Streamlining and Familiar Objects Bret H. Smith, IDSA, Auburn University
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Futurama 45 Minutes
<Segment Title> 3/19/03 11:35 PM study time Futurama 45 minutes - An essay by Roland Marchand, "The Designers go to the Fair, II: Norman Bel Geddes, The General Motors "Futurama", and the Visit to the Factory Transformed" from the book Design History: An Anthology. Dennis P. Doordan (1995). Cambridge: The MIT Press. During the 1930s, the early flowering of the industrial design profession in the United States coincided with an intense concern with public relations on the part of many depression-chastened corporations.(1) Given this conjunction, it is not surprising that an increasingly well-funded and sophisticated corporate presence was evident at the many national and regional fairs that characterized the decade. Beginning with the depression-defying 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, major corporations invested unprecedented funds in the industrial exhibits that also marked expositions in San Diego in 1935, in Dallas and Cleveland in 1936, in Miami in 1937, and in San Francisco in 1939. The decade's pattern of increasing investments in promotional display reached a climax with the 1939-40 World's Fair in New York City. Leaders in the new field of industrial design took advantage of the escalating opportunities to devise corporate exhibits for these frequent expositions. Walter Dorwin Teague led the way with his designs for Bausch & Lomb, Eastman Kodak, and the Ford Motor Company for the 1933-34 exposition in Chicago. In 1936 he designed the Ford, Du Pont, and Texaco exhibits at Dallas and three years later claimed responsibility for seven major corporate exhibits at the New York World's Fair—those of Ford, Du Pont, United States Steel, National Cash Register, Kodak, Texaco, and Consolidated Edison. -
Pan Am's Historic Contributions to Aircraft Cabin Design
German Aerospace Society, Hamburg Branch Hamburg Aerospace Lecture Series Dieter Scholz Pan Am's Historic Contributions to Aircraft Cabin Design Based on a Lecture Given by Matthias C. Hühne on 2017-05-18 at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences 2017-11-30 2 Abstract The report summarizes groundbreaking aircraft cabin developments at Pan American World Airways (Pan Am). The founder and chief executive Juan Terry Trippe (1899-1981) estab- lished Pan Am as the world's first truly global airline. With Trippe's determination, foresight, and strategic brilliance the company accomplished many pioneering firsts – many also in air- craft cabin design. In 1933 Pan Am approached the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958). The idea was to create the interior design of the Martin M-130 flying boat by a specialized design firm. Noise absorption was optimized. Fresh air was brought to an agreea- ble temperature before it was pumped into the aircraft. Adjustable curtains at the windows made it possible to regulate the amount of light in the compartments. A compact galley was designed. The cabin layout optimized seating comfort and facilitated conversion to the night setting. The pre-war interior design of the Boeing 314 flying boat featured modern contours and colors. Meals were still prepared before flight and kept warm in the plane's galley. The innovative post-war land based Boeing 377 Stratocruiser had a pressurized cabin. The cabin was not divided anymore into compartments. Seats were reclining. The galley was well equipped. The jet age started at Pan Am with the DC-8 and the B707. -
Designing the Machine Age in America: Streamlining in the 20Th Century
【연구논문】 Designing the Machine Age in America: Streamlining in the 20th Century Jeffrey L. Meikle (University of Texas, Austin) A design historian of an earlier generation once remarked that the streamline style of the 1930s exemplified the last moment of cultural coherence enjoyed by inhabitants of the United States. Viewed from the present, across the historical divides of the twentieth century, the decade of the 1930s can appear almost serene in its utopian optimism. There is something profoundly elegiac in historical images of the streamlined New York World’s Fair of 1939.1) For many Americans, however, the Great Depression hardly suggested anything so comforting as coherence. Economic hardship, migrations, political experiments, and threats of fascism and war contributed to a feeling of uncertainty that approached a national identity crisis. Some Americans looked not to the future but to the past for a sense of national purpose. A desire for continuity found expression in hand-made crafts and in reproductions of colonial furniture. Other 1) For photographs see Richard Wurts, The New York World’s Fair, 1939/1940, ed. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1977). 252 Jeffrey L. Meikle signs of Americans looking back to the past included the historical themes of WPA courthouse murals; the popularity of Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s novel of agrarian loss; and the fabrication of such pre-industrial outdoor museums as John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Colonial Williamsburg and Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. Americans of the Depression years -
