A Q&A with Furniture Designer Bruce Hannah, Part I
Spotlight articles shine a light on designers and design materials we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has met many wonderful designers as an educator and career designer, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with legendary industrial designer Bruce Hannah. We had such a wonderful conversation that we split the interview into two parts. Stay tuned for Part II!
Bruce Hannah is a renowned American industrial designer celebrated for his innovative and practical approach to design. A graduate of Pratt Institute in 1963, Hannah’s career blossomed through his collaboration with Andrew Morrison, resulting in groundbreaking furniture designs for Knoll International in the 1970s. Establishing his own design office in 1976, Hannah continued to create award-winning products, including the acclaimed Hannah Desk System, recognized as a “Design of the Decade” by the Industrial Designers Society of America in 1990. He joined the Pratt faculty in 1993 and has received numerous accolades for his teaching and thought leadership. Hannah’s influential work includes co-curating the “Unlimited By Design” exhibition and authoring notable books on design, underscoring his profound impact on the field. In Part I, we spoke to him about who has influenced him, his design philosophy, and how he feels about Knoll reissuing the iconic 1974 Office Chair he designed with Andrew Morrison.
Q: Can you share some of your early influences and mentors who shaped your approach to design?
A: I’d never have gone to Pratt if I hadn’t had Miss Egan as a Spanish teacher. She also taught art, but I took Spanish with her for two years. When I went to school you had to have two years of a language but you could take three. She was also my advisor. I went to her and I said, Miss Egan, what should I be doing as a junior? And she said, Please don’t take Spanish again.
So I took art with her, and I had fun doing it of course, and I came around to art. I applied to one school because she said, You should go to Pratt. I didn’t even know what Pratt was, by the way, and I was lucky enough to get in.
There are many other people who influenced me. At Pratt: Rowena Reed Kostellow and Alexander [Kostellow]. I’m responsible for creating books about both of them. Gail, my first wife, wrote the book about Rowena. That book is based on a slideshow that she and I worked on in 1980…I want to say 1988. Tucker Viemeister and I just did a book of the collected writings of Alexander Kostellow, which is 176 pages of stuff, which is pretty interesting. I’d been wanting to do that for years. I’d never gotten around to it and then Tucker said, Why don’t we do it? We self-published it on Blurb but people aren’t very interested in it. They should be interested in it because he says wonderful things. And he’s considered one of the fathers—if not the father—of industrial design education in this country.
He was asked one time, What about the Bauhaus? He said that it was a very interesting education but that it wasn’t for us. We needed to develop our own approach. One of the successes of his industrial design departments is that he was very interested in getting people jobs, as I have been as a design teacher.
There is a long list of people that I owe. Fred Ratti, who gave me my first job as a salesman. It wasn’t my first job ever, that was as a designer at S.S. White dental manufacturing on Staten Island, which was the big factory in the town I lived in, in Prince Bay. We lived by the 7:30 whistle or the 4:30 whistle. I grew up in one of those towns where everybody worked for S.S. White. When I graduated from college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I went there and I talked my way into a job, and Fred Ratti was a supplier from Engineered Plastic Product. He made custom plastic product parts for a product I worked on there. When I came back from the Army he said, Do you want to come work with me? I was making pretty good money by that time, being a designer, and I said, What can you pay me? He said, $100 a week. I said, I started three years ago at $100 a week. I’m making considerably more than that. And he said, That’s all I can afford. I said, I’ll take the job.
He was an enormous influence in terms of allowing me to stumble around with clients I didn’t realize were very important. Bell Labs was one of them at the time. This was the 1960s. Bell Labs invented the way we lived today. It wasn’t Mark Zuckerberg.
I figured out that I was a designer because I was calling on design firms. They were handing me drawings to take back to the shop and figure out how to make, and I was figuring out how to make them. After a couple years I realized, Hey, I actually know how to design stuff. Those were wonderful designers—I’m not calling them out—but I was taking their drawings and making them workable.
Q: How would you describe your design philosophy, and how has it evolved over the years?
A: My design philosophy really started to form when I stumbled on Andy Morrison and Steve [Gianakos] on Staten Island. We had worked together at Pratt. Andy went off to Montreal to work on the 1967 World’s Fair and I was working, running around New York City and New Jersey, figuring out how to make stuff. I quit that job and I left, happily. But I said, I have to try to do this design thing. And I didn’t really want to work for anyone. I had worked for two people who were wonderful employers, but they didn’t really make me want to live my life. So I designed this fiberglass chair, and I found out there was a plastic place on Staten Island called Aegis Plastic. They still exist, by the way. It was in a basement room full of furniture. There isn’t enough gold leaf in the world to cover all the stuff in this basement. It was Roma Furniture. I walked in and I thought, Oh my God, I know these forms. Andy and Steve were there, and that’s how I rekindled that friendship with Andy and Steve.
