"Designer Drama"  

not exactly a feud
but still an interesting story:
George Nelson recalls the iconic design of the Ball Clock as being a result of a night of drinking with friends and associates, Isamu Noguchi, Bucky Fuller, and Irving Harper.
?And there was one night when the ball clock got developed, which was one of the really funny evenings. Noguchi came by, and Bucky Fuller came by. I?d been seeing a lot of Bucky those days, and here was Irving and here was I, and Noguchi, who can?t keep his hands off anything, you know- it is a marvelous, itchy thing he?s got- he saw we were working on clocks and he started making doodles. Then Bucky sort of brushed Isamu aside. He said, ?This is a good way to do a clock,? and he made some utterly absurd thing. Everybody was taking a crack at this,?pushing each other aside and making scribbles.
At some point we left- we were suddenly all tired, and we?d had a little bit too much to drink- and the next morning I came back, and here was this roll (of drafting paper), and Irving and I looked at it, and somewhere in this roll there was a ball clock. I don?t know to this day who cooked it up. I know it wasn?t me. It might have been Irving, but he didn?t think so?(we) both guessed that Isamu had probably done it because (he) has a genius for doing two stupid things and making something extraordinary?out of the combination?.(or) it could have been an additive thing, but, anyway, we never knew.?
George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design; p.111
Later on Irving Haper claimed authorship of the design, as well as many other "George Nelson" designed items. (see link)
http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0601/har/index.html

Eli Attia & Philip Johnson
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Eli Attia - 101 Park Avenue
Philip Johnson - Chippendale Building
In the early 70s Eli Attia was a young Israeli architect when Johnson plucked him from obscurity and made him Chief of Design at Johnson Burgee Architects.
As his title would imply, Attia took a lead design role is many prominent buildings designed by Johnson's firm during this period. Two of the buildings that were executed under Attia's design direction included the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove California, and the Pennzoil Place Towers in Houston Texas. Attia wanted to be made a full partner with Johnson and Burgee, but Johnson demurred. In 1979, the year Pennzoil Place was completed, the first Pritzker Prize was awarded, and bestowed on Johnson. These newly completed Towers figured prominently in all the press accolades about Johnson's award. The following year, in 1980, Time magazine honored Pennzoil Place with a cover story and named it "Building of the Decade". When Johnson was not keen on sharing credit, Attia resigned in revolt.
Attia had just secured a skyscraper contract to launch his own firm, Eli Attia Architects. The "Architect's Building" on Park Avenue, the former New York offices of McKim, Mead and White, was to be demolished, and Attia's first skyscraper would be built there- simply known as 101 Park Avenue. The same month it was announced that Philip Johnson's firm was awarded a new Manhattan skyscraper project, also on the East Side, for the new AT&T headquarters (now owned by Sony). Both building's were to be the same number of stories tall and approximately the same in square footage as well. They came to completion within weeks of one another. Ada Louise Huxtable covered them both in the press.
With Attia's claims that the geometric glass crystalline compositions from Johnson's firm throughout the late 70 were of his hand, everyone looked to see if the pupil would prove to be the master. Johnson, rather than try to compete with Attia using the same brush, responded with an abrupt break from all his past work, and turned to Revivalist Postmodernism, with what became known as the Chippendale Building.
Had Attia not engaged Johnson in a competition of design and egos, Johnson may not have ever made this diversion to Postmodernism. Attia and Johnson continued an awkward love/hate/rivalry relationship, yet remained close until Johnson's death. It is rumored (but unsubstantiated) that Attia was handsomly acknowledged in Johnson's will.
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Hi ChrisG
What a fascinating story!...but, was AT&T really the first indication that Johnson had mouved toward post-modernism?. I might be wrong but was there not a re-building of the front of a residential building on 5th (facing central park, somewhere between Metropolitan and the Guggenheim, so say between 84th and 88th street, by Philip Johnson with a clear reference to the "Western" practice of building large panels over the width of the building at the edge of the roof, to make them look taller? Somehow I remember this as his first steps into "historical references"...

There's the famous dispute...
There's the famous dispute following the launch of Verner Panton's famous one-piece plastic "Panton" chair from 1967. Both architect Poul Kjærholm and the brilliant designer/artist Gunnar Aagaard Andersen claimed in various newspapers that Panton had somehow stolen the basic shape of the chair as both Kjærholm and Andersen had been working independently on prototypes that resemble the Panton chair quite clearly. I belive Kjærholm's was in plastic were as Andersen's was in steel wire and old newspapers. Whether this is really the case of if three Danish designers just happend to work on the same idea at the same time, I don't know. I've tried seaching the net for pictures of the prototypes, so you could see the striking similarities but with no luck yet.

