Herman Miller + Magis: Jasper Morrison
Japser Morrison and his elegantly simple Air-Chair, Folding Air-Chair and the Air-Chair with arms are now a welcome addition to the Herman Miller store. Morrison, one of the design world’s best-known and well-respected members, is certainly an interesting person to pin down. The idea behind this series of posts is that I would introduce you to the new designers we were working with through Magis and I would do that with video interviews. Let the designers speak for themselves. While Morrison, who is based in London with offices also in Paris, writes beautifully and copiously about the state of design today and his own design process there is not a single video interview I can present you. There are scraps of conversation here and there, what looks like a video shot by an audience member at a design show talk and a short film of him setting up an exhibition in Denmark. And that’s it. Perhaps he feels he’s said everything he needs to say in his books.
Thankfully the Air-Chair speaks eloquently for Morrison in that it is stripped back to its bare essentials. There are no extraneous details with this design creating what can easily be described as a “quiet” chair . For Morrison it’s the perfect example of the “super normal” – a term he coined in 2005 while having tea with Takashi Okutani during the Salone del Mobile in Milan. “I mentioned having seen Naoto Fukasawa’s aluminium stools for Magis,” writes Morrison. “And how they seemed to have a special kind of normality about them, and he added: “super normal“. That was it, a name for what I have been trying to achieve all these years, a perfect summary of what design should be, now more than ever.” To read the rest of his essay on super normal click here. You can also check out a slidehshow of his work over on Discover.
