Gallery: Herman Miller Just Redesigned Its Iconic Aeron Chair
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This morning, at its flagship store in New York, Herman Miller unveiled the newly remastered Aeron chair.
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To the untrained eye, the new Aeron doesn’t look that all that different from its predecessor. That was deliberate. “One of the concerns, originally, was we needed to preserve the iconography of the chair,” says Don Chadwick, who designed the original with Bill Stumpf.
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The real difference is in the chair’s mechanics. CEO Brian Walker compares the tilt on a chair to the engine in a car—and an engine from 2016 will undoubtedly boast better performance than one from 1994.
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The new tilt sports a leaf spring, adapted from the Herman Miller Mirra chair. It's made of strips of glass-reinforced polystyrene resin that bend more responsively.
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The membranous weave that stretches across the frame, which Herman Miller calls the pellicle, also got an update. The tensile strength of the updated “8Z Pellicle” varies across different zones (the original pellicle had a uniform tension) to create more nuanced posture support.
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The result, Herman Miller hopes, is a 21st century task chair that executes on Stumpf’s original, humble goal for the Aeron: to create a chair that inspires a lack of awareness.
