HOW TO SEE
VISUAL ADVENTURES IN A WORLD GOD NEVER MADE
George Nelson
George Nelson: HOW TO SEE [VISUAL ADVENTURES IN A WORLD GOD NEVER MADE]. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. First edition. Square quarto. Black cloth titled in white. Printed dust jacket. 234 pp. Fully illustrated in black and white throughout. Elaborate book design by Mitchell Ford. Jacket design by Herb Rogalski. Former owner inked dated name to front free endpaper. Mildly rubbed jacket with spine ends lightly worn and chipped. A very good or better copy in a very good or better dust jacket.
8.75 x 9.5 hardcover book with 234 and many black and white illustrations, mostly from Nelson’s personal archives. Stated first edition of one of the most important works by a leading figure in American design -- George Nelson's treatise on the post-Expulsion from the Garden of Eden visual ecosystem that we inhabit. Well illustrated with photographs of Architecture, Art, Industrial, Product and Graphic Design, the Urban landscape, etc., it presents the Design director of The Herman Miller Company & Nelson and Chadwick's thoughts on all of these subjects, and many more.
- Introduction
- Communications
- Art
- Old Stuff
- Mobility
- Geometrics and other Exercises
- City
- Survival Designs
- Standardization/Variety/Evolution
The chapters cover topics as diverse as Letterforms, Spirals, Erosion of Pedestrian Space, Bread, Patterns and Pismo Beach. In each chapter Nelson discusses a way to understand and interpret the visual information presented through the photographic illustrations.
“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
Architect, designer, and author George Nelson (USA, 1908-1986) was a central figure in Modern American design; and his thoughts influenced not only the furniture we live with, but also how we live.
Nelson came to design via journalism and literature. Upon receiving his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Yale in 1931, he won the Prix de Rome fellowship, and spent his time in Europe writing magazine articles that helped bring stateside recognition to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gio Ponti, Le Corbusier and other canonical modernist architects. In the 1940s, Nelson wrote texts that suggested such now-commonplace ideas as open-plan houses, storage walls and family rooms. D.J. Depree, the owner of the Herman Miller Furniture Company was so impressed by Nelson that in 1944 — following the sudden death of Gilbert Rohde, who had introduced the firm to modern design in the 1930s — he invited Nelson to join the company as its design director.
There Nelson’s curatorial design talents came to the fore. To Herman Miller he brought such eminent creators as Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, and the textile and furniture designer Alexander Girard. Thanks to a clever contract, at the same time as he directed Herman Miller he formed a New York design company, George Nelson & Associates, that sold furniture designs to the Michigan firm, as well as the Howard Miller Clock Company. Nelson’s New York team of designers (who were rarely individually credited) would create such iconic pieces as the “Marshmallow” sofa, the “Coconut” chair, the “Ball” clock, the “Bubble” lamp series and the many cabinets and beds that comprise the sleek “Thin-Edge” line.