LIVING SPACES
George Nelson
George Nelson: LIVING SPACES [Interiors Library Series Volume One]. New York: Whitney, 1952. First Edition. Small folio. Blue cloth stamped in white. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 146 pp. 232 black and white photographs and diagrams. The fragile dust jacket is lightly rubbed with trivial edgewear. Boards faintly bowed. One of the better copies we have handled, a very good or better copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
9.25 x 12.25 hardcover book with 146 pages, with 232 black and white photos and floorplans. This book is the Bible of postwar american interior design: beautiful photography by the best in the field: Julius Shulman and Heidrich Blessing, etc.
This book was George Nelson's attempt to sell modern housing to America and it is a lavish production. Designed by 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 housing can hold a candle to this rare, exquisite volume. I am not exaggerating.
Architects and designers represented in Living Spaces include Gordon Drake, Marcel Breuer, Richard J. Neutra, Architects Collaborative, Greta Magnusson Grossman, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, F.R.S. Yorke, Gropius, Harry Seidler, Samuel Glaberson, Charles Eames, Harold M. Schwartz, Twitchell and Rudolph, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, J.R. Davidson, Curtis and Davis, Campbell and Wong, Philip Johnson, L. Canella, R. Fontana and R. Radici, Ward Bennett, Breger and Salzman, Paolo Chessa, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., Oscar Stonorov, Russel Wright, John Campbell, Robert Rosenberg and New Design, Luigi Ghidini and Guglielmo Mozzini, I. M. Pei, Lamantia and McCoy, Antonio Lombardini, White and Hermann, Harry Seidler, Paul Laszlo, George Nelson, Jan Ruhtenberg, Alexander Girard, Finn Juhl, Waltner Bogner, Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames, Gruen and Krummeck, Ain, Johnson and Day, Carl Anderson and Ross Bellah, Twitchell and Rudolph, Craig Ellwod, White and Hermann, Oscar Stonorov, Dan Kiley, Robert Carson, Hugh Stubbins, Jr., Franco Albini, Eliot Noyes, Felix Augenfeld, A. Quincy Jones, Bogner and Richmond, Baldwin - Machado, Paul Laszlo, Katz Waisman Blumenkrantz Stein Weber Architects Associated, Michael Goodman, Augusto Romano, Marianne Strengell, Paul Beidler, Philip Johnson, Wallace Heath, Henry Hebbein, and J. Stanley Sharp.
Manufacturers and Distributors represented in Living Spaces include California Contemporary, Inc.; Drexel; Dunbar; Glenn of California; Kaplan Furn. Company; Knape & Vogt Mfg. Company; Knoll Associates; Herman Miller Furniture Company; Jens Risom Design Inc.; Van Keppel-Green; Widdicomb Furniture Company and many others.
“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
”What you make is important. Design is an integral part of business. The product must be honest. You decide what you want to make. There is a market for good design.” – George Nelson
Even if he had never designed a single piece of furniture or a wall clock, George Nelson (1908 – 1986) would be remembered as one of the founding fathers of American Modernism. The Hartford native’s writing celebrated American Design with messianic zeal and pedagogical insight. Every book Nelson authored is a true classic in every sense of the word. He was a central figure in the mid-century American modernist design movement; 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 furniture maker Herman Miller Inc., 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.
In any of the designs, in any iteration whose manufacture Nelson oversaw and encouraged, there are shining elements of lightness, elegance, sophistication —and a little bit of swagger. George Nelson felt confident in his ideas about design and didn’t mind letting the world know.