--- title: "USM Haller, the Office Furniture That Became a Flex" url: https://quietmenace.com/design/usm-haller-modular-furniture/ author: Quiet Menace Editors section: Design published: 2026-09-20 updated: 2026-09-20 topics: Furniture, Industrial Design, Architecture --- # USM Haller, the Office Furniture That Became a Flex > A Swiss locksmith's grandson, an architect obsessed with systems and a Paris bank order for 600 workstations. The chrome grid is still being bolted together. In 1969 the Rothschild Bank in Paris ordered 600 workstations from a metalworking company in Münsingen, Switzerland. The furniture was a grid of chrome-plated steel tubes, ball joints and colored steel panels. It had been designed for the company's own offices. That bank order turned it into a product, and the product is still sold today. ## From Locksmith to Systems Builder USM started in 1885 as a metalworking and locksmith's business founded by Ulrich Schaerer. Over the following decades it moved into window fittings, then ornamental hinges and precision-machined sheet steel. It was a supplier, the kind of company whose work you never notice. That changed in 1961, when Paul Schaerer, an engineer and the founder's grandson, joined the business as the third generation of family management. That same year Schaerer met Fritz Haller, an architect with a small office in Solothurn, and Haller took on the design of new buildings for the company. Haller, born in 1924, had spent a year after the war working in Rotterdam for the Dutch architect Willem van Tijen, after seeing the city's wartime destruction firsthand. Haller did not really design buildings. He designed systems for producing them. The factory in Münsingen, finished in 1963, went up on a modular steel frame he later developed into the MAXI building system, and the plant has been extended since. Two years after the factory came a glass-walled office pavilion on the same logic. A smaller version of the system, MINI, went into the Schaerer family's own house, the Buchli, designed in 1968 and finished in 1969. ## The Furniture Came From the Building Once the buildings were modular, the furniture inside them looked wrong. In 1963, according to [USM's own history](https://usm.com/en/office/about-usm/usm-history), Haller and Schaerer developed furniture to match the modularity and flexibility of the new buildings. The result used three elements. Chrome-plated steel tubes form the frame. Chrome-plated brass ball joints connect the tubes. Steel panels in a set palette of colors fill in the sides, shelves, doors and drawer fronts. Everything screws together, and anything can be taken apart and reconfigured. The ball joint was the invention. USM filed for a patent on it in 1965, and the whole system depends on it, since every connection in the frame runs through one. Pull a credenza apart and you can rebuild it as a bookcase or a reception desk with the same parts. ![An orange cube-shaped side table on a plain background](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1752061159819-f290b8f48b08?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *Panels, frames and right angles, the vocabulary of modular storage Photo by ObjectType RAW on Unsplash* Commercial sales began with the Rothschild order in 1969. It is hard to imagine a better first client for an office system that looked like a piece of engineering. The [Bauhaus](https://quietmenace.com/design/bauhaus-history/) had dreamed of furniture made like industrial products. USM Haller was literally that, produced by a metal shop, sold as a kit, and finished in the same chrome as a machine. For a bank the pitch is easy to see. Desks, storage and counters could all come out of one kit, and when a department moved floors the furniture could be unbolted and rebuilt rather than thrown out. That is an engineer's idea of luxury, where the expensive part is that you never have to buy it twice. ## Fifty Years in the Same Catalog The rest of the timeline is unusually calm. USM launched its Kitos range of height-adjustable desks and tables in 1989, opened its first showroom in Hamburg in 1998, and set up a US headquarters in New York in 2002, followed by subsidiaries in Tokyo in 2008 and the UK in 2015. In 2001 the Museum of Modern Art in New York added USM Haller to its permanent collection. In 2015 the company marked fifty years of the system, and in 2018 USM Haller received Cradle to Cradle certification. The look has barely moved, which is the point, and it makes USM an outlier even among the long-running classics in our [design coverage](https://quietmenace.com/design/). The furniture is built to be reconfigured rather than replaced. Few pieces of [furniture](https://quietmenace.com/topics/furniture/) are so honest about being a set of parts, and that puts it in the same family as the [Dieter Rams](https://quietmenace.com/design/dieter-rams-ten-principles/) idea that good design should be long-lasting and as little design as possible. ## Why It Works Outside the Office Put a USM sideboard in a living room and it still reads as office equipment, which is exactly its appeal. It is serious and slightly cold, it comes in strong colors, and it has the quality of good [industrial design](https://quietmenace.com/topics/industrial-design/) everywhere, where every joint is visible and nothing pretends to be anything else. It also sits comfortably next to work it influenced or resembles. Donald Judd's metal furniture, made with the [fabricator Lehni AG from 1984](https://quietmenace.com/design/donald-judd-furniture-marfa/), shares the same flat panels, strong color and refusal of decoration, though Judd arrived there from sculpture rather than engineering. Haller kept thinking at larger scales. His Totale Stadt studies, published from the late 1960s into the 1970s, imagined urban systems that could be scaled up to cover the planet. The furniture is the small end of the same idea. The patent application for the brass ball joint went in during 1965. The 600 workstations went to Paris four years later. --- Filed under: [Furniture](https://quietmenace.com/topics/furniture/), [Industrial Design](https://quietmenace.com/topics/industrial-design/), [Architecture](https://quietmenace.com/topics/architecture/) Hero image: Photo by ObjectType RAW on Unsplash (Unsplash License)