05 Cogdell 12/18/02 2:14 PM Page 36
05 Cogdell 12/18/02 2:14 PM Page 36 Products or Bodies? Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology Christina Cogdell In 1939, Vogue magazine invited nine well-known industrial design- ers—including Walter Dorwin Teague, Donald Deskey, Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, Egmont Arens, and George Sakier, among others—to design a dress for the “Woman of the Future” as part of its special edition promoting the New York World’s Fair and its theme, “The World of Tomorrow.” While focusing primarily on her clothing and accessories, many commented as well on future wo- man’s physique, predicting that her body and mind would be perfected through the implementation of eugenics. Figure 1 Donald Deskey, “Radically New Dress System for Future Women Prophesies Donald Deskey,” Vogue (1 Feb. 1939): 137. Copyright © 1939 Condé Nast Publications Inc. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. © Copyright 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 36 Design Issues: Volume 19, Number 1 Winter 2003 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/074793603762667683 by guest on 29 September 2021 05 Cogdell 12/18/02 2:14 PM Page 37 For example, Deskey proclaimed, “Medical Science will have made her body Perfect. She’ll never know obesity, emaciation, colds in the head, superfluous hair, or a bad complexion—thanks to a controlled diet, controlled basal metabolism. Her height will be increased, her eyelashes lengthened—with some X-hormone.” Because of her beautiful body, she would no longer need to wear underwear, he thought, and having passed through a stage of nudism, she would clothe herself in toga-like, semi-transparent draperies [figure 1].1 Teague’s design showed that he also believed that most women would have “beautiful bodies, and the present trend toward nudity [would] continue at an accelerated pace.” 2 Sakier stated that “[t]he woman of the future will be tall and slim and lovely; she will be bred to it—for the delectation of the commu- nity and her own happiness... -
Futurama: an Immersive Experience of America's Automotive Future
Journal of Motorsport Culture & History Volume 1 Issue 1 Article 6 2019 Futurama: An Immersive Experience of America's Automotive Future James Miller Hampshire College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.una.edu/jmotorsportculturehistory Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Miller, J. (2020). Futurama: An Immersive Experience of America's Automotive Future. Journal of Motorsport Culture & History, 1 (1). Retrieved from https://ir.una.edu/jmotorsportculturehistory/vol1/iss1/ 6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UNA Scholarly Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Motorsport Culture & History by an authorized editor of UNA Scholarly Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Futurama: An Immersive Experience of America's Automotive Future Cover Page Footnote I am grateful to Julia Hildebrand for her close and critical reading of an earlier draft. The paper also benefitted from archival research at the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts at the New York Public Library. This article is available in Journal of Motorsport Culture & History: https://ir.una.edu/jmotorsportculturehistory/vol1/ iss1/6 Miller: Futurama Futurama: An Immersive Experience of America’s Automotive Future James Miller Hampshire College, Amherst MA, US, [email protected] Abstract General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair offered a wildly popular immersive experience of American automobility twenty years in the future. The Fair proclaimed the “Dawn of a New Day” in “The World of Tomorrow” through comprehensive innovative architecture and design, which promoted the primary role of new technology, especially in the field of transportation. -
Overlooked Idsa Fellows Restored
A LOOK BACK OVERLOOKED IDSA FELLOWS RESTORED ne of IDSA’s most distinguished honors conferred publicly and annually on certain members is O Fellowship, a unique group of members known as the Academy of Fellows who have “earned the special respect and affection of the membership through distin- guished service to the society, and to the profession as a whole,” as the honor is formally described. Such members can be identified by the “FIDSA” following their names for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, over many years, cumulative historical clerical practices and the merger of predecessor orga- nizations in 1965 to form IDSA have denied a number of deceased members proper, permanent recognition in IDSA’s honored Academy of Fellows. The number of “overlooked” Fellows has accumulated because of past organizational protocol going back far before the merger that originally created IDSA. During IDSA’s 50th anniversary in 2015, we would be remiss if we did not correct as many of these errors as possible. Long before their merger in 1965, IDSA’s predeces- sors, the Industrial Designers Institute (IDI) and the American Former IDI members John W. Hauser, John Vassos and Alfons Bach are Society of Industrial Designers (ASID), honored their out- all IDSA Fellows. standing members with Fellowship, and identified them as such in their annual membership directories. However, as Fellows who had been dropped from previous member- these Fellows became deceased or dropped their member- ship directories. For a number of years after that, IDSA’s ship, their names (and their honor) were removed from the annual directory included the member status (such as Full, current directory. -
Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design
MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design Arthur J. Pulos Published on: Apr 22, 2021 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design We passed from the hand to the machine, we enjoyed our era of the triumph of the machine, we acquired wealth, and with wealth education, travel, sophistication, a sense of beauty; and then we began to miss something in our cheap but ugly products. Efficiency was not enough. The machine did not satisfy the soul. Man could not live by bread alone. And thus it came about that beauty, or what one conceived as beauty, became a factor in the production and marketing of goods. Earnest Elmo Calkins, 1927 ([121], 147) One of the results of the Paris exposition was to awaken the public press in the United States to the existence, if not the importance, of modern design. Whereas the specialized magazines in art and decoration had been supporting the strong interest of the establishment in traditional styles and the cultural aspects of design, now American newspapers and magazines began to promote design for its economic value. It was stated that America was beginning to catch up as big business was losing its “timidity in the presence of Art.” An editorial in the New York Times challenged industry: “American captains of industry must soon change their traditional characters. True, the -
Who Needs Futurists When You Have the World's Fair
Who Needs Futurists When You Have The World’s Fair David Rejeski Preface: One of my regrets in life was to be born too late to have visited some of the great world’s fairs. Between 1900 and 1940 there were over a hundred of these public spectacles with names like the Exposition universelle et internationale, the British Empire Exhibition, and the Century of Progress International Exposition. By the time I was a kid growing up in the 1950s and 60s, the only way to visit the future was to sit in front of a small box in the living room waiting for someone to tell me that I had just crossed over into the Twilight Zone. When I heard about the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and the Futurama exhibit, I spent a few weeks secretly wishing my parents had meet twenty years earlier. Here’s why. On April 30, 1939, John Ozman, a 48-year old mechanic from Ohio drove across the Tri-Borough bridge in his two-cylinder 1900 Holsman automobile. He had driven 4,350 miles from Santa Monica, California to New York City on 203 gallons of gas, financing his trip by selling 2,300 postcards of his automobile at 10 cents apiece. He had come to see the future. Just a few miles south of Manhattan, 1,200 acres of city dump had been turned into a vast advertisement for tomorrow and a 75-cent ticket would get you in the door -- of the World’s Fair. Ozman joined over 240,000 people who walked through the turnstiles on opening day. -
Skyscrapers and Streamliners
MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Skyscrapers and Streamliners Arthur J. Pulos Published on: Apr 22, 2021 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Skyscrapers and Streamliners … the new office of industrial designer can claim no superiority over the well- trained architect. Architectural Forum, December 1934 ([94], 409) Once again, in 1934, the Metropolitan Museum held an exhibition of industrial art in modern home furnishings. However, despite the pressure on the museum to avoid “the self-consciously clever design of five years ago, supported by an economic scheme only a little more false than its accompanying social concept” (as it was put by Architectural Forum), the museum’s insistence that all of the objects in the exhibit be shown for the first time produced things that were again out of context with the economic conditions. The museum was still preoccupied with the notion that all design should stem from architecture, and thus most of the exhibits were commissioned from architects. In recognition of the growing importance of industrial design, however, a fair percentage of those invited to participate were professional designers, including Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, Donald Deskey, Gilbert Rohde, Gustav Jensen, and Russel Wright. It was inevitable, perhaps, because of the sympathetic attention of museums and the vested interest of the architectural press, that the popularity and potential of industrial design should attract the attention of young architects who were finding few architectural commissions and who had an inclination toward a broader application of their design talent and training. -
Helen Dryden”
