CHAIRS
Interiors Library Volume Two
George Nelson
George Nelson: CHAIRS [Interiors Library Volume Two]. New York: Whitney, 1952. First edition. Small folio. Embossed tan cloth stamped in black. Printed dust jacket. 174 pp. 433 black and white illustrations. Former owners inscription to front free endpaper. Tan cloth sunned to rear panel. Orange dust jacket spine sun-faded [as usual] with wear, creases, and repaired chipping to edges. A very good copy in a good or better dust jacket.
9.25 x 12.25 hardcover book with 174 pages, with 433 black and white illustrations, showcasing the works of 137 midcentury and machine-age furniture designers. Outstanding Dust jacket design by Irving Harper, the man credited with developing the design of the George Nelson clocks for Howard Miller. The DJ design alone makes this volume a welcome addition to any mid-century modern collection.
This book was George Nelson's attempt to sell modern furniture to America and it is a lavish production: full cloth embossed boards and fine letterpress printing on glossy paper, etc. Designed by Irving Harper for the Office of George Nelson, the book itself is extremely well-designed and thoughtfully assembled. Drop-dead gorgeous photography, selected from the archives of Interiors magazine (who sponsored the publication of all four volumes in their Interiors Library Series). No other book dedicated to postwar American furniture can hold a candle to this exquisite volume. I am not exagerrating.
Contents:
- Introduction
- Material - Its influence is twofold: Tactile
- Material as structure: Wood
- Material as structure: Metal
- Material as structure: Laminations
- Material as both structural and tactile medium
- Two movements in design
- Three design influences: The handcraft look; The machine look; The biomorphic look
- Two movements in design
- Bentwood, Laminated Wood, Moulded Plastic
- Solid wood
- Metal
- Upholstery
- Index to Designers
- Index to Manufacturers and Distributors
Designers represented in CHAIRS include Aalvar Aalto, Franco Albini, Baldwin-Machado, Harry Bertoia, Sol Bloom, Marcel Breuer, Alexey Brodovitch, Luisa Castiglioni, Hans Coray, Paolo Chessa, Robin Day, Andre Dupre, Charles Eames, Le Corbusier, Taylor Green, Pierre Jeanerret, Finn Juhl, Carl Koch, Ray Komai, Florence Knoll, Don Knorr, Alvin Lustig (!), Bruno Mathsson, Paul McCobb, Mies van der Rohe, George Nakashima, George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi, Tony Paul, James Prestini, T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Gilbert Rohde, eero Saarinen, Ettore Sottsass, Edward Durell Stone, Hendrik Van Keppel, Alfred Thonet, Hans Wegner, Edward Wormely, Russel Wright, Gio Ponti, Harvey Probber, Ernest Race, Jens Risom, Eva Zeisel and many others.
Manufacturers represented in CHAIRS include Barwa, Dunbar, Edgewood, Hansen, Georg Jensen, Knoll Associates, Lightfoot, Herman Miller, New Dimensions, Pacific Iron Products, Paramount Furniture, Harvery Probber, Richards Morgenthau, Swedish Modern, John Stuart, Thonet, Van-Keppel Green, Widdicomb and many others.
From the book: "... there exists a truly extraordinary interest in just what one does sit on, and that trickle of new designs to which the furniture industry had long become accustomed had now grown to a veritable deluge."
It is also evident that this outpouring of ideas represented considerably more than a play for new business.... The greatest names in architecture since the Renaissance were to be found attached to chairs. Alvar Aalto of Finalnd, famed for his great sanatorium at Paimio and other buildings, found time to design a three-legged stacking stool and a number of laminated wood chairs, and he even invented some of the techniques for making them.
Le Corbusier father of a world-wide school of building engendered some prodigious creations in steel, leather and canvas. Mies van der Rohe designed his classic "Barcelona" chair in the course of doing an exhibition pavilion. Marcel Breuer became internationally famous for the steel chair he invented long before he made his reputation as an architect. Even Frank Lloyd Wright, who disapproves of sitting as an ungraceful and undignified posture ... has designed an impressive variety of seating pieces."
George Nelson (American, 1908 – 1986) possessed one of the most inventive minds of the 20th century. Nelson was one of those rare people who could envision what isn’t there yet. Nelson described his creative abilities as a series of “zaps” – flashes of inspiration and clarity that he turned into innovative design ideas.
