1930s Speed Lines

As the fields of industrial design and automobile styling were ramping up in the 1930s, streamlining became something of a fad. Later observers giggled at streamlining of non-mobile objects such as pencil sharpeners that never required aerodynamic efficiency for basic operation. Perhaps this was in reaction to some proselytizing by new industrial designers who claimed in effect that form that followed function would be beautiful and, by the way, sell well.

A more modest concurrent public relations and client sales approach was to "clean up" fussy, engineering-inspired design of the past. Here again, the results would be stronger sales in an era of depressed economy.

Theory and ideology aside, most designers recognized by mid-decade that to some extent they were in the fashion business because clients were soon asking them to "freshen" or even redesign products that had been touted as being purely function-driven.

As for streamlining, aircraft increasingly were becoming strongly streamlined, especially those made of metal. By around the 1934 model year, automobiles began to be designed with reference to serious concerns for aerodynamic efficiency (as they are to a far greater degree now). A famous case in point was the 1934 Chrysler Airflow.

But for various reasons, not all cars were given more than superficial streamlining in those days. Often streamline-like decor was added to provide a sense of streamlining. Furthermore, industrial designers and architects also included hints of streamlining in buildings and products.

In this post, I present examples of "speed lines" -- parallel ornamentation shapes suggesting airflow passing along or over the basic shape of the object. A fad, but in retrospect, a fun and basically harmless one.

Gallery

1934 Chevrolet - Barrett-Jackson auction photo
Modest speed lines can be seen along the side of the hood and rear wheel skirt.

1934 Nash
Speed lines here are more elaborate, being found on front and rear fender valances and atop the hood.

Chrysler Airflow facelift proposal - ca. 1934-35
By Norman Bel Geddes. This unused proposal featured grooves along most of the car.

Taxi design - 1938
By Raymond Loewy. Multiple, stacked bumpers also serve as speed lines.

Pennsylvania Railroad S-1 locomotive by Loewy - 1939
An addition to some actual streamlining at the front of the boiler section, Loewy added speed lines wrapping around the front and sides. That's Loewy in the photo.

Sears Coldspot refrigerator by Loewy - 1935
An early Loewy design with vertical speed lines.

Air-King Products radio - 1930-33
Designed by John Gordon Rideout and Harold van Doren. Plenty of parallel lines along with some skyscraper-inspired massing of the body. Photo from Brooklyn Museum.

Kodak Baby Brownie camera - 1935
By Walter Dorwin Teague. More than most early industrial designers, Teague liked parallel speed line décor.

Sparton 517-B radio by Teague - 1936

Texaco Type C filling station by Teague - ca. 1936
Streamlining is evoked here in the curved shapes associated with the overhang. Speed lines wrap around the building.

1942 Chrysler
Now it's the early 1940s, but Chrysler stylists gave their 1942 model one final, heavy, pre-war dose of speed lines.

Alexander Leydenfrost: Illustrating Technical Stuff

American readers born before, say, 1950 might recall leafing through copies of Life Magazine or other publications and coming across illustrations by Alexander Leydenfrost (1888-1961). What most viewers didn't realize was that Leydenfrost was an Hungarian Baron who moved to the United States in 1923 to escape the aftermath of the Great War. By 1930 he was working as an industrial designer for Norman Bel Geddes, and at the end of the decade moved into illustration full-time. Those and other details can be found in this short Wikipedia entry.

After a fling in Planet Stories, a science-fiction magazine, Leydenfrost built his illustration career depicting current and futuristic machines and settings. This was not a large step away from making certain kinds of industrial design presentations. However, he had an artistic sense that set him apart from those simply skilled in product rendering, which is why his scenes were usually dramatic and halfway believable even if they dealt with future possibilities.

Gallery

Brooklyn Battery Tunnel - 1950

Fleeing after atomic attack - Pageant Magazine - February 1951

Science on the March - Popular Mechanics Magazine - January 1952
This was a spread in the magazine's 50th anniversary issue.  Click on the illustration to enlarge.

Future Dirigible - ca. 1944

B-26 Bomber - 1942 or 1943

Pennsylvania Railroad calendar illustration - 1945

Dale Chihuly's Portable Radios With Plastic Cases, and More

This is actually one of my occasional industrial design posts, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to begin using a link to an artist.

That artist is Dale Chihuly (1941 - ), master of glass installations (Wikipedia entry here). A couple of years ago, a museum devoted to Chihuly was opened in Seattle right next to the well-known Space Needle. Attached to the museum is a restaurant called Collections Café. Its Web site is here, and a Seattle Magazine article about it is here.

That article notes that the name "Collections" refers to the cafe's decor, which is dominated by objects Chihuly collected over the years. The link includes some photos that help give you the flavor of the place.

