100 years of wood office furniture design.

In the last half of the 19th century, several inventions changing how the office works were preparing the way for subsequent necessary innovations in wood office furniture design.

First, in 1853, there was the elevator. This invention allowed much higher buildings to be built and eventually resulted in skyscrapers. They also took advantage of the new availability of steel frame and curtain-wall construction. The major occupants of these tall buildings was offices, which allowed them to be bigger than before and to be concentrated in cities.

As Wood & Wood Products first ancestor was appearing, the telephone, which had been invented in 1876, and the typewriter, developed in 1868 by Remington, were coming into general use in growing offices. Wood office furniture design responded to these inventions and the paper they produced, as it did later to the advent of computers in wide use in the early 1950s and copiers in the late 1950s.

Somebody had to handle the paper work. The number of clerks in American offices increased tenfold between 1890 and 1920 as industrial production expanded. Fortunately for all those workers, the use of electric lights became widespread in the early 1900s.

Office employees needed a desk, a chair, and perhaps a file and/or a bookcase. All of this furniture was wood, until the 1930s, when metal filing cabinets began to replace the old wooden ones. There was rarely any thought given to laying out offices in a sensible manner. The furniture was just set in place, often in rows in a "bull pen," just like in classrooms. Sometimes executive and supervisory private offices were constructed along one wall or perhaps around the whole perimeter. As employees were added, more furniture was brought into the existing space until space ran out. The office workers did not expect, nor were they given, any privacy.

Gradually, during the 1930s, the companies that were producing metal filing cabinets also began to make metal desks, especially for use in the "bull pen," where the fact that these desks were generally less expensive than wood ones was important. Most of the items were sold by stationery and office equipment dealers, to whom a case of paper and a secretarial chair had about equal importance.

The growth of the metal office furniture business was stopped short by World War II, when all steel was required by the military. But as the war ended, the steel office furniture manufacturers were ready to go with an aggressive marketing program. Wood manufacturers fought back by forming the Wood Office Furniture Institute, with headquarters in Washington, D.C. WOFI's equally aggressive advertising campaign, as well as an emphasis on strategic planning of executive and general offices, helped to combat the takeover of steel.

Gradually, however, as wood manufacturers began to use steel parts, and steel manufacturers added wood tops, it became clear that office furniture was office furniture. The day of two separate industries was gone. In 1963 WOFI became the short-lived OFMI, the Office Furniture Manufacturers Institute. Ten years later, BIFMA, the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association, was started.

Systems furniture

Offices and their staffs continued to expand, and rare was the office that had plenty of room. The answer was a new kind of furniture - systems. The systems revolution in office furniture, which began in the mid-1960s, was fueled by an increase in the office workforce, coupled with strong business growth and the advent of computers. This situation also produced a shortage of office space. Systems furniture allowed more office workers to be put into existing space than if conventional furniture were used. Systems furniture also used more vertical space than conventional furniture, over the work surface.

Systems furniture also helped in solving a more important problem: the advent of computers brought with it a change in the composition of the office workforce. Low paid clerks were replaced with a steadily growing body of highly educated and highly paid professional and technical workers. These people wanted and needed more choices in their furniture, which systems furniture could give them. It helped that most systems allowed height-adjustable work surfaces, which were needed for computer operators.

Another advantage of systems furniture is that it can be changed, modified, and added to quickly, as needed, to satisfy these professionals' demands or for organizational and job changes, sometimes referred to as "churn." Changing fixed walls can cost as much as thirty times what it costs to reconfigure panel systems. And, panel systems allow much more and better communication among office workers.

As panel systems made their debut during the mid to late '60s, another philosophy of office design, originating in Germany, was being introduced in America. Called Burolandschaft, translated as "office landscape," it was promulgated by the Quickborn team, named for their town of origin.

Without discussing the full Quickborner philosophy, there were aspects of it that affected furniture design; it used free-standing desks, tables, carts, and a few screens with nothing attached to them. These were placed in a visually random fashion so that they mimicked the clerical process; each workstation (if it could be called that) was a step in the operation of that particular office. Indoor plants and trees were scattered about.

Thus, a battle was joined between Burolandschaft and panel systems. In the United States, panel systems won. The disadvantages of Quickborn Burolandschaft included poor acoustics, poor space utilization, inadequate visual privacy, and inability to handle wiring and cabling as technology advanced. However, the concept was an important forerunner to the design and use of panel systems, since it eliminated fixed walls.

Over the years since office system furniture was first introduced, three basic types have evolved:

* Panel-based systems composed of structural panels and panel-supported components;

* Freestanding systems composed of free-standing furniture (sometimes also including non-structural panels); and

* Systems composed of a combination of panels, panel-supported components and freestanding furniture.

A tale of two companies

To see how wood furniture was designed to meet the needs of these growing offices, we might look at the histories of two companies thriving today whose existence roughly covers the past 100 years, Stow & Davis (now a division of Steelcase Inc.) and Herman Miller. A third design leader is Baker, Knapp and Tubbs, whose first piece of furniture, which appeared in 1893, could well be regarded as office furniture. It was a combination desk and bookcase. Today its business is well grounded in very high-quality reproduction furniture, of which the Venetian secretary shown on page 297 is an example.

