In 1970, MOMA released The Design Collection: Selected Objects, a slim, spiral-bound omnibus of works the Architecture and Design department had acquired since the collection's beginnings in 1934. The book is a jumble of Art Nouveau oddities, enduring forms, and precursors to modern classics. (Gunnar Aagaard Andersen's 1964 urethane foam armchair, dubbed a "curious brown anti-object" by then-director Arthur Drexler, bears a surprising similarity to Jerszy Seymour's Scum collection.) But sprinkled throughout are a handful of smart, directional, now forgotten objects that, if picked up by high-end retailers or knocked off by Ikea today, would surely become top sellers.
In one entry, the celebrated orange mushroom-shaped Nesso lamp by Artemide sits atop a clear acrylic cocktail table whose bent legs appear to have been peeled from its top. The book identifies the table's designer as Neal Small, who in the 1960s created a handful of quirky but functional Lucite pieces. Small removed himself from the design scene in the early '70s, choosing instead to focus on sculpture and move to Maine, where he still resides in what he calls "semi-retirement." But what about designers who are still in the game? What is it that keeps some lauded pieces in the public eye—and often in production—while others disappear? The caliber of a design, it turns out, is almost never the reason; there are far more freak twists of fate.
Murray Moss ticks off some of the "pedestrian and arbitrary" explanations for certain products' lack of market presence: "There's a Tord Boontje Swarovski chandelier we don't sell because it never got UL approval and the manufacturer wants every buyer to sign a waiver," he says. "There was a Moooi carbon-fiber chair pulled from production because everyone was using carbon fiber at the time, and there wasn't enough material to go around. And at Moss, you won't find much made in Japan, for purely selfish reasons: I don't speak the language there, I haven't set up a shipping network, and I don't like the food."
Having a single patron at the helm is what allows The Conran Shop the same luxury of keeping products alive for eccentric reasons. "Terence's favorite chair is called Karuselli," says Emmanuel Plat, vice president of Conran's New York store. Conceived in 1964 by the Finnish designer Yrjo Kukkapuro, the leather and fiberglass piece is based on the imprint of the designer's own body engulfed in snow. "It's in museums, and it gives us credibility. But the chair is quite large, and at almost $6,000, it's a dog commercially," Plat admits. At the same time, the shop is mindful of the practical concerns involved with most reissues: "Some stuff comes back because it's fairly easy to reproduce or a big manufacturer has a lot of money and is going to buy a mold," Plat says. "There are things we'd love to see again but the risk is too high to say, 'I'm going to invest in a $200,000 mold and it will sell like crazy.' What if it doesn't?"
That's the question that haunts Gregg VanderKooi, Herman Miller's product manager for classics. Herman Miller certainly does its part to revive erstwhile icons; in 2006, the company relaunched George Nelson's 1958 Swag furniture collection on curvy steel legs. The group's favored status with VanderKooi may have hastened its return to the market, but a reissue can mostly be credited to how easy it was to update the pieces for modern use: A grommet through which cords can be threaded was embedded in the corner of each desk, and the chair was cast in environmentally friendly polypropylene rather than the original fiberglass.
Nelson's 1963 chrome-rimmed Sling sofa, which also makes an appearance in the MoMA book, hasn't fared as well. "We discontinued it more than 10 years ago because the manufacturer of one of the main parts—the sling—went out of business," VanderKooi says. But surely, in an age of rapid prototyping, there might be another way to source the part? "The sofa had a low volume potential, not enough to justify the tooling costs," he explains.