Brunswick Corporation

Modern Design for School Furniture

A newspaper article published in the Kalamazoo Gazette on 18 April 1960 announced that the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company would be officially shortening their name to the Brunswick Corporation. That same year, Kalamazoo was headquarters for the company’s School Equipment Division. The corporation had been established in 1845 by Swiss born J.M. Brunswick in Cincinnati, Ohio, and focused on the manufacturing of billiard tables. By the late 1940s, Brunswick had set up its corporate headquarters in Chicago, and was involved in several product lines, including bowling equipment and school furniture.

The 300,000 square foot Kalamazoo facility was located at 2605 E. Kilgore Road. The property had been purchased from CBS-Hytron in 1958. One of the company’s novel concepts was the making of modular classroom equipment and furniture, often in modern, bold colors (Champagne, Citron, Flame, Sky Blue, Mist Green, Salmon). Brunswick was responding to the spatial and educational needs of modern school buildings, developing products like the Moduwall, a “series of flexible and interchangeable wall-hung teaching aids which permits each teacher to tailor physical wall space facilities to meet his or her teaching needs.” Another unique design solution put forward by the local division centered around the creation of stackable fiberglass chairs. Brunswick discovered that packing several chairs on top of eachother was far more cost effective than shipping individual chairs. This packing solution also had the positive effect of making it easier for teachers to move and store a large number of classroom chairs.

The company’s interest in color schemes was not without a pedagogical foundation. In 1958, authors Paul Seagers and G. Harold Hart published a brochure that outlined the company’s philosophy on industrial design and learning. Their “Ideal Classroom of Today” would be one that considered the role of color in supporting the learning environment.

“The enjoyment and use of color is fundamental in our everyday human experience. Alert educators in our school systems are aware of the enlightened use of color in factories and workshops as applied to such matters as fatigue, safety and morale. It is only reasonable to them that such knowledge be used in the treatment of the interiors and furnishings of our schoolrooms to obtain the optimum in the education of our growing boys and girls.”

“The effective use of color in the schoolroom need not be a mystery. The same basic principles of harmony in music govern in the use of color…in creating moods and background atmospheres for specific activities. It is by an increased understanding of its effective use that we are able to employ color more harmoniously and effectively.”

By 1970, Brunswick’s school furniture division in Kalamazoo ceased operations after the company sold off this portion of their product portfolio.

Written by Ryan Gage, Kalamazoo Public Library staff, January 2026