Right: Comprehensive Storage System (1957), with other products, including dishware, flatware and a Rek-O-Kut turntable
Below: Catenary Chair (1962) supported at either end by elegantly thin steel structure
McNay Art Museum
George Nelson: Deeply considered design for the (two-decade)
American Century
June 16, 2011America’s faith in itself, its power and prestige, reached its zenith in the two decades between the end of World War II and full-scale involvement in Vietnam.
What did that self-confident, forward-looking, go-getting, somewhat cheeky America look like?
It looked a lot like “George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher,” the summer exhibit in the McNay Art Museum’s Jane and Arthur Stieren Center for Exhibitions. Organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, the exhibit opened on June 8 and continues through Sept. 11. Vitra is the company that is licensed to manufacture Nelson’s designs for Europe, and the company's museum is the repository for the Nelson archive.
As director of design for the American manufacturer Herman Miller (1946-1972) and head of his own design firm, Nelson created or shepherded the creation of iconic designs that are still in production today -- among them, the widely imitated platform bench (1946) and translucent plastic “bubble lamps” (1947), the delightful “ball clock” (1948), and the “coconut chair” (1955). Howard Miller Clock Co., a family spinoff from Herman Miller, initially manufactured Nelson’s numerous shapes of bubble lamps and clocks, many examples of which are included in this exhibit.
These and other products (the exhbit also includes plastic dishware, logo designs and even a late-1950s Rek-O-Kut turntable, of blessed memory) helped establish a distinctive style of decor that was compatible with the lean, minimalist Modern architecture of the post-war period. Nelson, however, was not just a stylist. He was a designer in the proper sense, reconsidering the fundamentals of furniture and architecture in response to changes in culture and the nature of work.
The post-war period brought a big change in America's self-image. The character of that change was prophesied, and to a large degree was directly influenced, by a 1941 "Life" Magazine essay, "The American Century," by Henry Luce, publisher of "Life," "Time," "Fortune" and "Sports Illustrated." Luce's essay was partly descriptive, but mostly prescriptive: America, he said, should set aside its isolationist tendencies, enter World War II, win it, and assume the mantle of world political, economic and cultural leadership that, until then, the country had evaded. "The American Century" -- the phrase and the sentiment, if not the essay itself -- came to be as widely known as "The pause that refreshes," and as widely imbibed as Coca-Cola. Americans started thinking differently about their nation, especially after American power did indeed prevail in the war.
After the war, America adopted Modernism as virtually its national style, an emblem of America's new dominance of the West and new sense of progress. Old World styles and Old World patterns of thought were not suited to the American Century. The entire period covered by the McNay show, the 1950s no less than the 1960s, was characterized by increasing mobility, in both the literal and figurative senses. The end of World War II brought tremendous growth in housing and automobile ownership, and the combination of the two brought the autocentric suburbs into being -- wholly new urban forms. The same period gave birth to the Interstate Highway System and the eclipse of trains and ocean liners by air travel. Television overtook radio, bringing the world into the living room with new immediacy and vividness. The burgeoning Civil Rights movement and the steep decline of income inequality (which plunged when the United States entered World War II and wouldn't rise appreciably until the Reagan administration) upset long-settled power relations. The arts challenged corporate conformity (Sloan Wilson's "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit") and valorized the individual creative quest beyond established forms (Jackson Pollock, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage). Corporate and governmental organizations grew larger and more bureaucratic, but also more complex.
Accurately counting the pulse of this highly fluid culture, Nelson
brought certain key ideas to bear in his design work -- modularity, scalability, flexibility, system integration.
In some cases, the working out of these ideas was exceedingly simple. Nelson’s slatted wood bench could also be used as a platform because he designed other pieces to be the same depth. The McNay show includes a chest of drawers resting on one end of a platform bench; the two pieces look like a single unit.
The Comprehensive Storage System (1957) reflects a more complex design challenge, applying to furniture the inherent scalability of Modern architecture. The Comprehensive Storage System is a range of modular units -- cabinets, shelves, drawers, lighting -- designed to be supported on steel posts. The units can be mixed and matched in any combination to suit the users’ specific storage and workspace needs, and the system can be extended at will by adding support posts and modular units. The concept spawned innumerable progeny in home and office wall systems, by many different (and mostly lesser) designers. It also was the precursor, for good or ill, of the office work station.
Left: Action Office
units were designed for flexible arrangementRight: Model of modular American National Exhibition in Moscow, USSR (1959), a State Department showcase of American art and technology. The exhibit included a model kitchen, site of the famous "kichen debate" beween US Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev.
A similar system was used to create a sprawling “Jungle Gym” framework for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, site of the famous “kitchen debate” between US Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev. A scale model of the complete exhibit and several full-size segments are on display at the McNay.
The Action Office (1960) consists of easily movable units that can be rearranged at will. Conflicts between furniture legs and human knees are virtually eliminated by cantilevered work surfaces. A round table is supported by a thin steel pedestal rising from a wheeled base. The concept of movable, light-weight, cantilevered surfaces had been brewing for more than a decade:
In 1949, Nelson had hatched the Tray Table, a small, thin table cantilevered on a thin telescoping pedestal. (Alas, the McNay show does not include an example of the Tray Table, but that's about the only significant omission.)
Spare X-leg table, "pretzel" chair and wheeled typewriter table: Minimal design ideally suited to idea work
The McNay’s publicity materials describe this exhibit as “Modernist design from the ‘Mad Men’ era,” a reference to the popular AMC television series about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the 1960s. The reference is apt because the minimalism of Nelson’s office furniture -- desks no longer were glorified file cabinets -- seems most appropriate for idea work, especially idea work done by teams that may be assembled and disassembled depending on the projects at hand. That’s the kind of work that was growing rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s -- in the creative departments of advertising agencies, in the offices of editors at magazines and publishing houses, in the entertainment industry and of course at architecture and design firms. Similarly, the abstract, decorative geomery of Nelson's clock designs was more suited to the flexible, unpredictable pace of idea work than to the precisely calibrated realm of widgets-per-second industrial production. Nelson was prescient: Idea work leads the American economy today.
The law of unintended consequences remains in force. Modularity and scalability, which Nelson conceived as a framework for humane and specifically tailored environments, too often yielded stultifying, ill-fitting and permanent uniformity when translated (by others) into work stations for large organizations. Nelson's elegant Tray Table would be adapted by lesser designers, often with an enthusiastic application of vulgarity, as the TV tray table. And America's self-image as the world's Good Samaritan -- Luce's term -- would lure us into the Vietnam War.
But there are worse things to be than a Good Samaritan, and the inevitable misappropriation of deeply considered, elegant design is hardly an argument for mediocrity.
Mike Greenberg