Modern design in the United States

Despite what is often seen as German leadership in creating industrial design as a profession, the United States has an equally compelling claim to being industrial design’s parent country. The United States emerged from World War I (1914–18) physically undamaged; in contrast, many European cities and industrial facilities were not only damaged but in some cases downright decimated by those years of war and by the subsequent socialist and communist revolutions. In some ways the radical sociopolitical change of the interwar years catalyzed equally radical changes in attitudes toward design, as can be seen in the growing popularity of the Bauhaus within Weimar Germany. European society was in a state of turmoil and radical reform, but the United States, despite its share of social unrest, was somewhat more stable. During the war the country had established a reputation for large industrial production, and afterward its wartime factories were adapted for the civilian consumer economy. With this great output capability, most probably, came a tendency toward planned obsolescence. This term was supposedly coined after World War II by American industrial designers and writers to indicate industry’s desire to produce consumer items that would be replaced even before their actual utility expired. Although the concept is often linked with the second half of the 20th century, it is likely that American industrialists saw this profit-making opportunity well before then.

The United States at this time was thus ripe for the development of the industrial design profession. In fact, the U.S. Patent Office recognized the term industrial designer in 1913, and, as in Europe, organizations were formed to unite the visual arts professionals who helped create consumer products and environments. The American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (founded in 1927), for instance, was followed by the American Designers Institute (1938) and the Society of Industrial Designers (1944), all of which eventually merged to form the Industrial Designers Society of America (1965). As with the Deutscher Werkbund and most professional organizations, these served to validate the profession in the view of the public and to facilitate communication among their members.

One of the first major public expressions of the newfound commitment to showcasing well-designed consumer products was Macy’s department store’s Art in Trade Exposition (1927), which was designed by the scenic designer and Theatre Guild founder Lee Simonson and owed a major conceptual debt to the Arts Décoratifs exposition that had taken place in Paris two years earlier. Throughout the rest of the interwar years, other exhibitions were likewise mounted to inform the public and endorse the objects and artists exhibited as well as to promote well-crafted consumer items. Even museums such as the new Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York began to recognize the field; MoMA established a department of architecture and design (1932) and organized important exhibitions of industrial design, such as “Machine Art” (1934).

Moreover, department stores and direct-mail merchants, including Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company, created corporate design departments to control the look of their merchandise. Montgomery Ward was probably the first store in the United States to do so (1934), hiring design educator Ann Swainson to be their first woman executive and architect Dave Chapman to be the head of product planning. Sears followed soon afterward, scooping the competition by hiring noted German Modernist architect Karl Schneider, a Gropius and Behrens protégé, to design furniture and furnishings for the company’s line (1938–45). In 1926 Walter Paepcke founded the Container Corporation of America, and in 1936 he hired Egbert Jacobson to establish a consistent design identity for its products and advertising, a development that had far-reaching consequences in the American graphic design and advertising worlds.

At this time several outstanding industrial designers were at work in the United States—among them Donald Deskey, Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, and Norman Bel Geddes, who are often considered to be the founders of the industrial design profession in the United States. They created iconic items, ranging in scale from large (locomotive engines) to small (table lamps), that typify great moments in American design. These designers came from a variety of professional backgrounds, mostly in the visual arts. For instance, Donald Deskey was a furniture and interior designer who used an elaborate Art Deco style in his product design; his masterpiece was the interior of Radio City Music Hall in New York’s Rockefeller Center (a contract he was awarded in 1932). Henry Dreyfuss is best known for his interest in ergonomics, particularly in his design of Bell telephones (1930 and later), but he is equally acclaimed for his bullet-shaped Hudson J3a locomotive (1938) for the New York Central Railroad, his interiors for Lockheed Aircraft and American Airlines, and his products for Thermos and Hoover. Engineer Raymond Loewy designed appliances for Sears, Roebuck and Company, but he is perhaps best remembered for his transportation design, from the S1 locomotive (1937) for the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Scenicruiser bus (1944 and later) for Greyhound to Studebaker automobiles (1953 and later). Packaging and advertising specialist Walter Dorwin Teague is best known for his design work on Kodak Brownie cameras (1927–30 and later) and on gas stations and corporate imagery for the Texas Fuel Company (1935–36; later renamed Texaco), as well as his long-term work on Boeing airliner interiors, from the Stratocruiser (1945) through the 707 (1957–59). His firm, Walter Dorwin Teague Associates, continued to design Boeing airliner interiors into the 21st century. Joining those active and important practitioners was the more theoretically minded Norman Bel Geddes, a set designer best known for the futuristic transportation designs featured in his General Motors Pavilion and Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair (1939–40) and in his books Horizons (1932) and Magic Motorways (1940). The streamlined teardrop shape of his Motor Car No. 8 (1931) prefigured the similarly shaped Dymaxion car of American inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, unveiled at the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. Clean lines and streamlined shapes, suggestive of movement and speed, were characteristic of American design of the time and paralleled the design work produced by the aviation industry’s wind-tunnel research of the 1920s and ’30s.

During World War II (1939–45) industrial designers came into their own, creating design solutions and products to help win the war, such as the Walkie-Talkie, a two-way FM radio invented by Galvin Manufacturing (later called Motorola, Inc.) in 1943 and used by the U.S. Army. These designers also helped to usher in a postwar consumer society after the long hiatus in individual spending that had begun with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Henry Dreyfuss, for example, worked for the Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft Company during the war; he proposed (1944) to convert the company’s B-24 bombers into postwar airliners, and he planned and tested the Convair car (1947), a flying vehicle whose wings could be unbolted and whose fuselage could then function as an automobile, with that same company. Walter Dorwin Teague worked on converting the C97 military transport for Boeing into the double-decked Stratocruiser (1945) airliner, the conceptual forerunner of that company’s jumbo jets. Buckminster Fuller reshaped his military Airbarac (1946), designed to serve as a metal barracks for the members of the army and air corps, into the all-aluminum Dymaxion House for the Beech Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kan. (today on exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.). The war years catalyzed something else that had started during the Great Depression: architects’ and designers’ use of new and plentifully available materials, from aluminum and plastic to wood laminates. The postwar era witnessed a boom in industrial design throughout the world, as factories accustomed to churning out tens of thousands of machines for war transitioned to making mass-produced consumer goods. This was particularly so in the United States, where factories were not damaged or destroyed by wartime bombing. In a way, this circumstance guaranteed that American designers would be at the forefront of making consumer products immediately after the war.