Nelson Coconut Chair by Herman Miller

Herman Miller History

Founded in 1923 and recognized today throughout the world as an innovator in office and residential furniture design, Herman Miller has been ranked since 1986 among the top ten in Fortune Magazine’s annual list of the 500 most admired companies. Their pioneering research into producing environmentally responsible furniture has earned them GreenGuard Indoor Air Quality certification for most of their products. Aesthetically, many of Herman Miller’s iconic designs, particularly from the 1940s and 1950s, are valuable collector’s items and on permanent display in museums such as the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1933, new furniture designs created by Herman Miller designer Gilbert Rohde exhibiting the smooth lines and unembellished shapes of the emerging mid-century modern furniture style were exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1944, Rohde’s successor George Nelson designed such enduring icons as the Platform bench, and was famously responsible for teaming the company with such influential design artists as Alexander Girard, Isamu Noguchi and Charles and Ray Eames. Charles Eames, widely regarded as a genius in contemporary furniture design, produced one of Herman Miller’s most successful products in 1956, the elegant Eames Lounge chair. In 1994, Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf introduced a new office chair called Aeron (derived from the word aeration, which describes how the mesh suspension promotes comfort), which became an immediate worldwide success and earned a spot in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as well. Today, Herman Miller continues to attract world-famous designers like Jeff Weber, Jerome Caruso, the Studio 7.5 Design Team in Berlin, Yves Behar, Mark Goetz and many more.

If the purpose of design is to solve problems, and the relationship between design and business is synergistic, then Herman Miller today continues to be in the vanguard of design as a fundamental part of strategic planning.

George Nelson

“There is a market for good design.”
— George Nelson

George Nelson (1908-1986) was, together with Charles & Ray Eames, one of the founding fathers of the industrial design movement known as American Modernism.

After graduating from Yale in 1928 with a degree in architecture, Nelson moved to and traveled extensively throughout Europe where he met, interviewed and wrote about some of the leading figures in the modernist architecture movement, including Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Gio Ponti, in effect introducing the work of the European avant garde to an American audience for the first time.

Back in the United States working as an editor for Architectural Forum magazine, Nelson began writing about modern design not as a matter of styles, but instead as problems that needed to be solved. He conceived of design as a system beyond mere styling and always involved with the greater nexus of interrelated interests and concerns. His approach was to look at things as an industrial designer: Who is it for? Who’s going to use it? Where is it going to be? Good design began with asking the right questions.

“Total design is nothing more or less than a process of relating everything to everything.”
— George Nelson

In the 1940s, he began a series of collaborations that revolutionized American design and produced many of the era’s most enduring and acclaimed pieces. While the concept of the sectional sofa is attributed to Rohde, it was Nelson who converted that concept into shapes that were more flexible. The sleek, rectilinear lines of his famous Platform bench (aka the Slat bench) reflected his dedication to making an honest visual statement about an object's purpose. Nelson’s designs for sofas, tables, and chairs acknowledged the importance of accommodating the way a person worked before the concept of ergonomics existed! His design for the first L-shaped desk is the precursor to today’s workstation.

George Nelson’s conceptual efforts went far beyond producing products. Studying aerial maps of metropolitan areas and their traffic flow problems in the 1970s, he conceived of the outdoor pedestrian mall as a way to reduce pollution.

In many ways, George Nelson designed Herman Miller itself, by raising design to a corporate strategy. One example of his trailblazing approach was his idea that rather than simply arranging showrooms with furniture lined up in rows, displays could be created that placed the products in a realistic environment, which allowed customers to visualize the pieces in their own homes.

The lasting effects of Nelson’s forward-looking designs and conceptual innovations cannot be overstated.

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