Herman Miller
With more than 100 years of history, Herman Miller is a company that places great importance on design, the environment, community service, and the health and well-being of their customers and employees. They constantly work for a better world around us by designing and developing award-winning furniture and related services and technologies that improve your environment, whether it’s an office, hospital, school, home, an entire building, or the world at large.
Innovative business practices and a commitment to social responsibility have established Herman Miller as a recognized global company. In 2010, they were again cited by FORTUNE as both the “Most Admired” in their industry and among the “100 Best Companies to Work For” while Fast Company named Herman Miller among the “Most Innovative”.
Ward Bennett
While in Europe, he attended art schools in Florence and Paris, but he was mostly self-taught, with skills that ranged from illustrating, sculpting, and jewelry-making to furniture, interior, and home design. “I learn from people,” he once said, referencing a long line of influences, including Hattie Carnegie, Hans Hoffman, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
Bennett eventually settled back in New York, where his reputation earned him some of the day’s most affluent clients: David Rockefeller and Chase Manhattan Bank, Tiffany & Co., Sasaki, Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. Another—former President Lyndon Baines Johnson—asked Bennett to design a chair for his presidential library that would be “a cross between a barroom chair and a courtroom chair with a little Western saddle.”
Simplicity and comfort were always his goals, and Bennett says he learned a great deal about lumbar support, the importance of chair arms, and designing the right “pitch” from working with the doctor who treated John F. Kennedy’s bad back.
Indeed, Bennett designed more than 150 chairs, many of which have become classics, such as the Landmark chair, reintroduced by Geiger in 1993. (Bennett began working with Geiger in 1987, following his collaboration with Brickel Associates.)
