By Jessica Whittaker

How often do you think of the inventor of that gorgeous piece of furniture you just saw when you walked down the street? Are they just people who cut a few pieces of wood, got some sheets of metal and juxtaposed them in a fairly nice way?

Some people to whom furniture was more than just that made history. Whats more, some of them were architects of not just their sofas and tables but also of American modernism. He perpetuated a philosophy that reinforced human creativity and was the modernist who epitomises this creativity in his designs and looks at furniture in a way that only he can visualize.

He was born in Hartford in Connecticut. He showed all signs of brilliance as he grew up. College at Yale, degree in Fine Arts, work at pencil Points, and the Rome prize for Architecture just another feather in the cap for him. After winning this, as reward he got to stay in a palace in Rome, study architecture in the amazing city of boundless beauty and meet some of the greatest minds of modernist art like Gio Ponti, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. He interviewed them all for Pencil Points. His writings talked about a lot of concepts. He later co-wrote a book called Tomorrows House with Henry Wright (the man who made The Bungalow in Chicago). In his book, he introduced the revolutionary ideas of the family room and the storage wall. This made for interesting observation to Herman Miller who was introduced to Nelson by his brother Howard Miller.

The rest is history. Miller was interested in Nelsons futuristic visions for furniture and gave him a chance even though he had never actually designed anything previously. And George Nelson, being George Nelson, did not disappoint. Working together with other notable designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Irving Harper, Robert Schultz and David Knorr, he came up with some of the most frequently sought after pieces of furniture currently.

In 1955 he started his own firm George Nelson Associates. The famous Nelson artworks today include The Coconut Chair, The Marshmallow Sofa, The Ball Clock and the Nelson Platform bench. Some of the top notch people who worked with him were Irving Harper, John Pile and later, Ettore Scotsass. What happens to a company with that amount of genius is anybodys guess. There were negative criticisms as well of his work as he was a staunch modernist. He often blamed his colleagues for not standing by their principles of thought and design likings and going by what would commercially benefit them.

What Nelson is best known for is furniture but what made him an industry wizard is his yearning for the betterment of the world through his designs. An urge to preserve the rules of nature while still being modern was inherent in him. That is why his designs be it the marshmallow sofas or the sunflower clock are not mere pieces of art. They are marvels born out of the human mind. In what we saw a lifeless pane of metal, Nelson saw the possibility of making it come alive.

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