After 1944 George Nelson created many designs for storage furniture. The increasing demand for this type of furniture mirrored higher living standards as well as customers’ growing willingness to spend money on things for the home. Nelson invented the OMNI shelving system, with its supporting structure made of extruded aluminium, in the mid-1950s in collaboration with Aluminum Extrusions, a supplier to Herman Miller. The latter was not happy about Nelson working for a potential competitor and commissioned him to design a similar system: the Comprehensive Storage System (CSS). The main difference to the OMNI is the profile of the supporting elements: in the CSS they are rectangular instead of square. Furthermore, the grooves that run along the length of the struts and support the system’s horizontal elements can be found on all four sides of the OMNI’s struts, forming an arrow shape in the cross section. The T-shaped grooves introduced for the CSS, on the other hand, only appear on the front and back. A variety of wooden inserts could be mounted onto the grooves, customizable to the user’s individual needs.
Text: Jochen Eisenbrand