One such “zap” came in 1942 when Nelson conceived the first-ever pedestrian shopping mall – now a ubiquitous feature of our architectural landscape – detailed in his “Grass on Main Street” article. Soon after, he pioneered the concept of built-in storage with the storage wall, a system of storage units that rested on slatted platform benches. The first modular storage system ever, it was showcased in Life magazine and caused an immediate sensation in the furniture industry.
In 1946, Nelson became director of design at Herman Miller, a position he held until 1972. While there, Nelson recruited other seminal modern designers, including Charles Eames and Isamu Noguchi. He also developed his own designs, including the Marshmallow Sofa, the Nelson Platform Bench and the first L-shaped desk, a precursor to the present-day workstation. He also created a series of boldly graphic wall clocks and a series of bubble lamps made of self-webbing plastic.
Nelson felt that designers must be “aware of the consequences of their actions on people and society and thus cultivate a broad base of knowledge and understanding.” He was an early environmentalist, one of the first designers to take an interest in new communications technology and a powerful writer and teacher. Perhaps influenced by his friend, Buckminster Fuller, Nelson’s ultimate goal as a designer was “to do much more with much less.”
“Imagining a sheet of paper as building site will give you a good sense for Irving Harper’s (American, 1916–2015) approach to graphic design. As the Swiss magazine Graphis noted in a 1953 survey of his print work for the Nelson Office, it’s an approach not dissimilar to that of an architect. “The page on which to print is regarded as a site on which to build…. Pictorial material, often broken into fragments, is organized by asymmetrical harmonies.” From his start working with Nelson in 1947 through his tenure as design director at the office until 1963, Harper brought a visual coherence and energy to everything he created—from furniture, to ads, to clocks—but it's in the printed collateral that his approach to design as a total experience is most easily gleaned. Be it evoking three-dimensional spatial gestures into a two-dimensional magazine spread, for example, or turning a functional object like a clock into a graphic abstraction, or giving a simple typographic treatment the textural quality of a swath of fabric, everything he designs has a deeper sense of dimension.
“Formally trained as an architect, Harper studied in his native New York at Brooklyn College and Cooper Union and eventually landed his first architectural job for Morris B. Sanders, who had been invited to design the Arkansas pavilion for the 1939-40 World's Fair. He put Harper in charge of interiors, thus inadvertently altering the course of his career. As he recalled to Julie Lasky in an interview for her book Irving Harper: Works In Paper, “‘[I] found design much more interesting because it was entrepreneurial.’ In an architecture office, ‘it’s hard to rise to the top.’ And ‘design work is more varied. Everything is a first-time thing. You learn a lot more.’” Harper’s early foundational work for Sanders and then for Gilbert Rohde, the illustrator-turned-product designer who had a hand in shepherding American furniture design into the 20th century through his work with Herman Miller and Heywood-Wakefield, helped solidify Harper’s position as a designer. It also helped him land the job at the Nelson Office: Ernest Farmer, an old colleague from Rohde’s office, had moved on to work for Nelson, and it was he who convinced Nelson to hire Harper to design graphics for the office. This early foundation in 3D design informed so much of Harper’s compositional predilections at the Nelson Office, and unlike many of the furniture pieces he designed there, his advertisements—especially the collateral work for Herman Miller, for whom George Nelson was design director—were often credited to him by name.
“When Nelson undertook his debut furniture collection as design director for Herman Miller, he was also tasked with creating the graphics and advertising work to support its sale. This included a new trademark that could be heat-stamped into the wood furniture. Nelson had initially approached Paul Rand, one of the most sought after graphic designers at the time (and well revered for his identity work, most notably the IBM logo) to create the mark, but when Rand backed out of the project, the job went in-house and ultimately landed in the hands of Harper. The first ad for the collection was to be printed in 1946, prior to any tangible furniture to photograph or illustrate and was limited to a two-color printing process. But like any good designer or architect might, Harper took note of his limitations, and building around them, fashioned a monumental, French-curved M in bold red, set against a black and white wood-grain texture. Harper later called it the century's least expensive corporate branding, but even despite the mark’s humble beginnings, the bones of that original M (minus the wood grain) have endured as Herman Miller’s logo—a testament to both Harper’s skill as a designer and the company’s belief in the clarity of his vision.” — Amber Bravo