Midcentury Modern Designer: George Nelson
(1908-1986)
George Nelson is one of the founders of American Modernism and his name is synonymous with what most people consider Retro clocks, furniture and architecture. He graduated from Yale in 1928 where he had studied Architecture and in 1931 he was awarded another degree in Fine Arts. After this, he moved to Rome where he traveled Europe and became acquainted with a number of European modernist designers and architects who helped him refine the ideas that would later appear in his striking and innovative designs.
When he returned to the United States he wrote “Tomorrow’s House: A Complete Guide for the Home Builder” as well as a variety of articles and essays for various publications. In 1935 he was hired as an editor for the Architectural Forum magazine, a position he held until 1949.
During this period he had become known as an innovative and unique designer. He took design beyond the standards of the day, stating, “total design is nothing more or less than a process of relating everything to everything”. One of his groundbreaking designs was the “Storagewall”, a wall that doubled as a storage unit (in the prosperous post World War II United States, Americans began to need more storage space for their new possessions) was featured on the cover of Life magazine. He was also one of the first architects to propose pedestrian malls and wrote an article outlining the concept in 1942 that was published in the Saturday Evening Post.
In 1946 he was hired by Herman Miller to be the company’s design director. It was in this position that he worked with other leading designers of the time including Charles and Ray Eames, Donald Knorr and Isamu Noguchi. He remained at Herman Miller until 1972 and during that time that he developed many of his most famous designs including the Ball Clock, Asterisk Clock, and Marshmallow Sofa. Nelson also had a flair for functional furniture and developed one of the first “L” Shaped desks, a piece of furniture that can be found as a workstation in nearly every office.
He also founded George Nelson and Associates in 1947, a design business that focused on the innovative designs for which he was well known. In 1984 he was named the Scholar in Residence of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Design and his work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Brooklyn and Philadelphia.