglass chair spawned the 1954 stadium seating and the 1961 La Fonda del Sol restaurant chair. The aluminum group’s sling-

seat concept reappeared in the interlocking seating, designed for Chicago’s O’Hare and Washington’s Dulles airports. This adaptability was possible because much of the Eameses’ furniture was made of standardized parts that could be combined into different arrangements, offering customers the flexibility to mix and match different pieces to suit their needs. The fiberglass chair, for example, was available in a broad range of colors, upholstery, and leg configurations— from a constructivist assemblage of wire struts to traditional wood rockers. The buyer actively engaged in the processes of assembling, arranging, and disassembling the Eameses’ furniture, customizing the products for his or her own use. Throughout their relationship with Herman Miller, Charles and Ray worked closely with the company to position their furniture as modern and progressive, Where advertising was concerned, the Eameses often art directed their own photo shoots and graphic layouts. They developed the settings for retail furniture displays and Herman Miller showrooms.

Above Coconut Chair Left Full view of the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman

15. Hugh De Pree, interview with Virginia Stith and Beryl Manne, August 29, 1977, St. Louis County Dept. of Parks and Recreation.

These advertisements and schemes for merchandising decor represented the furniture as lively, colorful, and fun to own. The graphics were witty and often didactic, instructing potential buyers about the furniture’s manufacturing process, its lineage from industrial technologies, and its diverse uses. While the Eameses’ art direction would certainly have appealed to architects and designers—who were the first to purchase the furniture (Herman Miller initially sold the plywood chairs for as little as $14.25) —institutions would later become the leading buyers, making the furniture practically ubiquitous. This new market opened in the early 1950s. Robert Blaich, then a young Herman Miller sales representative, remembers contacting the purchasing officer of his alma mater, Syracuse University, to try to sell the Eameses’ fiberglass chairs for dormitory and dining hall use (in 1952 the price of the fiberglass chairs started at $30). The G.I. Bill of Rights for veterans’ college tuition had expanded the university market dramatically, and the Eames chairs’ reputation for durability (and Herman Miller’s for reliability) soon made the chairs institutional best-sellers.16 Beyond its successful sales record, the Eameses’ furniture was—and continues to be—beautiful. This quality, according to D. J. De Pree, was the final criterion of good design. “It’s part of that last 10%,” he once noted, “that Charles Eames always talked about being so hard to get.”17

16. Robert Blaich, telephone interview with Donald Albrecht, September 16,1995. Blaich graduated from Syracuse University in 1952 and was associated with Herman Miller from 1953 until 1979. From 1965 to 1979 he was vice president of corporate design and communications. 17. D. J. De Pree and Ralph Caplan.

Original Eames molded plywood chair

Bibliography

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 1935â&#x20AC;&#x201C;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 1945â&#x20AC;&#x201C;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. Kolln, Germany: Taschen, 1993. Gandy, Charles D. and Susan Zimmermann-Stedham. Contemporary Classics: Furniture of the Masters. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1990 (originally McGraw-Hill, 1981). Garner, Philippe. Twentieth-Century Furniture. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980. Greenberg, Cara. Mid-Century Modern: Furniture of the 1950s. New York: Harmony, 1984; reprinted 1995.

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.: A.I.A. Press, 1994.

Horn, Richard. Fifties Style. New York: Friedman/Fairfax, 1993.

De Pree, 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: Schaffer Publishing, 1998).

Jackson, Lesley. Contemporary Architecture and Interiors of the 1950s. London: Phaeton, 1994. Knobble, Lance. Office Furniture: Twentieth-Century Design. New York: E. P Dutton, 1987.

Herman Miller, Inc. Action Office System. Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, Inc., 1984. Herman Miller, Inc. Reference Points. Zeeland, Michigan, Herman Miller, 1984.

Mang, Karl, History of Modern Furniture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978. Meadmore, Clement. The Modern Chair: Classics in Production. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975. Pifia, Leslie. Fifties Furniture. Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer, 1996. Pulos, Arthur J. The American Design Adventure 1940â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1975. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Sembach, Klaus-Jorgen, et at. Twentieth-Century Furniture Design. KĂśln, Germany: Taschen, n.d.

Herman Miller, Inc. Burdick Group Pages. product brochure. Zeeland, Michigan, Herman Miller, 1992. 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 Catalog. Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, 1996. Marigold Lodge. Zeeland, Michigan, Herman Miller, n.d.

Sparke, Penny. Furniture: Twentieth-Century Design. New York: E. P Dutton, 1986.

Hunter, Sam. Isamu Noguchi. New York: Abbeville, 1978.

Simpson, Miriam. Modem Furniture Classics. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1987.

Kirkham, Pat. Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: MIT, 1995.

von Vegesack, Alexander et. at. 100 Masterpieces from the Vitra Design Museum Collection. Weil am Rhein, Germany: Vitra Design Museum, 1996.

Nelson, George. Chairs. New York: Whitney, 1953; reprinted New York: Acanthus, 1994.

Books by or about Herman Miller and its designers:

Display. New York: Whitney, 1953.

Abercrombie, Stanley. George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Storage. New York: Whitney, 1954. Problems of Design. New York: Whitney, 1957.

Aidersey-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. Caplan, Ralph. Connections: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames. exhibition catalog. Los Angeles: Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, 1976.

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.

Ostergard, Derek and David Hanks. "Gilbert Rohde and the Evolution of Modern Design 1927–1941." Arts Magazine (October 1981).

Propst, Robert. Action Office: The System that Works for You. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Herman Miller Research Corp., 1978.

Ostergard, Derek and David Hanks. "Gilbert Rohde: The Herman Miller Years." 7-page typescript in Herman Miller Archives, n.d.

Propst, Robert, et. al. The Senator Hatfield Office Innovation Project. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Herman Miller Research Corp., 1977.

Pearlman, Chee. "Machine for Sitting." ID. (September/October 1994).

Renwick Gallery. A Modem Consciousness: D. J De Pree, Florence Knoll. exhibit catalog. Washington D. C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975.

"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).

University of Illinois. William Stumpf, Industrial Design. exhibition brochure. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1995.

Slesin, Suzanne. "George H. Nelson, Designer of Modernist Furniture, Dies.” The New York Times (March 4, 1986): D26, obituary.

Articles "Storage Wall.” Life (January 1945): 64–71. “A Conversation with George Nelson.” Industrial Design (April 1969): 76–77. Sudjic, Deyan. “Playfulness." Blueprint (October 1994): 29–36. 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.

Tetiow, Karin. “Dock’N’ Roll." Interiors (September 1990): 146–151. "3 Chairs/ 3 records of the design process." Interiors (April 1958): 118–152 "25: Year of Appraisal." Interiors (November 1965): 128–161.

Caplan, Ralph. "Caplan on Nelson.” ID. (January February 1992): 76–83. "Designers in America: Part 3." Industrial Design (Oct. 1972): 30–31.

Walker Art Center. "Nelson, Eames, Girard, Propst: The Design Process at Herman Miller." exhibit catalog. Design Quarterly 98199 (1975): 1–64.

"Furniture Best of Category: Aeron Chair." ID. Annual Design Review 1995 (July/ August 1995).

Wierenga, Debra, ad. "Design and the Office in Transition - Part 1: A Conversation with George Nelson." Ideas (November 1979): 1–20.

Gingerich, Owen. "A Conversation with Charles Eames." The American Scholar. (Summer 1977): 326–337.