Like many designers of the 1950s, George Nelson actively embraced the new possibilities plastics opened up for the design and production of furniture. Irving Harper, one of Nelson’s first co-workers, later recalled how in the mid-1950s, Nelson floated the idea of a novel-looking sofa, whose disc-shaped foam cushions would be cut out by machine and then mounted on a supporting frame. Anecdote has it that the flash of inspiration came to Nelson when he was approached by a salesman from a plastics manufacturer, who claimed that his company could punch out foam discs that, when heated, would automatically form a smooth vinyl surface. The Marshmallow Sofa’s design incorporated a lavish number of eighteen individual, equal-sized, round discs, based on the assumption that they could be manufactured economically. The producer, however, ultimately proved unable to deliver and instead of skinning themselves, the individual cushions had to be painstakingly hand-covered after all. Since such an emblematic sofa design was too good to be filed away, Herman Miller still went ahead with its production, even though the higher costs translated into sluggish sales that consistently fell short of expectations. After nine years the decision was made to drop it altogether. The Marshmallow Sofa – it is hailed as the first example of Pop Art furniture – nevertheless became a classic of furniture design, and thirty years later Herman Miller teamed up with Vitra to reissue it.