Note that each of these three firms started in the area around and in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attracted by abundant high-quality hardwoods and skilled labor available in the area. Although two of them have plants worldwide today, their main facilities are still in the Grand Rapids area.

Stow & Davis

Founded in 1879, Stow & Davis was originally a manufacturer of high-quality kitchen and dining tables. Starting with a capital investment of $500, by 1889 it had grown to the point where it was incorporated with capital stock of $110,000.

One of the owners, George Davis, noticed that the company's tables designed for homes kept showing up in offices. He started the design and production of Directors' Tables for board and conference rooms in the last years of the 19th century. Soon after, Stow & Davis began to make lines of bank and office furniture and in 1917 decided to concentrate production on matched office suites. An example is the 8000 suite, designed by London-trained William Millington. It is his adaptation of 17th-century English Jacobean style in American walnut and English pollard oak. Millington also designed for Baker, Knapp and Tubbs.

After acquiring a Grand Rapids desk company in 1928, Stow & Davis introduced the industry's first desk with a steel structural framework and wood surfaces. This led to a commission from Frank Lloyd Wright for Stow & Davis to produce the wood components, and Steelcase the metal frames and components, for office furniture designed by the architect for the celebrated Johnson Wax office building in Racine, Wisconsin. Stow & Davis still uses this construction method today for its Elective Elements line of systems furniture for the office world of computers, one of the first modular wood-surfaced lines.

Herman Miller

Founded in 1905 to make traditional furniture, Herman Miller began its modern furniture design saga by hiring designer Gilbert Rohde in 1929. Rohde's influence on Herman Miller's destiny was profound; his austere designs derived from his studies in Europe, especially at the Bauhaus, that fountain of modern architectural design. He undoubtedly was influenced by the Bauhaus masters as well as by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld's Red and Blue chair and Finnish architect Alvar Aalto's deceptively simple plywood chairs.

Rohde contributed the concept of sectional or unit furniture to Herman Miller, an industry first. His next set of designs, the Living-Dining group, was conceived so that the pieces could be used in any room in the house. Finally, Rohde's Executive Office component group brought Herman Miller into the office furniture market in 1942, where the firm had never before competed.

Rohde had also set the stage for the designers to come. After his sudden death in 1944, Herman Miller began a long association with George Nelson. an architect, interior planner, editor, graphic and industrial designer. Nelson's first designs, a successful series of simple plywood case goods on metal supports, was introduced by Herman Miller in 1946. He is perhaps best known for his invention of the L-shaped office desk in 1947.

Nelson also was responsible for introducing Charles and Ray Eames to the company. They came up with the molded plywood-and-leather lounge chair and ottoman that are perhaps the most imitated pieces of architectural modern furniture. They also invented the all-plywood side, visitor and dining chairs as well as molded plywood seats and backs for chairs on steel legs. Some of these products are being offered today by a subsidiary, Herman Miller for the Home.

Herman Miller's second modular office group was the Action Office (AO) system, designed by Robert Propst, a researcher and inventor who devoted years to finding out how people work in offices and what they need to do that work

In 1964, AO was a radically different design for the "open plan" within which work spaces are defined and separated by modular panels. These panels and other system components can be easily moved, enabling companies to adjust to changes in the office quickly and efficiently.

Portable and teamwork offices

The idea of "office" has been changing radically in recent years. For example, a person need not necessarily go to an office; he or she can bring the office along. Haworth's Steamer is a completely self-contained, portable office that can be packed up, then unpacked and used anywhere. Its name derives from the so-called steamer trunks that used to be stored beneath passenger berths on ocean-going steamships. It features a full-width, hinged locking door that houses a free-standing work surface, a tackboard, and an erasable marker board. Also included are two adjustable shelves, a roll-out keyboard tray, a 6-inch drawer and a 12-inch locking drawer. The Steamer measures 62 3/4 inches high, 36 inches wide, and 24 inches deep.

Another movable office is the Clipper CS-1 designed by Douglas Ball for Gilbert International; it looks like a Piper Cub cockpit and is formed from plywood.

Such mobile, portable offices are important for the increasing number of teams that are temporarily formed in offices for specific purposes and projects.

Another teamwork environment is created by Crossings, a furniture collection developed by Haworth to answer the need for offices to be freely arranged and adapted by individual users and teams in order that they might create environments specific to their tasks, environments that work for the week, the day, or the hour. The components can change as the situation dictates.

And then there's Steelcase's Personal Harbor Workspace. Forty-eight-square-foot Personal Harbor Workspaces with acoustical, visual and territorial privacy are grouped around a common area for group action. Workers can shift back and forth from one to the other as the need dictates.

Requirements in offices spaces and the way people work most effectively continue to change. Wood office furniture design will continue to evolve along with those needs.

As Dr. Frank Duffy has pointed out, today's office is largely an American invention, but the three volume leaders in the office furniture industry - Steelcase, Haworth, and Herman Miller - are truly worldwide businesses, each manufacturing and/or selling in many lands around the world.

Dr. Walter B. Kleeman, Jr. is a High Point, North Carolina-based ergonomic consultant on the design of furniture and interiors. He also serves as a forensic consultant and expert witness for lawyers in 23 states who are involved in accident cases associated with the design of furniture and interiors, especially chairs. Dr. Kleeman was Design Editor of Wood & Wood Products from 1984 to 1990.