PROBLEMS OF DESIGN
George Nelson
George Nelson: PROBLEMS OF DESIGN. New York: Whitney Publications, 1957. First edition. Square quarto. Black fabricoid covered boards embossed and titled in white. Printed dust jacket. 204 pp. Multiple paper stocks. 26 essays illustrated in black and white. Former owners ink signature to front free endpaper. Very faint pencil marks to three margins within the textblock. Unclipped dust jacket lightly rubbed with faintest of edgewear. An uncomon title in hardcover, and rare in this condition: a fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
8.5 x 8.5 hardcover book with 204 pages and over 100 black and white 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. Foreward by Arthur Drexler. Book design credited to George Nelson and Company: Carl Ramirez, John Pile, Don Ervin and Herbert Lee.
Nelson tackles the problems of design in the following categories: Art, Architecture, Houses, Planning and Interiors.
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
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.