Part of the story is that ....
Gunnar Aagaard Andersen, always showing as much humor as talent, mentioned that he fel twice on his back, the first time when he tried to sit on his chickenwire and newspaper prototype (by the way, that was common practice at the time because the next step was to put plaster on the wire/paper combination and building it up to the desired shape and spending days on sanding...)the second time when he heard that Verner Panton was taking credit for the design. There is an excellent picture of Poul Kjaerholm's chair both in wire and in a wire/newspaper combination as well as the wooden jig used for the wire version, in Christoffer Harlang's (Arkitektens Forlag 1999) book on Poul Kjaerholm. The date for Poul Kjaerholm's chair is 1951.

1951 and 1967? That's quite...
1951 and 1967? That's quite a long time between those two chairs. Any idea to why Kjærholm never went on with his prototype and perhaps tried to get it into production? - or did he?

Personality conflicts are crucial in every field...
In design, these conflicts sometimes significantly alter what gets made and who gets credit.
In politics, unfortunately, the personality conflicts can get lots of people killed.
Perhaps we can start a reality tv show called, "Designer Survivor."
Ah, just kidding. 🙂

Hej M_Andersen
I really do'nt know. Maybe our friend Aagard Andersen gives an indication. In an article of 1967 reproduced in the catalogue called "Der Kragstuhl" of 1986. He tells the story of his chair of 1952-1953 and tells how he tried in wood, aluminum and glass fiber re-enforced polyester. He goes on saying that he finally found a manufacturer taht was capable of producing it but"...the chair would be too expensive..."
I think it is generally admitted that Verners's very first production in 1960 (not in 1971) was more an achievement of stubborness than of design. Which should not be dismissed to quickly. It was not obvious, as it is now, to produce a piece like that Bayer who recognized the challenge tried it in a variety of technologies and materials without much success. The prototype and wooden mould could also be interpreted as the start of a wire chair...a continuation of the Bertoia chairs. Poul Kjaerholm was a master in picking up one of the classics and re-interprete them in his own original way...as he did with K. Klimt, with the Thonet chair etc. It is not unlikely that his original intention was to build a wire frame chair.

Norman Cherner a.k.a. Bernardo a.k.a. Bernado
The classic Cherner Plycraft chair was apparently the center of a big authorship dispute. I vaguely remember the details, but if I recall correctly it involved Norman Cherner, George Mulhauser(?), George Nelson, and maybe someone else. Somehow in the midst of it all Plycraft credited the design to a mythical designer named Bernardo, sometimes spelled Bernado (a fake made-up name, there is a set on eBay demonstrating this).
Does anyone know the full story on this?
http://cgi.ebay.com/Set-6-Cherner-Plycraft-Chairs-Danish-Modern-Eames-Er...

Re "Eli Attia & Philip Johnson"
In fact, Johnson/Burgee got the AT&T commission in 1978, while Attia still was with the firm. My understanding is that, indeed, Attia did the schematic -- schematic, mind, not conceptual -- design of the building before he left.
As Attia tells it, this was around the time that Johnson was becoming very fond of the work of the English architect Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944). Johnson was wringing his hands over how to resolve the top of the AT&T -- couldn't figure out what to do. At a design meeting, Attia -- as a mocking joke -- scrawled a Chippendale top on a blank piece of paper and passed the drawing across the table to Johnson, saying: "You like classicism so much, why don't you do this?"
Johnson actually took it seriously, and the rest is history. At least, that's Attia's version.
With the passing of Ada Louise Huxtable, it seems appropriate to recall Huxtable's take on Attia's 101 Park Avenue. Writing in the Times on 22 July 1979 ("A Radical Change on the City's Skyline") -- as the building was going up -- she called the building "an exercise in the kind of creative quality that until very recently has been absent from the New York scene."
Huxtable continued:
"Mr. Attia is an extremely able Israeli architect who worked in Philip Johnson's office during the period when it produced such designs as the stunning, trapezoidal Pennzoil Building in Houston. Mr. Johnson has lately gone on to fancy-dress historicism but Mr. Attia is still pursuing the same impressive, abstract geometry.
"He was in the office when Peter Kalikow came to Johnson-Burgee with his first prestige site, 1001 Fifth Avenue. When Mr. Kalikow acquired his second prestige site, 101 Park, he solicited proposals from a number of architects, including Eli Attia. Mr. Attia won the commission and left Johnson-Burgee to open his own office."
She went on, writing specifically of Attia's design for 101 Park:
"The solution is extremely skillful on two counts: the way the volume is used to produce the 'economically efficient' the builder wanted, at the same time that the architect has raised that requirement to notable levels of art and urbanism. Mr. Attia, who has no patience with the allusive and decorative pretentions of 'post-modernism," has produced architecture at its most elegant, controlled, abstract and precise. Like the rest of the 'new wave,' it breaks scale, with many of the problems that result, but it also raises the standard of New York building."