Design Is a Response
to Social Change
The Modern House
Talk about social change! The postwar period in the 1940s saw profound and extensive changes in American life: the GI Bill, which sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to college—and on to professional careers; suburbanization—the movement of vast numbers of Americans from city apartments to newly built suburban homes; changes in income levels and gender roles. The list goes on and on.
George Nelson, who said, "Design is a response to social change," was focused on the change in living environments. "The modern house," he said, "is a good house because it is a 'natural' house." He was speaking as an architect and leading a design movement toward living spaces very different from prewar housing concepts. He understood that people would no longer be born and raised and die in the same house, that Americans had become mobile, and that they needed furniture to support the new American life style.
Nelson's Storagewall was the antithesis of what that "average manufacturer" might have produced.
"Simple and Even Stark"
One of Nelson's first designs for Herman Miller was a series of wood cabinets. But they were as far from traditional casework cabinetry as they could possibly be. The cabinets were different sizes and different configurations, but they were all done in the same finishes, so they could be used together in dozens of ways. They were the Storagewall deconstructed.
You could use them as standard furniture if you wanted. Or you could stack them, place them side by side, place them atop the Platform Bench, cover a wall with them for a built-in look you could take with you when you moved, or combine them to divide one room from another.
The cabinets were featured in a 1948 LIFE magazine article called "Top American Designers make it simple, slim and comfortable," which also featured the work of Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, among others.
For the first time since the 18th Century, Americans can buy furniture created and signed by designers of distinction and originality. Some of their work is shown here. It is very modern, simple and even stark, because its designers...feel that these qualities are more in tune with present ways of living than traditional imitations of Chippendale, Sheraton and Duncan Phyfe.
Change Again
As we shift into new ways of living at home in the 21st century, there is a need for modular, easily movable furniture pieces that serve more than one purpose—bookcase, media storage, filing, breakfront, bar, room divider. The Nelson Basic Cabinet Series fills the bill; these pieces save space, while providing lots of efficient storage.
That's why we decided it was time to reintroduce them. They are as useful in the homes of today as they were in the postwar boom.
The Storagewall
Nelson's radical Storagewall, conceived in 1944, was the first salvo he fired in the direction of traditional home interiors. "The average [furniture] manufacturer has no convictions whatever about design, or any understanding of it," he wrote in a FORTUNE magazine article in 1947. "Today he is making a lot of 'eighteenth century'—tomorrow, if he believed it would sell, he would cheerfully switch to Turkish Bordello."
A modular system of cabinets, shelves, drawers, and closets designed to hold all the stuff of daily life, Storagewall generated a lot of interest among the public and anxiety among furniture manufacturers, who didn't want to give up their traditional casework. It also caught the attention of our president, D.J. De Pree, who hired Nelson to be our design director after reading the Architectural Forum article about the idea.
It is very modern, simple and even stark,
because its designers...feel that these
qualities are more in tune with present
ways of living...
