Norman Bel Geddes: American Design Visionary

Description

Norman Bel Geddes has long been considered the ‘founder’ of American industrial design. During his long career he worked on everything from theatre design, world fairs and cars to houses and product and packaging design. Nicolas P. Maffei’s magisterial biography draws on original material from the archive at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, and places Bel Geddes’ work within the fast-changing cultural and intellectual contexts of his time. Maffei shows how Bel Geddes’ futuristic but pragmatic style – his notion of ‘practical vision’ – was central to his work, and highly influential on the professional practice of American industrial design in general. Cover Contents List of Illustrations List of Plates Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Becoming a Practical Visionary: Bel Geddes’s Youth and Early Career Portraiture and advertising illustration Christian Science and Fordism InWhich magazine 2 Transforming Audiences: Stage Design to Industrial Design Bel Geddes’s knowledge of Theosophy, psychology, and advertising Theater Number 6: Merging the audience and actors Bel Geddes’s stage design course, 1922–1928 Franklin Simon window displays, 1927–1930 J. Walter Thompson assembly hall, 1929 From stage design to architecture: Plans for the Chicago World’s Fair, 1933 The therapeutics of color in interior design, c. 1930 Design proposal for the Kharkov Theater, Ukraine, 1931 Architecture as a lively art 3 Horizons: Publicizing the Visionary Designer Promoting the artist in industry The Aerial Restaurant, Air Liner Number 4, and the Standard Gas Equipment stove Horizons and Towards a New Architecture Influences of Technocracy and scientific management Horizons’ press reception Technological forecasting in Horizons 4 A Machine-Age Architecturalist: Planning the Factory, Service Station, and the Mass-Produced Home Toledo Scale factory The House of Tomorrow, 1931 A modern, mass-produced service station: Socony-Vacuum, 1934 Hopes for the factory-built house, 1939–1945 Bel Geddes seeks an architectural license 5 Streamlining: From Imagined Ideal to Commercial Reality Graham-Paige Motor Cars, c. 1928–1933 Horizons and ideal streamlining: Car number 8 and Pan American Airways Critics of streamlining Chrysler job: Publicizing and designing the ideal car, 1934 Bel Geddes designs for Chrysler Ideal streamlining and the rear-engine debate Cleanlining and novel uses of streamlining, c. 1932–1950 6 Consumer Research: Imagining the Ideal Consumer, Developing a Popular, Modern Aesthetic Early consumer surveys: Philco and Abeyton Realty “Tomorrow’s Consumer,” 1943 Designing for the postwar consumer: Shell Oil, Radio Corporation of America, and Rittenhouse Chimes 7 The Production and Consumption of Model Worlds: Futurama and “War Maneuver Models” Exhibition, 1937–1944 Miniature games: The origins of Bel Geddes’s modeling and futurology Shell Oil “City of Tomorrow” advertisement, 1937 The General Motors Futurama exhibit, New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940 Futurama—planning and research: Creating a theatrical simulation Constructing the future: The publicity and the press Futurama as an advertisement War Models in Life Magazine, 1942, and at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1944 Conclusion Notes Index