“IT’S STYLED BY HELEN DRYDEN” THE FINE ART OF GOOD TASTE _______________________________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri – Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Art History) _______________________________________________________ by SARAH MARIE HORNE Dr. Kristin Schwain, Dissertation Supervisor December 2018 ©Copyright by Sarah Marie Horne 2018 All Rights Reserved The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled “IT’S STYLED BY HELEN DRYDEN” THE FINE ART OF GOOD TASTE presented by Sarah Marie Horne, a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. _________________________________ Dr. Kristin Schwain, Adviser _________________________________ Dr. James A. van Dyke _________________________________ Dr. Michael Yonan _________________________________ Dr. Elisa Glick For Vince, Eli, and Pippa, with love. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of a great many people. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my dissertation advisor, Kristin Schwain, who has always acted as an advocate for me and my work. As my advisor she helped me to build the confidence I needed to undertake this project and was indispensable as an editor and sounding board. I also owe a profound debt of gratitude to my committee members James van Dyke, Michael Yonan, and Elisa Glick whose guidance was critical in the formation of this dissertation. My respect for them as experts and as individuals cannot be understated. I would especially like to thank Michael Yonan for encouraging me to continue to pursue my academic interests, even as they led me astray from traditional art historical subjects. -
Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in The
currell.183-307 9/7/06 4:07 PM Page 217 NINE Smooth Flow Biological Eªciency and Streamline Design Christina Cogdell abstract In this chapter, adapted from her book Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s and reprinted here by permission of the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania Press, Christina Cogdell examines the eugenic im- plications of contemporary discourses about biological eªciency in three areas: eugenicists’ concerns for national eªciency (signified by a national, positive, eugenic di¤erential birthrate); health reformers’ and the general public’s consternation over bodily constipation; and indus- trial designers’ insistence on tapered, streamlined product designs. At first glance, these three areas appear unrelated, but in fact, all made manifest a similar rhetoric and group of ideas about national racial progress and the blockades that seemingly threatened it, which origi- nated in the terminology and ideology of the eugenics movement. For example, otherwise known as “civilized colon” because of its al- most exclusive appearance in middle- and upper-class whites, consti- pation was seemingly threatening the demise of national productivity and intelligence. It was believed at the time that once feces stagnated in the colon, parasitic bacteria rapidly reproduced and released poisonous toxins into the bloodstream, causing symptoms ranging from lethargy to sexual disinterest to outright mental degeneracy. Eugenicists, too, feared “poison in the blood,” although their concerns focused much more on the blood of the “national body.” For just as waste that failed to progress through the colon supposedly released toxins into the blood, so, too, according to the eugenicists, was the national body being poi- soned and national intelligence lowered by the introduction of the blood 217 currell.183-307 9/7/06 4:07 PM Page 218 christina cogdell of the “less evolved,” who seemingly reproduced as quickly as parasites in a “civilized” colon. -
Paleo-Futuros Cercanos. Apuntes En El Margen Del Imaginario Urbano Contemporáneo
Paleo-futuros cercanos. Apuntes en el margen del imaginario urbano contemporáneo Closed paleo-futures. Notes in the edges of the contemporary urban imaginary JUAN LUIS DE LAS RIVAS Resumen A través de tres figuras creativas y relevantes, aunque no siempre bien conocidas, de tres imágenes y de tres ideas arquitectónicas plan- teadas por ellas pensando en el futuro urbano, se desarrollan en este escrito unas notas o apuntes que quieren ser útiles hoy, aunque permanezcan en los márgenes del imaginario urbano contemporáneo dominante. A pesar de sus limitaciones coyunturales, Bel Geddes, Fuller y Kurokawa siguen ofreciendo una reflexión valiosa sobre la relación entre la ciudad y su medio y, a la vez, sobre la ciudad-artefacto como medio. Si dichas propuestas pueden parecen exageradas, ello se debe a las condiciones históricas de un futuro que cuando se defi- ne quizás envejece. Pero no son proyectos utópicos, se plantean en contextos precisos y se consideran viables, confiando en la capacidad de la ciencia y de la tecnología para mejorar el hábitat del hombre. Palabras clave Urbanismo moderno, arquitectura imaginada, ciudad del futuro, utopía, megaestructura. Abstract Through three creative and important figures, perhaps not well known, trough three images and three architectural ideas raised by them for thinking the urban future, this writing develops some notes useful nowadays, in spite of they remain in the edges of the contemporary dominant urban imaginary. Despite its occasional constraints, Bel Geddes, Fuller and Kurokawa still offer a valuable reflection on the relationship between the city and its environment and, at the same time, about the man-made city as a medium.