Full 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.
Contents
Introduction
1. Becoming a Practical Visionary: Geddes's Youth and Early Career
- Portraiture and Advertising Illustration
- Christian Science and Fordism
- InWhich Magazine
2. Transforming Audiences: Stage Design to Industrial Design
- Geddes's Knowledge of Theosophy, Psychology, and Advertising
- Theater Number 6: Merging the Audience and Actors
- 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
- 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
- Geddes Designs for Chrysler
- Ideal Streamlining and the Rear-Engine Debate
- Publicizing Streamlined Design
- 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 Geddes's Modelling 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
References
Index
