New York design studio Standard Issue has collaborated with American furniture company MillerKnoll to showcase over 300 pieces of furniture at an archive located at the brand’s Michigan headquarters.
Located at MillerKnoll’s Michigan Design Yard headquarters in Zeeland, the project encompasses a glass-enclosed reading room, an exhibition space, and shelves of open storage spread out over 12,000 square feet (1,114 square metres).
The exhibition space was enclosed in a central, white volume clad in a semi-translucent screen, while the shelves of open storage run around it. The spaces showcase pieces by designers from both Herman Miller and Knoll, as well as other subsidiaries, including designers such as Isamu Noguchi, Florence Knoll and more.
The inaugural exhibition on display, Manufacturing Modern, showcases archival pieces from the brands that “celebrate the shared legacies of Herman Miller and Knoll”, according to MillerKnoll Director of Archives and brand heritage Amy Auscherman.
“Our goal was to build a truly museum-quality environment that inspires awe the moment visitors enter the Manufacturing Modern exhibition and as they move through the space,” Auscherman told Dezeen.
“The MillerKnoll Archives collaborated closely with Standard Issue to create a new space that includes both an exhibition and a visible storage solution for our newly combined archival collections of Herman Miller and Knoll. At the same time, it needed to be flexible enough to grow and include the legacies of all our other MillerKnoll brands over time.”
The storage is arranged in chronological order, beginning with the 1920s.
Alongside well-known pieces such as the Knoll Womb chair designed by Eero Saarinen, work such as a gaming chair designed with Faile and a leather Aeron chair prototype are also on display to balance “the iconic and the unexpected”, according to MillerKnoll.
“We’ll continue to update the display and grow the collection over time, but our goal with this first installation was to create a layered narrative – balancing the iconic and the unexpected, and showing how modern design continues to unfold,” said Auscherman.
A version of the show was also on view at MillerKnoll’s recently opened Chicago showroom and office complex.
Alongside one side of the space, the reading room is outfitted with a long, light wooden boardroom table.
A bookshelf lines one wall, while boxes and flat file cabinets hold archival materials such as documents detailing the development of designer George Nelson‘s first Herman Miller collection, manufacturing drawings of the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman, and collages from the Knoll Planning Unit.
According to the team, the archive is intended as a resource for researchers, curators, and academics. The space will be open for some public tours.
Standard Issue previously worked with MillerKnoll on an exhibition at its showroom in Chicago.
Herman Miller acquired Knoll in 2021 for $1.8 billion and subsequently rebranded the two companies as MillerKnoll.
The photography is by Nicholas Calcott for MillerKnoll
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