Tag Archives: Herman Miller

In art, unlike design, the line dividing great work from the merely popular is most often drawn by our aesthetic institutions: Critics, academics, historians, and collectors—collectors, especially. After that, if a work can withstand the vagaries of the market and time then it may, at last, be something for the ages. What's conspicuously missing from this list is the public. In the final tally, they matter little.

But what if the mass market was the decider? Using reproduction numbers as a gauge, choosing a winner wouldn't be much of a contest.

On the left below, a Christ by painter Warner Sallman (that's his pic above, right) from 1940. He was once declared "the best known artist of the century" by The New York Times. His painting has been reproduced more than 500 million times to date. (During WW II alone, one printing shop kept two shifts of press laborers running on this image alone.)

On the right, La Gioconde, the best known painting in the world, Christendom and beyond, and source material for incalculable mountains of kitsch. (Leonardo's pic is above, left.)

As for critical acclaim, that's another matter. Just for argument's sake, let's say we let the pointy heads of the institution decide: In 2004 a group of 500 selected British art world professionals were asked to vote on what they thought was the most influential artwork of the 20th century. Their winner?

The inventor of conceptual art and the self-proclaimed de-deifier of the artist, Marcel Duchamp and his infamous Fountain. (You were thinking Norman Rockwell perhaps?)

Design, on the other hand, needs more than critical acclaim. It needs sales. (As Henrik Fiskar said design that isn't profitable we call art.) However the critics and taste-makers enthuse about a particular designer object, without public support it's dead as Dada. Still, there's no reason to fear a cultural takeover by bean bags and barcaloungers: While the plebeians may get the final word on pop culture, aesthetic culture is another matter entirely.

This may go a ways to explain why furniture design remains fixed in the traditional and why we can't seem to move away from mid-century. As we've discussed before, most chairs inhabiting our spaces these days have pedigrees extending back generations if not thousands of years. Prior to mid-century, the last furniture revolution coincided with the rise of industrialization and the materials it made available. Since then, the tried and true have prevailed. With few exceptions, the edgy rarely finds its way to our dinner tables or living rooms.

To wit: Phillipe Starke's Louis Ghost Chair. A streamlined dining table version of the Louis XIV warhorse reimagined in plexi.

As flexible as it is invisible.

F

Below, Starke's creation infiltrates the set of Gossip Girl.

Given the mantle of founder of American Modernism, George Nelson's designs manage to work slightly outside the sphere of the traditional form.

Below, the Coconut chair from 1955 (still available from Herman Miller): Nelson also gave us the first modular storage system and a forerunner of systems furniture.

Nelson argued that a design could push all extremes except the one that sacrifices its humanity: [A designer] must first make a radical, conscious break with all values he identifies as antihuman... total design is nothing more or less than a process of relating everything to everything." There, you see: It's easy.

Above, the Marshmallow sofa by George Nelson and Irving Harper from 1956:

Below, decorator Billy Baldwin's famous slipper chair: A crisp and prim accent chair that takes its upholstery to the floor. There's a reason for that. Baldwin believed exposed legs gave a room the appearance of restlessness. Furniture should be designed first and foremost for comfort. The Slipper was designed for short term seating, low enough to make it easy for putting on shoes, no arms for easy in and out access, and look that was sharp and plush.

Below, the Cotton Candy version currently available at Urban Outfitters (with its  un-Baldwinesque exposed legs). The legacy of the chair also continues at Target, Crate and Barrel, and Pottery Barn. The Slipper is still hot, it seems.

One of the founders of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius interprets the Chesterfield. The style, named after England's Earls of Chesterfield, goes back over 200 years and describes seating with arms and back of the same height.

A more recent reworking of the design concept in the B & B Italia Tulip chair:

The Chesterfield, the traditional and a modern reimagining:

In an earlier post we discussed Harry Bertoia's Diamond chair, a chair known for its innovative use of steel wire. Other versions would include the Bird chair with ottoman and the Café chair.

Bertoia was also a college classmate of Florence Knoll. It was Knoll who offered to manufacture Bertoia's chair. His pioneering work would bring him many laurels including an AIA Gold Medal and Designer of the Year.

Below, the Bird chair under a disguise of upholstery:

Bertoia was a multi-hyphenated sculptor, furniture designer, creator of wedding rings for Charles and Ray Eames, and college lecturer. (Bertoia also created a series of 10 Sonambient record albums based on the sounds of his wire Sounding Sculptures. See a demonstration of the sound here.) The Diamond chair has been in production since 1952.

