|
1992 AIGA MEDAL
You may not recognize much of the work on these pages. You
should comprehend its spirit, though, even if you can't place its
author. Over the years, countless words have been written about the
force behind this, relatively little-known, work and other, much
more publicized ventures. It is the work of George Nelson, a man
whom some associate with the post-war glory years at Herman Miller
and others with the founding of Industrial Design
magazine. Still others may curse him for the development of the
office system. But there are those who've read his lucid, if
frequently caustic, prose or are familiar with this practical sense
of whimsy and miss the resonance of a voice that was continually
aimed with laser-like precision at the problems of design and the
problems with designers.
Those who knew him, and worked with or for him, recall his
ability to make the unexpected connections that resulted in new
solutions, or to ask more interesting questions, or to dismiss the
rote answer in design or anything else. Most especially, they
remember his ability to develop an airtight argument with the tools
offered by the discipline of design, and by the necessity of
language, thus effectively forcing them to see and to think
differently, and always clearly. As for the entire generation of
designers who remain uninitiated, Stanley Abercrombie has written a
forthcoming book on Nelson, George Nelson: The Design of Modern
Design, which should fill the lacuna.
George Nelson was not a graphic designer. He called himself,
simply, a designer. He practiced a variety of the so-called design
disciplines during his fifty-odd calendar years of ceaseless
professional activity. His formal training was in architecture. He
became extremely well known as a furniture designer, an industrial
designer, an interior designer and exhibition designer. He was in
the vanguard of a quiverful of design “disciplines” which were only
becoming bona fide professions, or at least ways to make a living,
at the same time he began to turn his hand to them. Or when he
began to write about them. Or when he began to do the work that
proliferated and sneaked in many, often unexpected, directions.
George Nelson in the course of this rather remarkable career
managed to excel in several professions requiring skills of
articulation seemingly removed from those of design. He was a
marvelous writer. He was a reporter, an editor and an essayist. It
may be that the designs he wrought from the English language were
his greatest designs of all. Unfortunately, those essays, as well
as the several books and countless magazine articles, have long
been out of print.
He also taught, on and off, on and on, through those fifty
years. And he traveled and took pictures, examining the world with
a typewriter, a sketchbook and a camera. Then he wrote some more
and designed some more, traveled some more and taught some more.
And learned some more.
That pattern of integrated interests and abilities and diverse
energies began establishing itself relatively early. George Harold
Nelson was born in 1908 in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated
from Hartford Public High School in 1924. He graduated in 1928 from
Yale University, where he had discovered architecture, with a
Bachelor or Arts degree. Afterwards, he pursued a Bachelor of Fine
arts at the Yale School of Fine Arts—the predecessor to the
architecture school, where he was an instructor—which he received,
with honors, in 1931. While in school and teaching, he also worked
as a renderer in the New York architecture firm of Adams and
Prentice. He headed south to do graduate work at Catholic
University in Washington, D.C. and to prepare for the Paris Prize
competition. Ironically enough, while he only made the finals of
the Paris Prize, he won the Rome Prize in 1932.
He spent the next two years based in Rome, but it seems that he
traveled throughout Europe quite a bit at a time when both
Modernism and Fascism were on the rise. In a remarkable series of
interviews with, among others, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le
Corbusier, Gio Ponti, the Luckner brothers (some of whom would die,
some of whom would emigrate to the U.S., others of whom remained to
rebuild Europe after the war or to populate the obscurity into
which many contemporary luminaries often fall) he captured the
political tenor of the age and its effect or absence of effect on
the life and work of designers. These interviews were the first
ever published in the United States with these men, whose very
existence would change the way we live and work. There were twelve,
published over a year or so in Pencil Points, the
architecture journal that eventually evolved into Progressive
Architecture. They appeared in print with the editors'
frequently repeated and increasingly strong caveat about using that
modern work as a paradigm for American architecture. The caveat was
ignored by Nelson, some of his contemporaries and an entire
subsequent generation of architects who saw the world
differently.
After Nelson had sold the series to Pencil Points, but
prior to its complete publication, he landed a position in 1935 as
an editorial staff writer at Architectural Forum, the
leading professional journal of the time, published by Time Inc.
His first written work for any journal in the Luce empire was for
Fortune magazine, and unsigned: it was an article in the
February 1934 issue titled “Both Fish and Fowl? is the
Depression-weaned Vocation of Industrial Design.”
During the following decade at Time Inc. he went on to become
the co-managing editor of Architectural Forum, a special
contributor to Fortune, the head of the Fortune-Forum
Experimental Department, and a peripatetic who had, in the course
of roughly a decade that overarched the period of our delayed entry
into and successful exit from World War II, plotted the future of
housing, of city planning, the state of industry and of travel,
among many other varied topics. He published his first book in 1938
and, until America entered the war, he was also a partner, with
William Hamby, in an architecture firm that did rather well,
designing, among other things, a widely-published “machine for
living” house for Sherman Fairchild, the aircraft mogul, in
Manhattan. He also found time to teach evening courses at Columbia,
in the early Forties.
After the war Nelson met D.J. DePree, a mid-westerner with a
mission to find a new designer for the modern furniture that his
company, Herman Miller, had been making. This meeting happened as a
consequence of some work Nelson had done for Time Inc. The project
was the Storagewall, an insight about interior space, organization
and efficiency that was eventually published in Architectural
Forum, made the cover of Life magazine, and filled a
chapter in Nelson's book, Tomorrow's House, co-authored
with Henry Wright, a colleague at Architectural Forum. The
Storagewall, an architect's answer to getting rid of the
unnecessary clutter that accumulated with post-war prosperity,
signaled an unusual, and fortunate, convergence of purpose,
training and insight. It also indicated a preference for the
sooner-rather-than-later extinction of free-standing furniture that
Nelson would ceaselessly propose for the rest of his
furniture-designing existence. All of which, with a few martinis on
Nelson's part, several trips to the wilds of Zeeland, Michigan, and
a handshake, led to a very long (nearly forty years) association
between Nelson and Herman Miller.