The photo at the top of this post is from Seattle Met magazine and shows a wall display in the cafe consisting of dozens of pre-transistor portable radios from the 1940s and 50s for the most part. The variety of styles grafted onto fairly similar electronic boards is astonishing.

A little context for that era of small (for the time) plastic-cased radios is offered below.

Gallery

Philco 40-180 - 1940
Many households of the 1930s had a large radio such as the one shown here.  Such a device was normally located in the living room and served as the focus for evening entertainment for a family.

Philco 84B - 1935
Not all radios were large back then.  That's because the chassis with its vacuum tubes (valves, in Britain) could be pretty much the same size for all AM radios since the electronic functionality was the same.  What usually varied was the size of the cabinet and perhaps the size of the speakers.  The radio shown here is a table-top type that could be placed in a living room, bedroom, home office or somesuch place.
The Philco model illustrated here is the same type as our family radio when I was a wee tyke; it was used until television came along.  I still have that radio.  It looks almost the same as the one above except that the dial has sort of an orange hue.

Philco 38-15T - 1938
By the late 1930s engineers were able to create more compact layouts allowing for even smaller sets.

Philco PT-25 - 1940
Philco cased its radios using wood through most of the 1930s, but added plastic by 1940.

Westinghouse H-127 Little Jewell - 1945-47
An early post- World War 2 portable radio, this from Westinghouse.  I include it because I had such a radio in my bedroom when I was young.  Unlike the old Philco, I no longer have it.

Over-Designed Flatware

Flatware (or silverware, as perhaps most people call it) presents an interesting challenge for designers. The basic pieces -- knife, fork and spoon -- have specific tasks in the eating process. Moreover, they must be held by human hands of various sizes (though the range for adults is fairly limited), and therefore cannot be too large or too small. In fact, flatware items of a given type (table knife, butter knife, soupspoon, teaspoon, etc.) are usually pretty much the same size across sets.

The design challenge largely lies in creating a distinctive appearance for a flatware set when there are already many hundreds of patterns having appeared over the years. Usually the distinction-creation focus is on ornamentation and detailing, the general shapes being largely traditional.

But the ethos of Modernism in its classical form holds that ornamentation is to be shunned. Therefore, a modernist designer must concentrate on shape alone to create a distinctive flatware set for the marketplace. The task is difficult thanks to this additional design constraint, and it isn't surprising that some designers seem to try too hard. In this case, the result often is a visually interesting design that is marred by ergonomic (human factors) defects.

Let's look at some examples of flatware designs that suffer from that problem.

Gallery

Josef Hoffmann for Wiener Werkstätte - c. 1903-04
Hoffman (biographical links here and here) thought of himself primarily as an architect, but he also devoted considerable effort to domestic design, such as for the silver flatware set shown here.  The tips of the handles contain tiny bits of what can be called decoration,  The round opening between the tines of the center fork also is pure decoration.  Potential ergonomic problems include the arbitrary round spoon bowls and the broad, flat handles on most of the other pieces.

Josef Hoffman - Hugo Pott 86 - 1955
Half a century later, not long before his death, Hoffmann created this design.  The little round knobs at the ends of the handles serve to help balance while holding the piece, though they are basically decorative.  To me, the problem is that the handles seem too thin to grasp comfortably.

Arne Jacobsen - 1957
As Wikipedia indicates, Jacobsen also was basically an architect who practiced industrial design on the side.  The (partial) set shown here is interesting to look at, but probably not easy to use.  For example, the fork tines seem too few, too short and perhaps too sharp.  The flat handles might be a little uncomfortable to hold.  The knives and spoons could be better balanced.

Sasaki Aria Asani
This set is from a Japanese firm, but I don't have a date for it.  Again, wide, flat, poorly balanced handles.

Yamazaki Haiku
Another set from Japan, designer and date unknown (to me, anyway).  The design is interesting and creative: note the split handles (a decoration, not being functional) and uneven fork tine lengths.  But yet again, I doubt that the pieces would be comfortable to use.  And the split handles might be hard to clean.

Norman Bel Geddes' First City of the Future

Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), shown above posing with a model city of the future, is perhaps most famous for his Futurama America in 1960 exhibit in the General Motors pavilion at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. But before that, he did a trial run for the Shell Oil Company in a 1937 series of advertisements.

Well, I think it was a trial run. But given the lead-time required to construct the GM exhibit, it's possible that the two somewhat similar projects might have been started at about the same time. Some Googling failed to turn up anything definite regarding this, but perhaps an existing or forthcoming Geddes biography will have the details.

The smaller-scale Shell project was nevertheless a typical bravura Geddes combination of showmanship, technology and imagination. Below are images of the model of the Shell City of Tomorrow along with a few advertisements featuring it. Click on them to enlarge.