Below, fiberglass Shell side chairs:

An important part of the mid-century style explosion was Danish Modern, a form epitomized by countrymen Arne Jacobsen (featured here), Finn Juhl (as seen here), Arne Vodder, and Arne Hovmand-Olsen. All four designers would enjoy international recognition and all owe a large debt to their forbear, Kaare Klint.

Below, Klint's Faaborg chair.

Klint's Propeller stool, owing much to the Egyptians:

While Klint and the Danish Modernists agreed with much that was going with Bauhaus, there were stark differences. The Bauhaus style stressed form and function as a singularity, minimalistic design without adornment, and industrial materials, especially steel tubing and glass. Bauhaus also represented a conscious break from Art Nouveau which had begun to fade with the beginning of the 20th century. Klint and other Danes were less inclined to let go of Nouveau's naturalistic motifs and organic forms. They preferred wood as a material and hand-crafted over the industrial as well as having design respond to the human body and its behaviors more than efficiency of industrial fabrication.

The Safari Chair from 1933:

The Safari reimagined (with a little Chinese style thrown in) from 1984 by Dutch designer Ruud-Jan Kokke:

Below, a Klint Lounger:

Bauhaus was founded in 1919 as a merger of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art, the former directed by Belgian Henry van de Velde. Velde would also be the Bauhaus school's first director, a job he would be forced from as the nationalists rose to power in Germany. Van de Velde would choose Walter Gropius to be his successor. The change over would also bring an end to the influence of Nouveau.

Henry van de Velde's work would bridge Nouveau and Bauhaus:

The chair on the left is from a pre-Bauhaus period of 1897; On the right, Velde eschews the organic for a more industrial look:

More chairs to come in Part 4.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 - 1928) believed everyone that came to the table deserved a throne. His high backed dining chairs not only radiated royalty but seemed to praise formality in the everyday. Mackintosh came early to the Modernism game and his designs embodied the movement well: Rejecting tradition and even burlesquing it but never without a subtle reverence for it. (Always best to give a nod to the giants that came before.)

More of a niche than a chair, this Mackintosh design shows more than a little of an Asian influence (above). Clearly, it's a design that still resonates as demonstrated in the Philippe Starck chairs (below).

In many of their chairs, contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Mackintosh shared a similar vision. Two of Wright's master works below: The Barrel (below, first) and the Robie House chair (second below).

Before Danish architect Arne Jacobsen bombed the furniture biz in 1952 with his first major success, the innovative Ant (below left) chair, he contemplated the future of Modernist design from the seat of his favorite Eames plywood chair. Soon after, he'd follow with Number 7 in 1955 (below right) to even greater effect. The ne plus ultra of Danish furniture design, Number 7 would go on to sell over 5 million units.

Jacobsen continued to produce iconic pieces throughout the 50s and 60s: Most notably, the Egg (below), Swan (second below), and Drop (third below) chairs.

As students, Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames would collaborate on a collection of furniture that would win first prize in a 1940 exhibition at MoMA "Organic Designs in Home Furnishings." By 1946 Saarinen and Eames would follow their muses seperately: Eames with Herman Miller and Saarinen with Knoll. For the Finnish born Saarinen, this fertile muse would lead him to some of the most renowned chairs ever designed. This included the Ball chair from 1946;

the well furnished playboy's pad staple, the 1968 Bubble chair;

the 1948 Womb chair;

and the chair made famous on the starship Enterprise, the Tulip from 1956.

The Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy designed Butterfly chair would come to rule bourgeois homes of taste in the 60s, even though by this time his 1938 design was practically middle-aged.

Here, the Butterfly elegantly coerces Sophia Loren's knees into the sun.

In 1955 sculptor Harry Bertoia won "Designer of the Year" for what was to become the iconic Diamond chair.

Another chair with considerable aesthetic stamina is the Xavier Pouchard designed Tolix French Café chair from 1934.

The 1006 Emeco Navy Side chair is probably one the world's best known. Founded in 1944 to create a chair for the U.S. navy worthy of a torpedo strike (company founder Wilton Dinges tested the chair by tossing it out of a six-story window), Emeco fabricates the chair in 77 step that is still guided and crafted by hand. (Apparently the curtains may be closing on the traditional process soon.) Despite their sturdiness the chairs are lightweight, the result of being made from corrosion-resistant aluminum. Interior designers would later discover the chair for themselves and pluck them from maritime obscurity. And the rest is aesthetic history.

More recently, Emeco has been producing chairs from recycled materials. This, their plastic version, is called the 111 for the fact that it's made out of 111 recycled Coke bottles. It also comes in a range of colors beyond red.

