MillerKnoll Archive: Preserving Over a Century of American Furniture Design

The MillerKnoll Archive

• 💡 The MillerKnoll archive space in Holland, Michigan, curates stories of unique furniture pieces, preserving over a hundred years of American furniture history.
• 🎯 This region was once a significant global hub for furniture manufacturing.

Iconic Designs and Their Stories

• 🛋️ The archive features exemplars of modern American design, including the Womb chair, designed by Eero Saarinen at the request of Florence Knoll.
• 🏛️ Florence Knoll, trained as an architect, translated her background into creating interior architecture through products like her Model 540 cabinet.
• 🖼️ The collection includes pieces like the Chesca chair by Marcel Breuer and the Aeron chair, which was initially seen as futuristic and unconventional.

Evolution of Furniture Design

• 📈 Herman Miller, founded in 1905, evolved from carved wooden furniture to designing for a modern, industrial age, focusing on simple, mass-producible products.
• 🧑‍💼 Designers like Bruce Hannah and Andrew Morrison created furniture in the 1970s that responded to office norms, challenging the idea of separate chairs for management and secretaries by creating universally applicable designs.
• 📐 The design process involved practical considerations, such as determining the spacing of buttons based on human anatomy like sit bone width.

Archival Significance and Future

• 📚 Curator Bridget Bartell has utilized the archives for a new book and exhibit at the Cranbrook Art Museum, highlighting how designers like George Nelson were already thinking about the reception of designs a century later.
• 🌟 Designers like Bruce Hannah view the archive as a sacred space, feeling honored that their work is preserved alongside that of design heroes.
• 🔮 The caretakers anticipate the need for an archive twice the size of the current one to accommodate the next hundred years of furniture manufacturing.