BRUNO MATHSSON (Swedish, 1907-1988)

Mathsson was a forth-generation cabinetmaker from the town of Värnamo. His father, Karl, gave Mathsson his early training as a cabinetmaker and designer, and this training for the perfection of the craftsman stayed with Mathsson throughout his career. His training in the Swedish craft tradition, led him to explored organic shapes in his furniture design. Through his training as an architect, he simultaneously developed the modernist’s openness towards emerging technologies, viewing them as acceptable means to making high quality furnishings and expanding the notions of design and production, and constantly considered aesthetic coexistence of furnishing and architecture with their environments. The resulting style was modern and clearly influenced by Bauhaus and the International Style of the 1930’s, but like many of Mathsson’s Scandanavian contemporaries, became warmer and more human in scale and feeling. From 1945 until 1958 he turned much of his attention to architecture, and completed over 100 projects during his career.

Mathsson’s early experiment revolved around manipulating wood through varying carving, bending, and laminating, techniques. In designing seating – for which he perhaps best known - he often combined these with webbings made of various different materials, usually natural rather than artificial. His love of experimentation continued throughout his career, as he expanded into the use of expansive glass and in the 1960’s he even began experimenting with tubular steel. His father’s furniture business eventually came to manufacture many of Bruno’s designs. His work was shown in a one-man exhibition at the Röhsska Art & Craft Museum on Gothenburg in 1936 and gained international recognition with his pieces at the World Fair in Paris in 1937. In 1939 His work was shown at the MoMA, representing some of the first pieces of furniture ever exhibited by the museum. back to top

CHARLES EAMES (American, 1907-78)
RAY (KAISER) EAMES (American, 1912-88)

Charles Eames was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in the midst of industrial America. He studied architecture for two years at Washington University, before accepting a fellowship from Eliel Saarinen to Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit. In sharp contrast, Ray Kaiser, was born in Sacramento, California, and spent her formative years as a painter in New York just as modernism was rising to prevalence. In 1937, she showed her work in the first exhibition of American Abstract Expressionism. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the Eamses saw design, not merely as a means to better living, but as a vehicle to social and cultural change. This was to be done by bringing better understanding between diverse cultures through design, making the science of materials understandable to the layperson, and through teaching the public to see the beauty found in every day life.

Charles met Ray at Cranbrook in 1940, and they married the following year, moving to Los Angeles. The Eames began to produce low-cost furniture that was manufactured through Herman Miller. The Eames' approach to chair design was to work off of the idea of a seat as a shell, shaped to fit the body so that upholstery was unnecessary. The seeming hindrance of World War II forced the Eames to experiment with new materials and technologies, leading to the bent plywood chairs and molded fiberglass seating which came to influence modern American design throughout the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. As Charles noted about the molded plywood chair, "Yes, it was a flash of inspiration…a kind of 30-year flash."

In 1956, Charles and Ray created a now famous birthday present for their friend Billy Wilder, the Academy-award-winning film director; a leather upholstered lounge chair and ottoman. It was released through Herman Miller as one of their most luxurious and expensive pieces. Known as the Eames Lounge Chair, it is one of the most recognized - and copied - designs of the 20th century. This celebrated chair had a televised public debut on The Today Show, and the Eames Lounge Chair is in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. back to top

FLORENCE KNOLL (American, b. 1917)

Florence Schust met Hans Knoll in 1941. Knoll had established the Hans G. Knoll Furniture Company in New York, producing a range of modern furniture designed by Jens Risom. Florence was an architect who had studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, at the Architectural Association, London and under Mies van der Rohe at the Armory Institute, Chicago. Florence Schust had also worked for Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius. In 1943, she was taken on as an interior designer for Hans Knoll and re-directed the company’s product line from the Scandinavian style to International style. She also married Hans Knoll and as a partner in Knoll Associates, Inc., Knoll Textiles, Inc. and Knoll International, continued to run the business after her husband’s death. Florence Knoll’s own designs are reserved, cool and angular, reflecting her modernist sensibility and perhaps the influence of childhood friend Eero Saarinen. While she is modest about her own accomplishments, it was through Florence that Knoll began to manufacture modern sculptural furniture such as the Tulip chair by Saarinen, Isamu Noguchi’s coffee table and Harry Bertoia’s Diamond chair. In 1948, Knoll also acquired the rights to produce Mies van der Rohe’s furniture designs. During the 1950’s Florence Knoll continued to fashion the distinctive Knoll look, overseeing all aspects of the corporate identity, from showroom design to graphic design. She also recruited Swiss designer Herbert Matter to create a series of compelling posters advertising Knoll products and the Knoll logo. In 1967, the Knoll identity was strengthened by Massimo Vignelli, who designed the bold graphics that represent Knoll today. Knoll is one of the most respected and third largest manufacturers of contract furnishings in the world. Florence Knoll, set the company on the path that has led to its prominent position as a highly innovative industry leader today. "I design the gap-fillers," she once said. Clearly, she did much more. back to top

HANS J. WEGNER (Danish, b. 1914)

Wegner is one of the last living masters of 20th-century Danish Modernism. Trained as both a carpenter and architect, his work is characterized by organic, sculptural forms that are precisely crafted and highly functional. Born in Tonder, Wegner was an apprentice to a carpenter as a child. He went to technical college and in 1936 he enrolled at the Copenhagen School of Arts and Crafts, and subsequently returned to lecture in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He worked as a furniture designer in the architectural practice of Arne Jacobsen and Erik Moller, before opening is own furniture design studio in 1943. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s he collaborated on many of his projects, including interior design projects with Borge Mogensen and longstanding collaborations with cabinetmakers Johannes Hansen and Fritz Hansen.

