Sofa, Harvey Probber, circa 1960

A 2-seat sofa in patinated leather. Walnut structure and steel legs.

American work by designer Harvey Probber, dating form the 1960’s.

Harvey Probber (September 17, 1922 – February 16, 2003) was an American furniture designer who is credited with inventing sectional, modular seating in the 1940s. A “pioneer in the application of modular seating,” many of his ideas have been adopted by other designers.

Probber referred to the concept as a modular system, and the individual pieces as modules. Although what was then called “unit furniture” dates to the first decades of the twentieth century, Probber’s modular seating was the first of its kind. Taking the concept further, he introduced “nuclear furniture”—which included occasional tables with interchangeable pedestals, in different shapes and sizes that could, like seating, be clustered in varying configurations.