In our post on Vitra’s purchase of the Finnish furniture producer Artek we quoted from a letter George Nelson wrote to Charles Eames recounting a meeting with Alvar Aalto in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Below we quote more from said letter.
We cannot prove or disprove any of the claims made therein.
We assume it is all true.
We say, you can keep your stories of rock star debauchery, your stories of film star excess, your stories of out of control poets and of the decadence of the European nouveau riche.
You can keep your Trainspottings, Manumissions and Quadrophenias
We have furniture design.
Furniture design is the true Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Which is probably why we like is so much…..
All went well at the Institute in Chicago until the question and answer period during which I narrowly escaped lynching. One earnest young man got up and said “Why is this nice modern furniture you do so expensive that people can’t afford it?” I gave him the answers that came to mind and at the end said, “I think I ought to tell you that, as a designer, I don’t give a damn about the people”
In the mob scene that followed [Serge] Chermayeff and two janitors grabbed sub-machine guns and I left the building unharmed.
Last week I went up to MIT and repeated the performance, this time taking care to explain what I meant, at which point Aalto who had just come in from Finland and had dropped by to hear the talk jumped up and said, “I agree completely.” This eliminated the possibility of renewed violence because in the MIT scale Aalto comes first and God second. It was perfectly wonderful running into him – Aalto, not God – and we went out afterwards and consumed the entire stock of the local bar.
Letter from George Nelson to Charles Eames April 30 1948, quoted in Stanley Abercrombie, “George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design” MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1995
Tagged with: alvar aalto, George Nelson