A creator of pop art classics
Irving Harper, who pioneered pop art furniture design with whimsical mid-20th-century modernist classics such as the marshmallow sofa, the ball clock and the sunburst clock, died last month at his home in Rye, N.Y. He was 99.
Harper was famously obscure, working as an industrial designer from 1947 to 1963 for George Nelson, who was often credited with the company’s creations for the Herman Miller furniture line. Even Harper’s death received scant attention, except in local newspapers.
Harper’s creations included exhibits at the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs in New York, department store interiors and the Herman Miller company logo (an evolving stylized letter “M”). As a hobby, he produced a fanciful menagerie of intricate paperboard and balsa wood sculptures of animals.
But his most enduring legacy is the sofa he conceived one weekend after Nelson had embraced a Long Island plastics manufacturer’s method of making inexpensive moulded 30centimetre diameter discs.
The plastic proved impractical, but Harper playfully assembled 18 upholstered discs as if they were floating on a 1.3-metre-long metal frame. As the company took pains to explain in its catalogue, “Despite its astonishing appearance, this piece is very comfortable.”
The sofa originally sold for $452 (U.S.) in 1956 (the equivalent of al- most $5,310 Canadian today).
About 150 were purchased from 1957 to 1961; one of the original models was auctioned off in 2003 for $30,420 (U.S.).
The sofa now comes in 12 colours and retails for $7,300 in the Herman Miller catalogue.
The catalogue describes “love seat #5670” as the Nelson Marshmallow Sofa and lists the designer as George Nelson, as was his firm’s practice. But the George Nelson Foundation website attributes it to Harper.
He was born Irving Hoffzimer on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on July 14, 1916. He attended Brooklyn College and Cooper Union. After he married Belle Seligman, a labour lawyer, he changed the family’s surname to Harper. She died in 2009. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a sister, Phyllis Hoffzimer.
As a draftsman for Gilbert Rohde, Harper worked on exhibits for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, was hired by Raymond Loewy Associates to design department store interiors, and in 1947 joined George Nelson Associates, where he handled the Herman Miller furniture and Howard Miller clock accounts (including the numberless timepieces that featured balls on the end of spokes).
In1964, he and Phillip George started their own design company, where Harper worked until he retired in 1983.
Harper’s work helping to design the Chrysler pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair, in Queens, N.Y., involved creating a lake with islands featuring different elements of automobile manufacturing, including a walk-in engine. The project was so stressful, Harper told the Financial Times last year, that he considered taking up knitting to relax. He then turned to paper sculpture, which seemed to come more naturally.