HERMAN MILLER INC. NEW DESIGNS / NEW SETTINGS
Eames Office and The Herman Miller Furniture Company
Zeeland, MI: The Herman Miller Furniture Company, 1963. Original edition. 2-sided mailer announcement/invitation printed in three colors with letterpress perforations. Uncoated paper with a tiny bruise to lower corner, otherwise a fine uncirculated copy. Rare.
8 x 3.375-inch card printed in three colors with letterpress perforations dividing the card into quarters. Uncredited graphic design from the Eames Office. The Los Angeles Herman Miller showroom at 8806 Beverly Boulevard was the only commercial architectural project designed by Charles Eames. Eameses’ three Californian Architectural commissions—along with Case Study Houses 8 and 9— all shared philosophical and material similarities.
This piece of ephemera from the West Coast Herman Miller outpost kicked off the Corporate promotion for the introduction of the Eames Tandem Sling Seating system, with the showrooms in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles redesigned by the Eames Office with railroad station photomurals and sets designed as public areas and filled with travel objects and signifiers curated by Deborah Sussman and Ray Eames.
Charles (United States, 1907 – 1978) and Ray Eames (1912 – 1988) created more than a look with their bent plywood chairs or molded fiberglass seating. They had ideas about making a better world, one in which things were designed to fulfill the practical needs of ordinary people and bring greater simplicity and pleasure to our lives.
The Eameses adventurously pursued new ideas and forms with a sense of serious fun. Yet, it was rigorous discipline that allowed them to achieve perfection of form and mastery over materials. As Charles noted about the molded plywood chair, “Yes, it was a flash of inspiration,” he said, “a kind of 30-year flash.” Combining imagination and thought, art and science, Charles and Ray Eames created some of the most influential expressions of 20th century design – furniture that remains stylish, fresh and functional today.
And they didn't stop with furniture. The Eameses also created a highly innovative “case study” house in response to a magazine contest. They made films, including a seven-screen installation at the 1959 Moscow World's Fair, presented in a dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. They designed showrooms, invented toys and generally made the world a more interesting place to be. As the most important exponents of organic design, Charles and Ray Eames demonstrated how good design can improve quality of life and human understanding and knowledge.
Alexander Girard (United States, 1907 – 1993) was born in New York City and raised in Florence, and educated in Europe as an architect. He began practicing architecture and interior design in the late 1920s. The exhibition he curated for the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1949 —“For Modern Living”— celebrated postwar modernism. Girard developed a friendship with Charles Eames in the 1940s when the two men realized they had coincidently designed almost identical modern radio cabinets and were both experimenting with plywood chairs.
Girard became director of design for Herman Miller's textile division in 1952, a time when fabrics, especially in the office, tended toward the utilitarian, drab and pattern-less. “People got fainting fits if they saw bright, pure color,” Girard commented at the time.
At Herman Miller, Girard had the freedom to express himself. With primary colors, concise geometric patterns, and a touch of humor, he injected joy and spontaneity into his designs. During his tenure, he created over 300 textile designs in multitudes of colorways, wallpapers, prints, furniture, and objects. Girard's work with Herman Miller continued until 1973 and included spicing up the Action Office system with a series of decorative panel fabrics.
Girard's reputation soared in 1959, when his zestful interior design of the La Fonda del Sol restaurant in New York electrified the public. He designed the entire experience for the restaurant—interior, graphics, place settings, staff uniforms. Girard reprised the feat for Braniff International Airways in the mid 1960s, designing no less than 17,543 different items—from logo to lounge furniture.
While Girard focused his abilities at Herman Miller on the textile program, he had a long history of designing furniture for other projects and clients. For Braniff this included sofas, lounge chairs, café seating, and tables for its airport lounges. In 1967, these designs were commercialized into the Girard Group—his only collection of furniture for Herman Miller.
One of Girard’s biggest ventures with Herman Miller was the innovative yet financially unsuccessful Textiles & Objects store in New York City, opened in 1961. The store sold objects that he brought back in bulk from his travels around the world, as well as products made with his textiles such as pillows and tablecloths, and small furniture by other Herman Miller designers. The short lived store, seen by many as an exhibit rather than an enterprise, provided the experience Girard described as "seeing, touching, and remembering familiar associations and all the other intangible activities of the mind and soul."
In a characteristically wry 1944 correspondence with Herman Miller founder, DJ De Pree, George Nelson wrote that “your reservations on my suitability as a designer for Herman Miller Co., impressed me very much for they seem to be well founded… the question of lack of experience in the commercial furniture field is also important, but here, I am afraid, you and your associates will have to make the decision on your own.” Fast forward four years later, and Nelson once again found himself reflecting on the integrity of the Herman Miller Co., but this time, not as a potential hire but rather as Herman Miller’s founding creative director. In the 1948 introduction to the catalogue for his first ever collection for the company, he writes, “From the viewpoint of the designer, which is the only viewpoint I can assume with any degree of propriety, the Herman Miller Furniture Company is a rather remarkable institution.”
Whatever leap of faith was required of De Pree to hire Nelson, the affinity and mutual respect shared between the two was undeniably fruitful. Nelson credits Herman Miller’s singularity as a result of a “philosophy” or “attitude” compounded of a set of principles—that what you make is important; that design is integral to business; that products must be honest; that only we can decide what we make, and that there is a market for good design—that allow for a degree of autonomy and innovation unavailable to companies driven by the shallow demands of the market or sales. “There is no attempt to conform to the so-called norms of ‘public taste,’ nor any special faith in the methods used to evaluate the ‘buying public.’ The reason many people are struck by the freshness of Herman Miller designs is that the company is not playing follow-the-leader.”
George Nelson (United States, 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.”