African-American designer Nathaniel Alexander was first to patent the folding chair (1911). (The idea of the folding chair goes back to the Egpytians.) Though, his version still had a ways to go as it didn't include folding legs, he certainly was a forerunner in what might be the most pervasive chair in modern life. If success in design has anything to do with commonality and use then surely Alexander is one of the giants of the chair.

Even more awesome chair shizznit to come in The Definitive Guide: Part 3; Part 3.

First, a disclaimer:
Is such a thing even possible, to designate one work the be all end all for everyone? Probably not. And even though we'll be confining our choices to the twentieth century, there's still loads of room for debate. Art and design, like politics, are emotional: The best work is forged from it, and our response is a product of it. Emotions are a kind of social anarchy where tastes are concerned; Each of us with our own internal wiring will inevitably make for spirited, complicated, and endless disagreement. Maybe awards for The Greatest are best left to accountants to tally up the tangibles, like sales and attendance. But art is a slipperier. As Humphrey Bogart said of the Oscars: " Awards are meaningless for actors, unless they all play the same part." Why should design be any different?

There are many Greatest lists, surveys, and Top Tens to choose from if you're satisfied that's close enough. But where's the fun in that? For this, The Definitive Guide to The World's Greatest Design, we're looking only for the acme, apex, and apogee : That true One. To find it may require a bit of data teasing and some creative speculation, but no matter: We'll get to the bottom of it.

Now, down to business.

1) Architecture
The evidence:
According to the paper The Greatest Architects of the Twentieth Century: Goals, Methods, and Life Cycles by David Galenson published by NBER, using a method of  surveying textbooks, Galenson was able to establish, based on his research, the greatest architect of the twentieth century: Le Corbusier.

Above, Le Corbusier's Chapel for Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France: The architect showing some influence of the popular Art Noveau and Art Deco movements of his time. In its Best of the Century feature in 1999, Time Magazine named The Chapel as Best Building. (Falling Water came in third.)

Time Magazine also called Le Corbusier "the most important architect of the twentieth century. Frank Lloyd Wright was more prolific [but] many would argue that Le Corbusier was more gifted." (Below, Villa Savoye, Poissy, France.)

Not that the legendary modernist didn't have his detractors. He's not only been blamed for the unsavory conditions of life in his high rises, but also for violent urban gangs. One critic accused him of being "to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform." Ouch.

Galenson also makes the claim, using the same methodology, that Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano are the twentieth century's greatest living architects.

Frank Lloyd Wright (his Fallingwater above), on the other hand, was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) as "the greatest American architect of all time." (It's interesting to note that Wright also thought of himself the same way.) The prodigious Wright designed more than a 1,000 projects and completed over 500. In addition, he wrote books and articles and, like Le Corbusier, designed all matter of other stuff as well: To him the term consummate designer would certainly apply.

As for the greatest single example of architecture, the Empire State Building: Ranked number one by the AIA on its List of America's Favorite Architecture and named one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Designed by architect William H. Lamb and completed in 1931, it was the tallest building in the world for 40 years (and is once again the tallest in NYC) and perhaps the greatest example of the Art Deco building style. It also remains one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world.

In 2010, Vanity Fair magazine published a survey among 52 of the world's most prominent architects, a list that included 11 Pritzker winners. This Western-tilted jury included the likes of Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Zaha Hadid, and Richard Meier. The quesiton? What is the most important piece of architecture built since 1980? The winner: Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Here's Phillip Johnson's anointment of the master in the same article:

"In February 1998, at the age of 91, Philip Johnson, the godfather of modern architecture, who 40 years earlier had collaborated with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on the iconic Seagram Building, in Manhattan, traveled to Spain to see the just-completed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He stood in the atrium of the massive, titanium-clad structure with its architect, Frank Gehry, as TV cameras from Charlie Rose captured him gesturing up to the torqued and sensually curving pillars that support the glass-and-steel ceiling and saying, 'Architecture is not about words. It’s about tears.' Breaking into heavy sobs, he added, 'I get the same feeling in Chartres Cathedral.' Bilbao had just opened its doors, but Johnson, the principal apostle of the two dominant forms of architecture in the 20th century—Modernism and Postmodernism—and the design establishment’s ultimate arbiter, was prepared to call it on the spot. He anointed Gehry 'the greatest architect we have today' and later declared the structure 'the greatest building of our time.' ”

There you have it: The Pritzker laureate and architect that brought Philip Johnson to tears. And in terms of cultural impact, Gehry's Guggenheim alone has had the effect of taking the otherwise unassuming Bilbao, a municipality only slightly larger than the city of Bakersfield, and bringing it to the world stage as a global destination.

The verdict:
Frank Gehry, World's Greatest Architect; The Guggenheim in Bilbao, World's Greatest (modern) Building.

Next in Part 2: Interior design.