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. Montgomery Ferar, Dave Chapman, Ray Sandin, and Brooks Stevens were among the early architects who, followed by George Nelson, Eliot Noyes, Charles Eames, Walter B. Ford, and others, developed successful careers in industrial design. The range of their feelings about their career shift is reflected in Sandin’s “I got into this profession by accident and I am most happy that I did” (218) and Chapman’s “Frankly, I still thought of myself as an unemployed architect, pacing out the depression in an attractive, lucrative but, nonetheless, substitute career.” [217] Over the years, design and architecture have enjoyed a warm but wary relationship. Architecture has largely ignored its upstart friend, yet has turned to it either in times of economic stress or in the search for that instant fame that comes with having one’s name attached to a unique chair. Design, on the other hand, has often hungered for the status of architecture (Walter Dorwin Teague doggedly pursued an architectural degree until he acquired it in 1938 at age 55) or looked for and caught the flame of the latest formalistic fashion from its senior associate. 2 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Skyscrapers and Streamliners Further evidence that architecture was reaching out for its share of the influence and affluence of industrial design is that, coincidental with the Metropolitan show in 1934, the young Museum of Modern Art, with Alfred H. Barr, Jr., as director and Philip C. Johnson as director of the department of architecture, installed an exhibition on “Machine Art.” Whereas the Metropolitan was catering to the personal environment and was preoccupied with formalism as personal expression in the current fashion of modern art, the Museum of Modern Art elected to meet human needs with mechanical means and found its formalism in the geometry of solid shapes—forms so mathematically pure that the object “loses all character and distinguishing marks of purpose,” as Geoffrey Holmes observed. It is evident that the theme of the MOMA exhibition was stretched to include the categories of geometrical shapes in household equipment and furnishings carefully extracted from the work of industrial designers who were also represented in the Metropolitan show with more personal and humane forms. Alfred Barr was quite correct in pointing out that a product has a mechanical function (how it works) as well as a utilitarian function (what it does). Years earlier, however, as a teacher of art, he had invented for his students the wise game of having them search the outside world for well-designed objects selling for less than $1 in order to stimulate their sense of value. It is difficult to understand why he did not include a humanistic function (the why). Phillip Johnson properly objected to what he called “French-age aesthetics” and to the irrelevant styling and irresponsible streamlining that were gaining popularity. However, there still remained his presumption that solid geometry can be equated with utility. 3 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Skyscrapers and Streamliners Walter Dorwin Teague’s water glasses for Corning, conceived as pure cylinders, were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art exhibition in 1934. Museum of Modern Art. 4 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Skyscrapers and Streamliners This set of stainless steel mixing bowls manufactured by the Revere company was included in the Machine Art exhibition. Revere Copper and Brass Co. The third attention-getting exhibition of 1934 represented the final side of the philosophical triangle of industrial design. If the other two sides were the formalisms of personal and impersonal aesthetics, the third was the formalism of public aesthetics. The exhibition, entitled “Art in Industry,” was held at New York’s Rockefeller Center (whose Radio City Music Hall, incidentally, now a national monument, had been designed by Donald Deskey). It was organized by industrial designers under the sponsorship of the National Alliance of Art and Industry to illustrate, according to the prospectus, “what designers are doing in the way of conscious creation of forms to help the engineer sell his mechanical devices.” ([93], 331) Once again the work of industrial designers, like Walter Dorwin Teague, Russel Wright, Gilbert Rohde, and Gustav Jensen, was included in the exposition together with about a hundred of their less famous colleagues showing more than a thousand designed products. The exposition provided a glittering showcase for many of the giants of the young profession. However, their very success led to a complicated situation that was eventually to draw industrial designers into a professional society. 5 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Skyscrapers and Streamliners The following year, 1935, when the National Alliance of Art and Industry decided to hold another exhibition, its officers decided to turn responsibility over to the manufacturer members of the Alliance rather than the designers. Many of the most prominent industrial designers objected to their having no part to play in the quality and contents of the exposition. Thus, when President Roosevelt tapped a golden telegraph key in the White House to open the showing in New York and Fiorello LaGuardia gave his opening speech praising the design of utilitarian products, examples of the work of these outstanding designers and their important clients were missing from the exhibits. Even the showing of a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City” could not cover the fact that without their presence and aesthetic guidance the show was a carnival of bad taste and irrelevant exhibits. The designers who had boycotted the show, feeling their strength, issued a manifesto stating that the Alliance “neither stimulates better design, represents the artist, nor improves the relationship between the designer and industry” and that “it does not promote the best standards of American design.” [191] As a result the leading designers, together with other interested designers, got together in a protest meeting. They compared their grievances against the Alliance and promised themselves to form their own organization soon. With these exhibitions and others it became evident that the concept and promise of industrial design had caught the public imagination and that designers would be hailed as the heroes of the economy. Some magazines even suggested that designers may have been instrumental in pulling the nation out of the Depression. Designers became popular subjects in the Sunday newspaper supplements and the focus of innumerable stories in the business and general magazines. Editors of periodicals aimed at the higher classes discovered the subject of domesticated aesthetics and devoted themselves to articles on a higher and better life surrounded by the elegant vernacular of modern industry. In an article entitled “The Eyes Have It,” Business Week declared that “‘stylizing’ has become an effective weapon in meeting new competition.” [118] Forbes magazine, under the title “Best Dressed Products Sell Best,” suggested that “progress, profit and patriotism do mix.” [128] And the pamphlet “Dollar and Cents Value of Beauty,” published by the Industrial Institute of the Art Center in New York, accepted industrial design as “not a luxury, but an economy; not a fine art, but a practical business” and extolled the profit value of bringing out new models to whet buying interest. [215] On this last point, over which controversy raged for half a century, it must be remembered that planned obsolescence seemed to make sense at a time when the economy needed a jolt to get it moving again. The idea was given form 6 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Skyscrapers and Streamliners by Earnest Elmo Calkins in 1930—in part, perhaps, as a tactic that would be beneficial to his own business of advertising: “The styling of goods is an effort to introduce color, design and smartness in the goods that for years now have been accepted in their stodgy, commonplace dress. The purpose is to make the customer discontented with his old type of fountain pen, kitchen utensil, bathroom or motorcar, because it is old- fashioned, out-of-date.

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