Gallery

Helen Dryden: From Illustration to Industrial Design

Helen Dryden (1887-1981), according to her Wikipedia entry, spent most of her art school years working to become a landscape painter. And afterwards she shifted to commercial art, becoming a cover illustrator for Vogue magazine. (More biographical information is here.)

By 1914 she was doing costume and set design for theater, though Wikipedia does not provide information regarding how many productions she worked on.

Besides fashion-related illustration, by the late 1920s Dryden was practicing what was becoming known as industrial design. I could find no examples of this work to present below. She consulted for Studebaker in the later 1930s, probably mostly dealing with interiors. Studebaker advertising credited designs to her, though Raymond Loewy also began working with Studebaker in 1936. Since he had had previous experience styling Hupmobiles, he probably did exterior work, but the advertising featured her probably because she was better known at the time.

The Wikipedia entry indicates that she had fallen on hard times by the mid 1950s. If her year of death was 1981, I wonder how she managed to survive for another 25 years; the entry implies city welfare.

Gallery

Vogue - 15 July 1914

Fashion Fête program cover - November 1914

Vogue (UK) - April 1919

Vogue (UK) - 1 November 1920

Delineator - July 1929

Delineator - October 1929

1936 Studebaker Advertisement crediting Dryden

A Not-So-Good Design

The great industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss (1904-1972) was especially concerned with "human factors" or "ergonomics" when designing a product. The idea was to made the item easy to understand and use. It also should be compatible with the physical dimensions and manipulation capabilities of the user. Finally, it should do its job well.

Vacationing at a fancy resort in the Hawaiian island of Kauai recently, I encountered something that failed on more than one of those criteria just mentioned. Here it is:

Apparently the resort refurbished its early 1960s-vintage buildings in the 1990s. Hotel rooms were smaller around 1960, so the modernization had to make do with available space. This was especially the case with the small bathroom area.

My problem had to do with the sink arrangement shown above. The style of sink that projects above the counter top was never my favorite, but it makes sense here. That's because toothbrushes, lipstick cases and other odds and ends can migrate under the sink's edge. The effect is to increase the usable amount of counter space compared to a normal sunken sink of the same size.

The failure has to do with the faucet. It doesn't extend far enough over the sink. Drawing a glass of water, brushing teeth, washing hands and all the other chores one does over a sink are harder and messier to do because the stream of water is too close to the side of the sink. Ideally, the water should fall near the drain hole rather than on the shallow slope of the sink's side.

So what we have here is a faucet design that's functionally not compatible with the design of the sink. One solution would have been to install a sink with steeper sides to better accommodate the water stream. But that would have meant a sunken sink and less counter space. The better solution would have been a faucet with a longer stem that would reach farther into the sink area. Maybe none were available at the time; I have no idea. Regardless, we were stuck with the result of decisions made years ago.

Syd Mead: Famous Designer of Unbuilt Cars

So far as I can tell, car stylist, industrial designer and visualization renderer of future environments Syd Mead (born 1933) never had any of his automobile designs enter production. It's possible that some of his industrial designs were produced, but I don't know of any offhand.

Yet Mead is well known by styling and design practitioners and some of his efforts are famous to groups of the public at large. For instance, he designed the future Los Angeles for the movie Blade Runner and the vehicles for the original Tron. More recently, he has been involved with computer game settings. Mead's web site is here; it contains many examples of his work and even t-shirts that you can buy from his on-line shop.

I first came to be aware of Mead back in my army days at Fort Meade (of all places!) when a buddy of mine showed me a copy of a brochure with Mead's designs commissioned by U.S. Steel. Many of those illustrations were included in his first Sentinel book, a copy of which I own.

One aspect of Mead's work that interests me is that it's hard to distinguish which designs and renderings are recent and which were done when he was working on the U.S. Steel project in the early 1960s. (As can be seen below, his very earliest efforts are easier to spot.) So Mead seems to have attained a personal version of the future that was strong enough to serve him for a career of 50 years. Let's take a look.

Gallery

Blade Runner visualization
His Blade Runner designs are probably his best-known work so far as the general public is concerned; but they likely would not know who Syd Mead is.

Student design while at Art Center School

Illustration of Ford Gyron show car - 1961
These are examples of Mead's work from when he hadn't attained his mature sensibility.

Concept car for U.S. Steel

Design for U.S. Steel

U.S. Steel project scene
It's a little hard to believe that these designs and renderings are nearly 50 years old.

Commuter car designed for Philips
This design could be produced; it's not very futuristic, which Mead acknowledges by placing a black contemporary car in the near-background.

Futuristic scene
This was done more recently than most of the illustrations above.

Future horse race

Automobile design
Another design that's not totally blue-sky futuristic; note the costumes of the background figures aren't as wild as in the image directly above.