Midcentury George Nelson Slatted Bench for Herman Miller

With its clean lines, sculptural shape and use of organic materials, George Nelson’s Platform bench reflected the American designer’s background in architecture and embodied modernist design. The bench, critical to the Basic Cabinet series he created for Michigan manufacturer Herman Miller — his first collection for the maker — demonstrates Nelson’s enthusiasm for honest, pared-down design.

Nelson (1908–86) grew up in Connecticut and studied architecture at Yale University. While on a post-grad fellowship in Rome, he interviewed numerous pioneering modernist designers, such as Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and more for profiles that were published in American architecture journal Pencil Points. Nelson subsequently lectured at Yale and secured prominent architectural commissions, but his editor roles at Architectural Forum and Fortune magazine proved pivotal to his career. After Herman Miller founder D.J. De Pree caught wind of Nelson’s Storagewall — a modular storage concept codeveloped with architect Henry Wright that was featured in Life and in the pair’s book, Tomorrow’s House — he invited him to design modern furniture for the company.

In 1946, Herman Miller debuted Nelson’s spare and versatile slatted-wood Platform bench. Initially comprising a birch top and ebonized wood legs, the bench’s metal base was integrated as an alternative in 1954. Nelson created his Platform bench for his office at Fortune before it found a home at Herman Miller, where it was marketed as seating, a low table or, per an Irving Harper–designed ad, a “plant rest.” It was discontinued in 1967, but the company reintroduced it in 1994. Today, the Nelson Platform bench is available from Herman Miller as well as Vitra (“Nelson bench”) in various sizes and finishes.

Architect, designer, and writer George Nelson was a central figure in the mid-century American modernist design movement; and his thoughts influenced not only the furniture we live with, but also how we live.

Nelson came to design via journalism and literature. Upon receiving his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Yale in 1931, he won the Prix de Rome fellowship, and spent his time in Europe writing magazine articles that helped bring stateside recognition to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gio Ponti, Le Corbusier and other canonical modernist architects. In the 1940s, Nelson wrote texts that suggested such now-commonplace ideas as open-plan houses, storage walls and family rooms. D.J. De Pree, the owner of the furniture maker Herman Miller, was so impressed by Nelson that in 1944 — following the sudden death of Gilbert Rohde, who had introduced the firm to modern design in the 1930s — he invited Nelson to join the company as its design director.

There Nelson’s curatorial design talents came to the fore. To Herman Miller he brought such eminent creators as Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, and the textile and furniture designer Alexander Girard. Thanks to a clever contract, at the same time as he directed Herman Miller he formed a New York design company, George Nelson & Associates, that sold furniture designs to the Michigan firm, as well as its competitor, the Howard Miller Clock Company. Nelson’s New York team of designers (who were rarely individually credited) would create such iconic pieces as the Marshmallow sofa, the Coconut chair, the Ball clock, the Bubble lamp series and the many cabinets and beds that comprise the sleek Thin-Edge line.

For dedicated collectors, as well as for interior designers who look beyond “the look,” there is a “cool-factor” inherent to vintage pieces from George Nelson and others. Nelson was in on it from the start, and it’s valuable to have a piece that was there with him. But still, as is evident from the offerings from dealers on these pages, in any of the designs, in any iteration whose manufacture Nelson oversaw and encouraged, there are shining elements of lightness, elegance, sophistication — and a little bit of swagger. George Nelson felt confident in his ideas about design and didn’t mind letting the world know.