Andy said to me, You want to design a chair for Knoll? I said, Sure. The philosophy was: design a chair for Knoll and retire. That was it. Along the way we discovered all these other things that we thought were important. The first product we did together for Knoll was the suspension seating. It’s a sofa system, and the major structural element of it is a sailboat mast. We decided that we could make a very light piece of furniture with two aluminum castings and a couple of structures made out of the sailboat mast. We figured out how to make a sofa that could hold a thousand pounds but weighed 88 pounds. We also had this theory that everything costs a dollar a pound or it costs two dollars a pound an hour, or whatever – everything costs some denominator. So the less of it you could use, the better off everybody was. If you use less material, then you transport less material, dig up less material. And if you make it recyclable, you’ve stopped that habit of making something and throwing it away.
Part of that thinking was formed by a guy named Witold Rybczynski, who still teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and has written a bunch of books. He had a laboratory at McGill. And Andy knew him, and he would come occasionally to hang out in our studio. He’d designed a little house made out of all kinds of recycled things with this 1966 tertiary water. So you have black water, gray water, white water, or clear water. You have solar panels. The house is made out of recycled sulfur. There are mountains of sulfur in the world that no one knows what to do with. We started to be influenced by these people we had no business actually hanging out with because they were much smarter than we were. Witold wrote a wonderful book that I still to this day recommend called Home. It’s about this new thing that human beings want which is called Comfort. A new idea actually, most people in the world are not comfortable yet, but, most Americans and most Europeans and lots of Asians… their lives are comfortable. Lots of Africans are comfortable. So that idea started to figure into it. Our neighbor was Walter De Maria, who was on the second floor of our building at 27 Howard Street. Walter did The Lightning Field and The Broken Kilometer. He filled a gallery in Stuttgart full of dirt. One of the first conceptual artists. Very interesting. So he was hanging around. I mean, nobody was doing anything. We were doing stuff but no one was getting on planes and going anywhere. We were in what would eventually become SoHo. We were playing stickball in the middle of West Broadway.
There were all these influences that led us to start thinking about the refinement of an idea in poetic ways. Walter’s work was very much influenced by that. So Andy and I were thinking not only about using less material, but also how we would go about doing it. The philosophy became very much like poetic writing. Poetry is about essence and trying to be clear about what you’re saying while saying something in a grand way. We started to think of all the things we were designing as poems.
So we didn’t use staples because I don’t know how you control staples. Staples are sort of like a lot of people putting a lot of dots at the end of something. You’re not quite sure how many you should have or where they go, and there’s no way to control it. We started to eliminate things from our vocabulary of design, and that led us to thinking about how few parts It would take to do something.
We’d ask, If it takes four parts, can you do it with three? If you can do it with three, can you do it with two? If you can do it with two, can you do it with one? If you do with one, do you really need it? We would say these things to each other. Andy and I worked together for 10 years, night and day, 365 days a year. It was basically a marriage. The sad thing is that he died just months before Knoll announced that they were going to reintroduce the chair. The whole thing has been very emotional in that way.
Q: Yes, the Office Chair you designed for Knoll with Andrew Morrison in 1974 is being reissued. How do you feel about this iconic design coming back to life? What do you think keeps the design timeless?
A: Emotional, fantastic, unexpected, delighted, excited. The thing was, Andy and I really wanted to design an antique. We thought if you designed an antique, or something that would become an antique, people loved it. Or they liked it a lot. Think of Michael Thonet’s chairs, they’re going on 200 years old as a design, these wooden chairs, because he figured out how to bend wood so it didn’t crack. And then once he did it, he kept doing it. That’s what you do: you beat the idea to death. You just keep banging on it. The Thonet side chair, due to genius or serendipity, comes along just as cafe society is exploding. We needed those chairs. People were going to sit around outside and drink coffee or tea and read the newspaper. They were wealthy, and that hadn’t happened before, not at this scale. So you had a lot of people walking around Vienna saying, We’re going to go listen to music in the afternoon. We need little chairs. We would look at these objects and try to figure out, What is that about?
I think timelessness comes back to Essence. There’s something essential about it. There’s essence in the form, and I think that’s different from ‘essential’. We really thought about it. We tried to make an office chair with the least number of parts. There were some givens. You had four or five casters, and you had a tilt mechanism, and a lift mechanism. But what else do you need? You need a base and a frame of some kind. So the thought was, Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…pillows.
We said, Okay, so we’ll go with the pillow. When we made that first frame, we just bolted the pillows on because we didn’t have a better way to do it, we hadn’t thought it through yet. At first we thought we could figure out how to make seat cushions and back cushions that just popped into place. We struggled with that and finally we just bolted them on. Going back to the poetry of it, the tilt mechanism we were using at the time was called the Helms mechanism. It was a mechanism that Knoll had designed for all of its chairs. They said, You have to use this. We said, Okay. The way you adjusted the tilt was with a little Allen wrench. So I said, Why don’t we connect the cushions with the Allen wrench that already exists? Then you’ll get the chair and you have one tool to adjust it, disassemble it, and assemble it. That always interested us also, How few things can you put something together with?
Every designer that we talked to said, Hide the bolts. But one of the other philosophies that came from that chair was, Let’s just make it obvious. Let’s just use them as an element. So they became an element.
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Stay tuned for Part II of this interview!
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