George Nelson did not like the idea, and he said so. The gossip, as he called it, involved Herman Miller acquiring Knoll. “I think that would be the worst thing that could happen,” he said at the time.
Mr. Nelson was Herman Miller’s Director of Design from 1946 until 1972. His opposition to joining the two firms wasn’t rooted in business dynamics or strategic concerns. It was different.
“The co-existence of Miller and Knoll is what puts both of them on their toes,” said Mr. Nelson. “We were always designing to each other. We wanted the audience to like what we were saying, but we were playing to our peer group.”
The thanks for this record of George Nelson’s reflections belong to an oral history project conducted in the late 70s. Excerpts here come from Margot Weller’s article in a 2015 issue of Art Papers.
Without fate’s intervention in 1937 during a drop-in visit to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s New York City office, there may not have been a company called Knoll. That story is another revelation from Ms. Weller’s article, “The Knoll Transcripts.”
On that winter day, SOM’s Gordon Bunschaft received Hans Knoll at the firm’s recently established office on East 57th Street.
“Hans was selling a special flat spring for upholstered seats,” said Mr. Bunschaft. “We were interested in furniture for buildings at the World’s Fair in 1938-39. I told him we weren’t interested in springs – we were interested in seats.”
The world can be grateful SOM wasn’t buying springs that day.
Soon after that, a team who would drive the strategic growth of two fledgling enterprises had their hands full. The site was the Cranbrook Academy of Art, located in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
By the late 30s, the academy was proving itself a vital destination. Charles Eames, Bernice “Ray” Kaiser, Florence Schust, and Eero Saarinen were all studying there.
On October 1, 1940, the Department of Industrial Design at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art announced an “Inter-American competition for the design of furniture, fabrics, and lamps.”
Winning in two categories, Seating for a Living Room and Other Furniture for a Living Room, was a team whose entries were prepared on Cranbrook’s grounds. The names Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen appeared on both.
While Eames and Saarinen’s choices in materials and methods were a “significant innovation,” the manufacturing expertise of the day hadn’t yet conquered the three-dimensional molding of laminated wood.
Helping Charles and Eero prepare their entries was Bernice “Ray” Kaiser. It’s unclear if that role factored into the divorce of Charles from his first wife to marry Ray. What is certain is how Eames Studio helped build Herman Miller’s design reputation.
Mr. Eames was well-remembered by Stan Schrotenboer. He joined the company in 1948 and was General Foreman in 1977 when interviewed for the Charles Eames Oral History Project. Mr. Schrotenboer said, “To the employees here, Charles Eames may be one of the two or three people who have put Herman Miller where it is today.”
There’s no single insight into Eero Saarinen. A quote from him on Knoll.com lends a glimpse of his thinking. “We have chairs with four legs, with three and even two, but no one has made [a chair] with just one leg, so that’s what we’ll do.” His statement in 1955 led to Knoll’s 1958 introduction of The Pedestal Collection.
That very collection rang a bell at Herman Miller, as told in “The Knoll Transcripts.” At about the same time that George Nelson’s team had a basic clay model of their pedestal base. Nelson saw Saarinen’s first pedestal chair and sent his friend a message. The note read, “You won.”
There’s a take on George Nelson and the Action Office story in Leslie Piña’s book, “Classic Herman Miller.” The 1964 introduction of Action Office 1 saw Nelson’s interpretation of a product plan evolved within the Herman Miller Research Corporation. Robert Propst led the Research Division from its founding in 1960.
While AO-1 was an award-winning design, its sales were underwhelming. Mr. Propst took the lead in designing Action Office 2, a modular panel system. It was a homerun.
By comparison, victories of a different sort came some years earlier for Knoll’s Planning Unit. To her Cranbrook cohorts, it was likely no surprise who was the force behind those wins.
She was Florence Schust, known to her friends and peers as Shu. Following her 1946 marriage to Hans Knoll, she became a full partner in Knoll Associates.
The same SOM architect that sent Hans Knoll away that winter day in 1937 gave Florence Knoll’s Planning Unit its big break in the mid-50s.
Gordon Bunschaft, by then a partner, remembers. “Shu Knoll had developed quite an interior department, and she was hired to do the interiors for Connecticut General at our recommendation.” The 650,000 square foot project completed in 1957 signaled a “turning point for Knoll and commercial American interior design.”
What was shared among that remarkable group at Cranbrook in the late 30s? Scott Klinker, 3D Designer-in-Residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art offers an answer.
The Eames Studio designs for Herman Miller and Eero Saarinen for Knoll came out of a truly hands-on, craft process. It was the Cranbrook way, in contrast to the Bauhaus. Mr. Klinker explained, “The Bauhaus focused on the Machine Aesthetic, asking ‘How do we use the standardized processes of industry to deliver a high level of aesthetic refinement?’”
He continued, saying, “Cranbrook was about craft, discovering forms with your hands. It doesn’t come from drawing something on paper. This process led to their iconic Mid-Century designs delivering a softer, organic, more human version of Modernism.”
Mr. Klinker points to the MoMA’s 1941 Organic Design Competition. The winning chair design, a collaboration between Eames and Saarinen, established a “new typology: the shell chair, using new materials and processes like bent plywood.” From there, they went to work applying what they learned, one with Herman Miller and the other with Knoll.
Aptly summing up what came next, Mr. Klinker said, “The rest is history.”
Special thanks to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Scott Klinker, the Cranbrook Academy, and researcher Ryan Burkart.
Stephen Witte writes, speaks, and consults for the design industry. Contact him at stephenmwitte@gmail.com.