ABC OF MODERN FURNITURE
George Nelson, The Herman Miller Furniture Company
George Nelson: ABC OF MODERN FURNITURE. Zeeland, MI: The Herman Miller Furniture Company, 1951. Original edition. Quarto. Saddle-stitched thick wrappers. 40 pp. Text and illustrations printed in 2-colors throughout. Wrappers lightly worn along spine edge. Interior unmarked and very clean. Unmarked but from the library of james Prestini. A nearly fine copy.
8 x 9 saddle-stitched softcover booklet with 40 pages profusely illustrated in a blue and olive colored variant [substituted for the Herman Miller Red] showcasing the furniture and fabric designs of Charles Eames, George Nelson and Alexander Girard. Stellar graphic design by George Tscherny, the Graphic Ace of George Nelson and Associates.
This book was constructed by George Nelson as a primer for the modernist ideology emanating from Zeeland, Michigan after World War II. A manifesto disguised as a childrens book, ABC OF MODERN FURNITURE was designed to sell the concept of modern furniture to mainstream America. In terms of booklet size and content, ABC . . . could easily be viewed as Nelson’s contribution to the dialogue first articulated by Edward J. Wormley two years earlier in WHAT IS MODERN? published by the Dunbar Furniture Corporation of Berne, Indiana.
ABC . . . is extremely well-designed and thoughtfully assembled by George Tscherny. He combined drop-dead gorgeous photography with clip art from the Bettman Archives to hammer home the idea that change is not only inevitable, but should be painless and maybe even fun.
The Herman Miller furniture lines from 1948 has been called the most influential groups of furniture ever manufactured. An exceptionally rare piece of ephemera that captures the zeitgeist of Herman Miller Furniture Company at the height of its influence. Highly recommended.
"George Nelson was an outstanding designer. We all know that. But my hunch is that, in a hundred years, he'll be even better remembered for his thinking and writing about design.'
-- Stanley Abercrombie, architect and writer
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 (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.”
George Tscherny (Hungary, 1924 – 2023) was hired by George Nelson, the visionary furniture and industrial designer and critic, as an assistant to Irving Harper who was responsible for designing trade advertising for the vanguard furniture manufacturer, the Herman Miller Co. As low man, Tscherny was given the sixth-of-a-page magazine ads to design. “I decided to make plums out of them, ” he says with pride, and he did an admirable job which earned him the full-page ad assignment. He eventually became head of the graphics department with a staff of his own.
Working with Nelson was probably the most important thing that happened to me professionally,” says Tscherny. “First of all, in those days the Nelson Office was the office and Herman Miller Co., his main client, shared the crown of the furniture company along with Knoll. I was literally thrown in with the elite of design. But more important, Nelson was one of the few articulate spokesmen for design then—and his ideas rubbed off on me. In fact, the most enduring lesson was not to bring preconceived ideas to any project. When Nelson designed a chair, for example, he didn't start with the assumption that it had four legs.” But the key advantage for Tschery was the Nelson had no proprietary interests in graphics. “He was interested in building three-dimensional monuments,” continues Tscherny. “And he thought that graphic design was ephemeral.
Although he liked me and appreciated what I was doing, he had no pressing need to involve himself in my area. That meant I could do almost anything within reason; I could experiment without looking over my shoulder.”
Tscherny believes that “design communicates best when reduced to the essential elements.” Yet he has resisted the ideological traps of some design theory. His method derives not from a preordained rightness of form, but primarily from instinct. Indeed one of his most significant accomplishments at Nelson's was to break the cliché of how furniture was advertised. Most advertising agencies believed, that to sell effectively, furniture (and for that matter, many other products) should be presented in a photograph with some good-looking woman in the foreground. Tscherny knew that while some consumers might be seduced by this cheesecake, the approach also had negative connotations. For example, a heavy-set person might be insulted and therefore not relate to the product. He further realized that the professional audience wanted to see the product alone, but intuited that signifying a human presence was important in both cases. As a consequence, he developed a method called “the human element implied.”
A 1955 advertisement announcing the opening of a new Miller showroom in Dallas was the first time this approach was used. An extraordinarily simple design, it features two spare lines of sans serif type and a high contrast black-and-white photo of a chair with a cowboy hat resting on the seat. The ad is bathed in red ink with the chair legs dropped out in pure white. “By including the hat, I suggest Dallas,” explains Tscherny, “while at the same time, I show the furniture in use, suggesting the human presence.” Tscherny's promo did not discriminate against heavy or slim, ordinary or beautiful, male or female, but set an inviting stage. Years later he made a similarly provocative School of Visual Arts poster showing a plaster cast of an ear, symbolizing the study of art, with a real pencil tucked behind the ear, suggesting human practice. Human expression, rather than pure geometric form, has been the key feature of Tscherny's design.