Review: George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher

Abstract

George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany 12 September 2008–3 May 2009 Fundacion Pedro Barrie de la Maza, A Coruna, Spain 15 June–29 November 2009 Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma 2 February–1 May 2011 McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas 6 June–29 September 2011 Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Washington 29 October 2011–12 February 2012 Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan 16 June–14 October 2012 Yale School of Architecture Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 8 November 2012–26 January 2013 In 1946 D. J. De Pree, director of the furniture company Herman Miller, hired George Nelson (1908–1986) as a furniture designer, and a year later he created the position of design director especially for Nelson. Later on, Nelson liked to remark that he took on his first assignment as a complete beginner, having never actually designed furniture before. Yet, by the end of the 1940s, Nelson was a leading American designer, shaping products for home and office and accepting commissions for architecture, graphic design, corporate communications, exhibitions, and interiors. To mark the one hundredth anniversary of Nelson’s birth, the Vitra Design Museum, which acquired the archives of Nelson’s office from his estate, created the traveling exhibition George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher . The exhibit presented Nelson, whose life and career have received relatively little attention in comparison with other postwar designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, as a prolific and influential designer whose product designs shaped the experience of the home, the workspace, and the other new environments created by postwar modern architects. Nelson was educated at Yale, receiving a BA in architecture in 1928 and a BFA three years later. While in Europe from 1932 to 1934 as winner of the Rome Prize, he visited leaders of the emerging modern movement, including Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius. These visits resulted in a series of essays in Pencil Points , beginning in January 1935, that profiled leading European architects and launched Nelson’s career as a writer. That same year he joined Architectural Forum and soon became an associate editor there and at Fortune . In 1936 he opened an architectural practice in New York with William Hamby, but it was primarily as a writer that Nelson achieved early recognition. In 1944, Nelson and …