Unlike his contemporaries, such as Jacobsen, Wegner was extremely precise in his designs, creating full scale drawings and elevations of each piece, detailing every curve and join to exacting specificity. In spite of the rigid precision of his designs he has always understood that good design must also be inviting; something with which we can live comfortably. "We must take care," he once said, "that everything doesn't get so dreadfully serious. We must play - but we must play seriously."

The American magazine Interiors featured Wegner’s Round Chair (1949) on its cover in 1950, referring to it as “the world's most beautiful chair.” This cemented his standing in the international design community, and the Round Chair became so ubiquitous that it became known simple as The Chair. The Royal Society of Arts, London made him an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry in 1959, and in 1990 awarded him an Honorary Doctorate. back to top

HERMAN MILLER FURNITURE COMPANY

The Herman Miller furniture company, based in Zeeland, Michigan, was one of the dominating forces in the spread of American mid-century modernist style, and continues to be an anchor and innovator in the furniture industry. From the 1930s onward, the company began taking bold steps like employing designers with a new, and sometimes even startling, vision of how the modern home should be furnished and decorated. Designers like George Nelson and Gilbert Rohde, each of whom served for a time as Design Director, Charles and Ray Eames and Verner Panton helped establish the reputation the company enjoys for the quality and pioneering energy of the pieces they produce.

The company started when Dirk Jan DePree and his stepfather, Herman Miller, purchased the Star Furniture Company in 1923. Throughout most of the 1920s they produced mainly traditional pieces for the home and historical reproductions. In the 1930s, after the realization that this style was not keeping the company afloat financially, DePree began to accept that their approach was not fulfilling the modern needs for furniture. Spurned on by the advice of Gilbert Rohde that the smaller houses being built needed modern, more efficient furniture, DePree completely reinvented the company aesthetic.

Just after WWII Herman Miller began its relationship with the Eames that brought them an incredible amount of industry and consumer attention. The Eames designed their first California showrooms and they opened several other showrooms in Chicago's Merchandise Mart and in New York City featuring their furniture. Over the next decade the company also brought on furniture designer Isamu Noguchi and textile designer Alexander Girard who led the company's brief Textiles & Objects store that opened in New York in 1961. In the 1960s Herman Miller saw a new incarnation as a leader in office furnishings with the development of Robert Propst's "Action Office." This plan for a modular office committed to ergonomically designed furniture helped revolutionize the relationship between design and corporate environments.

Herman Miller states in their company profile that Charles Eames best articulated their aim and philosophy when he said that, "it was never my design objective that the furniture be different or novel; only that it be good to sit in, good to use, good to look at, and easy for everyone to buy." While the furniture they distribute is usually strong in all of these respects, it was also the sense of novelty that exposed the company as leaders in furniture for the modern home. back to top

HEYWOOD-WAKEFIELD FURNITURE COMPANY

In 1826 the Heywood brothers - Walter, Levi, Seth, Benjamin and William - began manufacturing furniture in a barn near their father’s farm in Gardiner, Massachusetts.

In 1897 the Heywood Company merged to become Heywood-Wakefield. Originally, they specialized in wicker and rattan furniture. By the time of its 100th anniversary in 1926, Heywood-Wakefield was producing a wide variety of cane and wood seat chairs, school furniture, baby carriages, cocoa mats and matting, railway car seats, bus seats, reed and fiber furniture, opera and theater chairs, toy vehicles, fiber webbing, and a variety of miscellaneous cane and reed items. In the 1940’s the company turned to mass-produced lines of blond, streamlined, modernist furniture. In 1992, the South Beach Furniture Company bought the remnants of the company and began reproducing the original designs. back to top

JENS RISOM (Danish, b. 1919)

Risom was trained under Kaare Klint at the Copenhagen School of Industrial Arts and Design in early 1930s, and worked his first job as a furniture and interior designer for Ernst Kuhn.

Jens Risom emigrated from Europe to America as a young man, and in 1939 Risom collaborated with German émigré Hans Knoll on an exhibition for the New York World's Fair. This began a long and lucrative collaborative period for both Risom and Knoll. In 1941 the two took a three-month trip to study the various design styles and trends of America. The two became convinced that the new trend would be to furnish homes with quality, modern designs. Upon their return to New York Risom provided Knoll with fifteen pieces for his first Knoll catalogue. This 1942 series featured a variety of seating pieces, all made under the constraints of wartime materials limitations. The chairs, constructed from cedar wood and surplus webbing - inspired by the work of Bruno Matthson - have since become classics and gave Knoll the strong commercial start he had been seeking. Risom continued to work with Knoll as well as George Jensen, but established his own design studio, Jens Risom Design, in 1946. Dictaphone acquired his studio in 1970, although, as reported later by Interiors magazine, Risom “still cast his formidable, perhaps inhibiting shadow on the new owners.” In 1973, Risom began a new venture called Design Control, located in Connecticut. In the 1970's, he was a trustee of the Rhode Island School of Design. He was knighted in 1996 in is native Denmark. back to top