Herman Miller: A Way of Living

Most furniture books are about chairs. This one is about a company, which turns out to be the harder subject and the more interesting one.

Herman Miller: A Way of Living is Phaidon's 614-page history of the Michigan furniture company, covering more than a hundred years from its founding in the early twentieth century to the present day. It is a survey rather than a monograph on any one piece, and the pictures come from two sources: new photography commissioned for the book, and the company's own archive. That pairing is the point of the thousands of illustrations. A piece as it was photographed when it was new, then the same piece photographed again now. Ray and Charles Eames, George Nelson and Alexander Girard each get their stories and their work. So do the defining moments and the people who ran the place, which is the half a furniture catalogue always leaves out.

Phaidon gives Herman Miller's record on the environment and on community service the same weight as the designs and the international influence, treating the culture around the furniture as part of the story instead of a footnote to it. That is the argument the book is making: a company known for the Eames lounge chair is also a company that built a particular way of working, and the two are not separable. Six hundred pages is what it takes to show both, and three editors to assemble it, Amy Auscherman, Sam Grawe and Leon Ransmeier. The printing in circulation now is Phaidon's anniversary edition.