The Design District
George, Herman, and Hive...Sale!
On the occasion of the annual (or is it semi-) Herman Miller sale at Hive NW Glisan) through which you save 10% and get free shipping until December 20, it’s fitting to dig a bit deeper and get to know George Nelson, (those are his Coconut chairs above) one of HM’s top designers whose work looks wholly contemporary today.
Stanley Abercrombie’s George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design is a kind of working biography of Nelson, detailing not only how his career began—as an architecture grad from Yale who began by writing a dozen interviews with Modern architects for Pencil Points— and how it took off when his Storagewall system began to get publicity, but also how he worked, who he worked with, including friends Isamo Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller (all roads lead to Rome), and the incredible range of problems his office tackled. His modular housing system, never put into production, is the most interesting I’ve seen.
The book’s littered with great anecdotes like the origin of his Bubble lamp…he coveted a Swedish silk spherical lamp for his office, seeing it as a sign of prestige. But when even the battered discounted floor model at the Swedish import shop was obscenely priced ($125 in 1940), he returned to the office angry and determined to make his own lamp. Nelson remembered hearing about the Navy mothballing ships by spraying a self-webbing plastic over netting. The Nelson office built the wire frame, found the manufacturer of the spray, and the lamp was born.
The Bubble Lamp is not a Herman Miller product and so is not on sale, but is available in all its iterations from Hive. I was curious if its $365 price tag would trouble the designer who created it as an economic alternative. $125 in 1940 dollars (the price of the Swedish lamp at discount) would be $1,847 today.
Nelson’s Slat Bench, however, a version of which he’d designed for his own office at Fortune magazine (!), is a Herman Miller product.
Get the Nelson book at Powell’s.
