George Nelson, Alexander Girard, Charles Eames: the three Miller’s designers. A key encounter for Design. The company became history. The three American designers became history.
The Miller company was established in 1923 taking over the shares of the Star Furniture Company, which manufactured traditional furniture. The legend of the Herman Miller Furniture as manufacturer of original works in series, began in 1930 when D. J. De Pree, Herman Miller’s son-in-law, meets Gilbert Rhode, who suggests to him to manufacture a new series of furniture, simple but quality products, focusing on the materials and the solidity of their production.
In 1936 the new company’s principles meets the favour of the market and in 1941 Miller opens a showroom in New York, to display and sell the new products. In 1946 Rhode passed away and George Nelson joined as a designer: he would work for Miller for twenty-five years designing a new series of office furniture, and also thanks to him, the company becomes the second furniture manufacturer in the world.
George Nelson is known as one of the most famous American designers of the Twentieth Century.
Since his youth he has many interests, a busy life full of satisfactions. Born in 1907, he attends Yale and Washington Universities and, in 1932, after winning a Rome Prize, he moves to Italy for two years to attend the American Academy in Rome, where he writes for the Pencil Points magazine and interviews the authorities of architecture of the time, from Giò Ponti to Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.
Even during his busiest period at Miller, he continues to teach in various institutions and universities, including Yale and New York, besides working as an architect, journalist and critic.
In 1944 he designs Storagewall, the first modular furniture. De Pree notices that masterpiece on a magazine and decides that Nelson would be the best candidate for the position of design-director at Miller.
He creates the modular cabinets Comprehensive (1957), the sofa Marshmallow (1956), the series of chairs, tables and desks Swagen-Leg (1958), the sofa Sling (1963) and, the most important product, the modular system Action Office I (1964 1965). The modern cubical office originates from this first modular system, also in absence of partition walls everyone can have its own space according to the need of the group and the individual.
During his years at Miller, Nelson invites other designers of great talent, among them Alexander Girard and Charles Eames , to design modern office furniture.
Girard’s position at Miller is in the materials division, of which he becomes director in 1952. Many of Miller’s tapestry materials, with lively colours and elaborate motives, were designed by him.
Born in New York in 1907, Girard spends his childhood in Florence and gets his degree in London in 1929. He starts to work as an architect in Florence and continues his studies at the Scuola Reale di Architettura in Rome, where he gets his degree in 1931. Moreover he takes his doctorate in New York in 1935.
In the Forties he moves his activity as an architect and a designer to the USA, working at Ford and Miller in Detroit. His passion for travelling takes him to move to Santa Fè in Mexico, where he opens his studio in 1953. Fascinated by Mexican culture, he films a documentary movie together with Charles Eames: “Day of the Dead”. He dies in Santa Fè in 1993.
The versatile activity of the Eames, indefatigable creators, is connected to the Miller company, as for chairs and tables made in bending plywood (1945-46) and a whole series of furniture manufactured in the Fifties and Sixties, among which the Aluminium Group chairs and the Eames Storage Units, bookshelves made of different colours and materials.
The Eames creative pair designs and Miller manufacture distributes, turning the principles of the Eames furniture philosophy into reality: “Manufacture low cost but high quality furniture: creates low cost but well designed home or office spaces. Help people to see beauty in everyday life; help Americans and other cultures to understand each other”.
Maybe the Miller’s mission is not as politically correct as that of the Eames, but Miller’s potential on large scale distribution allows the spreading of new concept and materials furniture.