The association segued naturally into the opening of Nelson's
own design office and the exploration of other design interests. It
led, naturally, to the winding down of the relationship with Time
Inc., and, not surprisingly, to a contributing editorship with
Interiors magazine and later to the evolution of
Industrial Design magazine. But what it led to most
importantly was the opportunity for Nelson to let his instincts
flourish, to tease his thoughts free from the morass of extraneous
information, and enable him to oversee the process required to
translate an idea or insight into a physical, often useful and
occasionally beautiful thing. This bore a certain resemblance to
the considerably reductive and always hasty cycle of magazine
life.
The chance to put a keen critical sense to the practical test of
developing designs for products, for what came to be called
corporate image and graphic programs, for signage, for interiors,
of really seizing an opportunity for design to play a significant
role in commerce and, by extension, in culture didn't exactly come
with Nelson's role as design director for Herman Miller. He just
made it happen that way, by applying design to every designable
aspect of the company: from his first furniture collection and the
development of the Herman Miller mark to the design of the
company's first, and subsequent catalogues; to letterhead and truck
signage, advertising, secondary and tertiary literature,
invitations and hangtags—even to collecting other designers to
develop products for the company. It was all an act of faith. And
it also yielded a great deal of growth for the company and for
Nelson's design office. Perhaps most important, it endowed the
general practice of design with a certain specificity and
legitimacy it may well have lacked prior to the overwhelmingly
convincing example Nelson provided.
That, in turn, gave Nelson a mission of his own: to make people
see clearly what design was and was not, what it might be capable
of achieving and what it would require, as a discipline, to reach
its potential. He also tried his damndest to make people see that
there was a thought process driving design, one which had a certain
universality, with clearly beneficial effects for all those who
disciplined themselves to look beyond visual style, to see more
clearly the world they were making for themselves so that they
would, at worst, synthesize and, at best, design a better one.
The effort to do this occupied Nelson for years. He fought the
prejudice of a population he termed “visual illiterates,” people
who confused design with style, who hadn't developed any critical
visual faculty, who didn't understand that the immediately apparent
“look” of something was not design at all; that design was, to the
contrary, an internal, necessary, and ineradicable logic inherent
in the fabricated, synthetic world. Design, for Nelson, made the
mind's eye visible, tangible, comprehensible in the language of
materials of the physical world.
His argument has faded more rapidly and more completely than
seems possible given his pre-eminence as an ardent, provocative and
persuasive articulator of a substantial underlying reason for
design. He believed that the natural world and the natural sciences
provided a kind of basic model that could be used by designers to
design the manufactured world. He believed that designers ought to
attempt to develop a scientific method for critical assessment of
design. He believed that design, like science, needed a system as
objective as theory, hypothesis and experimental investigation to
insure its integrity. Of course, Nelson was at his most effective
as a designer during the time when the scientific discoveries about
the “design” of the physical world were thrillingly changing our
perceptions and providing new models and metaphors to obtain
greater clarity and depth of understanding of that physical
world.
From the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s the Nelson office had a
client list that included a host of Fortune 500 clients, a choice
selection of those decades' entrepreneurs, some wacky projects,
some possibly revolutionary proposals that were never realized, a
number of endeavors years ahead of their time and, most unusual, a
series of corporate brain trust-like consultancies even now outside
the range of most designers' activities. Nelson continued to write,
design, travel, lecture, organize (particularly Aspen conferences)
and to serve generally as a self-appointed gadfly buzzing around
the design community, stinging it awake every so often with an
outrageous truth.
It is impossible, within the confines of this essay, to
chronicle, even in précis, the work that Nelson himself and the
Nelson office produced from 1945 until its close in the mid-1980s.
That a gargantuan number of designs came to fruition is a wonder of
its own. Much of the work has remained memorable, some of it has
achieved icon status, and some designs have become cult classics.
That this is so is a tribute indeed to the rigor of thought and
agility of mind that went into their development. Other of Nelson's
works, perhaps, were just a matter of luck—the right idea came at
the right time; the flash of insight illuminated unexpected
possibilities.
Over the years, various people were more and less responsible
for interpreting, translating and executing Nelson's ideas into
graphics and packaging. The “paper” work and its applications were
in concert with and expressive of design ideas contained in other
aspects of any given project. The list of designers in the Nelson
office who created graphics includes Irving Harper, Chris Pullman,
Tomoko Miho, George Tscherny, Don Ervin, Fred Witzig, Herbert Lee,
Tobias O'Mara, Philip George and Anthony Zamora, to name
several.
The zest, appetite, curiosity, skill, and, in a way,
innocence—or at least a certain idealism—Nelson brought to his life
and work characterize him as a man of a specific time: an era which
saw the rise and fall of a faith in America as a benevolent
superpower with might and right on its side; and era which saw
science fail to succeed its successes in its role as a catalyst; an
era of progress usurped by politics and force of economics.
Most fortuitously, Nelson lived during the roughly one-half
century of the post-war period when design really could have
mattered. Its current concerns, ideals, and style may unfortunately
no longer mirror those that preoccupied him. But while they did,
there was not a stronger, more eloquent nor more articulate
practitioner than George Nelson.
Copyright 1992 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
|