George Nelson Biography
George Nelson was an American industrial designer and one of the founders of American modernism. While director of design for the Herman Miller furniture company, Nelson and his design firm, George Nelson Associates, Inc., designed much of the most iconic modernist furniture of the 20th century. An architect and designer active from the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s, George Nelson combined simple geometric shapes with ergonomic functions in his iconic designs. During his career, he designed several industrial and domestic objects; including clocks, benches, lamps and tables. He received the Architecture Prize in 1932, while in Europe he met some important designers and architects, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Gio Ponti. In the following decades, the designer collaborated with Vitra and Herman Miller, as well as producing architectural works in the United States. Today his personal archives are preserved at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, while his works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.
