PROBLEMS OF DESIGN
George Nelson
George Nelson, Arthur Drexler [Foreward]: PROBLEMS OF DESIGN. New York: Whitney, 1957. First Edition. Square quarto. Black fabricoid boards decorated in white. Printed dust jacket. 204 pp. 26 well-illustrated essays. INSCRIBED on front free endpaper. Very good example of the scarce, unclipped dust jacket, with mild rubbing and slight chipping. An very uncomon title in hardcover, especially with the dust jacket. The association inscription makes for a singular copy. Near fine
Warmly inscribed to Elaine K. Sewell Jones, a publicist for Herman Miller and renowned advocate of Californian Design who was also married to Architect A. Quincy Jones. During her lengthy career, Jones handled public relations for T&O, the short-lived Textiles & Objects Shop in New York City. The Shop was a Herman Miller store that showcased Alexander Girard fabrics, as well as objects Girard found on his international travels.
8.5 x 8.5 hardcover book with 204 pages and over 100 b/w photographs, illustrations and diagrams. An anthology of 26 essays by the ever-erudite Nelson, culled from a variety of sources, including Interiors, industrial Design, Holiday, Fortune, Architectural Forum, house and Garden, American Fabrics, the Philips Academy Bulletin (!) and others.
Nelson tackles the problems of design in the following categories: Art, Architecture, Houses, Planning and Interiors. Every essay is a keeper, with Nelson arguing his positions with humor and insight that have not dated one iota in the half-century since they were first published.
Contents:
PROBLEMS OF DESIGN
Design as Communication
Good Design: what is it for?
Art X -- the Georgia Experiment
Captive Designer vs. independent Designer
Ends and means
Obsolescence
A new Profession?
Structure and Fabirc
The Enlargement of Vision
The Designer in the modern world
High time to experiment
ART
Some notes on relations between the visual arts
Venus, persephone and September Morn.
ARCHITECTURE
Classic holiday house
Wright's houses
Stylistic trends in contemporary architecture
HOUSES
Down with housekeeping
the japanese House
Prefabrication
After the modern house
The Second house
PLANNING
Planning with you
Main Street
INTERIORS
The dead-end room
Modern Decoration
Notes on the new subscape
Contains work by the following designers, artists, photographers: Charles Eames, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, Hedrich-Blessing, Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller 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
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. [xlist_2018]