MillerKnoll's new archive is a design lover's paradise

When Herman Miller acquired Knoll Inc. four years ago to form the super-company MillerKnoll, it was a big deal.

Just how big of a deal?

‘It's like Coke and Pepsi, or the Mets and the Yankees,’ says Amy Auscherman, MillerKnoll’s director of archives and brand heritage

The $1.8 million merger not only married two juggernauts of American furniture design but also brought a constellation of brands – including Design Within Reach, Hay and Maharam – beneath one umbrella.

That’s a lot of furniture. It’s also a lot of design heritage, history that the company is now putting front-and-center as part of its newly-formed MillerKnoll archive, which was unveiled today in Zeeland, Michigan.

The 12,000-square-foot facility, designed by New York-based firm Standard Issue, brings together a hit parade of items by titans like George Nelson, Florence Knoll, Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, and Marcel Breuer, while also providing spaces for special exhibitions, scholarship and product development.

‘It's really a celebration of the furniture collection in a way that it hasn't gotten in the recent past, in addition to creating a space where people can actually come and use the archive,’ Auscherman explains.

‘Stories start to come to life when you put it all together,’ adds MillerKnoll’s chief creative and product officer, Ben Watson. ‘We knew that opening the aperture of who [the collections are] available to was a powerful thing.’

With history spanning more than a century, though, (Herman Miller has roots dating back to 1905; Knoll was founded in 1938) company archivists had thousands of items to sift through. Herman Miller’s existing library, for instance, housed ‘not only furnishings, but records that include everything from written correspondence between the Eames and [former CEO] Max De Pree, to much more straightforward documentation about the development of specific designs,’ Watson explains.

‘It's messy before it's clean, right?’ he adds. ‘To know what you have, you actually have to get it out and look at it.

Each item received a condition report, was digitally logged and got a light restoration, if needed. ‘It was an amazing day when we got to buy a HVAC museum-quality vacuum,’ Auscherman jokes.

In the end, Auscherman and her team selected about 300 pieces of furniture to display from holdings that span about 2,000 items.

‘We've displayed items from the 1920s until today – including pieces from Frank Gehry, Maya Lin, Cini Boeri, Gae Aulenti, the Eameses, and Isamu Noguchi. So it's really anyone and everyone,’ says Auscherman. A special exhibition ‘Manufacturing Modern’ examines shared design DNA between the two companies and the evolution of modern American furniture production.

Of course, there were discoveries along the way that would make a design nerd’s hair stand on-end, like an early Womb chair prototype that Eero Saarinen designed for his mother (upholstered in an unexpected jacquard), that would go on to become a smash-hit for Knoll. Or designs by Gilbert Rohde that were displayed at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. Or a minimal table lamp design Noguchi designed for Knoll in 1947, a model that was a predecessor of his famous Akari lanterns.

‘Our job gets to be like “Antiques Roadshow” a lot of days,’ says Auscherman.

The archive will be open to the public on select days this summer, in partnership with the Cranbrook Art Museum, and also be open to design students on an appointment basis. MillerKnoll’s product team and collaborators will also be able to use the archive as a resource, whether working on a re-issue or developing a whole new product. Ultimately, company employees say, the new facility allows MillerKnoll to connect the dots between past and present.

“It's easy to think of the archives as historical – the good old days, but it's also an act of actively collecting. What stories do we need to actively preserve for those that will come after us?’ says Watson. ‘There were many chapters before us, there will be chapters after us.’