BUSINESS & FINANCE

TIME, OCTOBER 31, 1949

MODERN LIVING
Up from the Egg
In his Manhattan apartment early one morn-
ing last week, Industrial Designer Raymond
Loewy awoke with a start. As he flipped a bed-
side switch, soft indirect light spread over walls
made of egg-crate fiber and over a group of im-
probable furnishingsa Tahitian drum, Congo
ceremonial sword, Chinese helmet, Moroccan
fly-switch, Senegalese war hatchet and gro-
tesque Zulu masks. Loewy, who gets some of
his best ideas in bed (and no nightmares from
the masks), reached for the ever-present memo
pad beside his pillow and scribbled a cryptic note:
Why not a suction cap for shaving-cream tubes?
The idea captured, frail as it was, Loewy went
back to sleep until a Loewy-designed alarm clock
tinkled at 7 a.m., turning him out into a world
filled with the products of his night & day dream-
ing. In his black, beige and bronze bathroom,
with its motif of Nubian slaves, he plugged in his
Loewy-designed Schick electric razor, used a
toothbrush and tube of toothpaste he had mod-
eled for Pepsodent, tore off the wrapper he had
designed for Lux soap. Even the expensively
tailored grey suit he put on was his own snugly
fitting creation. Its special feature: inch-and-a-
half cuffs on the sleeves, which could be replaced
when frayed (a designers fray quickly).
In the combination living & dining room, glit-
tering with thousands of flecks of gold-colored
plastic thread woven in chairs, sofa and carpet, sion maker wanted him to draw up sketches for a trim figure better (he keeps his weight close to
the huge mirror forming the far wall parted; a new line of cabinets. Fine. said Loewy, I spent 170 by diet and massage), worked on through
through it, from her hidden boudoir, stepped Viola $2,000 on my own set and it hasnt worked right the lunch hour, pausing only for an apple and
Loewy, his 28-year-old bride of less than a year, since I bought it. From Glamour magazine came saccharin-sweetened coffee. Then, in & out of
to join him at breakfast. a phone call: How about an article on theater workrooms again, he stopped by a drafting board
After eating, Loewy descended ten floors to design? Wonderful. said Loewy. Ive been wait- littered with new tiepin designs, picked up a pencil
his spanking new 1950 Studebaker convertible ing for a chance to tell everyone whats wrong and drew an arrowhead and part of the shaft.
waiting at the curb. That he had designed too with theaters. Then Loewy paced nervously Work some up like this in gold, or blackor
along with all the Studebakers since the war through the various cubicles where his associ- maybe burgundy, he said in the tone of a
and thereby helped set a new fashion in auto- ates were planning new designs for everything suggestion. Men seem to like burgundy. At the
mobiles. Loewys own car had a few special flam- from tiepins to locomotives. blueprints for a power-wheel for bicycles for the
boyant frills: a plastic tail-fin, a tiny gold grilled He looked over models of the interiors of three American Brake Shoe Co., Loewy commented:
air scoop above the emblem on the hood, re- new ocean liners for American President Lines, Much too heavy. On his way out he stumbled
cessed door handles, porthole windows and hurried on to pick up a new bottle for Lever Bros. over some outdoor cooking grills that a new cus-
other eyecatchers to start pedestrians tongues Loewy thought it would be nice to put some kind tomer had brought in for redesign. Looking at
awagging with the name of Studebakerand of shock absorber on the bottom (The clash of the clumsy grills with ill-concealed horror, he
Showman Loewy. glass against a sink isnt good). From his pocket murmured: Terrible! Terrible! and rushed off for
Man at Work. Loewy and his 143 designers, he whipped out his hasty design for the tube-top a rubdown and massage at the New York Ath-
architects and draftsmen were busier than ever made as a suction cup (to hold the tube against letic Club.
spreading that name & fame on a dozen new the wall while in use). Make one up and Ill try it The Sleeping Beauty. As the biggest indus-
projects. They had signed up to modernize at home for a week or two, he said. trial designer in the U.S., Raymond Fernand
Raglands department store on Texas famed King Loewy stopped to look ruefully at the flat let- Loewy, at 56, is the dominant figure in a field,
Ranch (TIME, Dec. 15, 1947); they had just com- tering on a new ice-cream package. Its for home which in less than a quarter-century has mush-
pleted the first part of a face-lifting for freezer units, he protested, where there isnt roomed from a groping, uncertain experiment
Manhattans Gimbel Brothers (cried Gimbels in much light. The brand name has to jump right into a major phenomenon of U.S. business.
full-page ads: We are speechless). Their new out at you. Grabbing scissors and glossy, col- Design has existed since man made the first
two-level Greyhound bus, (the Scenicruiser) was ored paper, he snipped out a design, slapped wheel, but the Machine Age, concerned at first
being road-tested on Michigan roads. For Cali- the brand lettering against it and held it up: the only with spewing forth its myriad products in
fornia they were planning a state fair. name jumped out, all right. increasing quantity, was slow in discovering the
Hardly had Loewy stepped into his muted grey Designer Loewy, who likes good food, but likes need for form. As early as 1904 Frank Lloyd
and beige penthouse office high above Fifth Av- Wright was singing the beauties of the machine.
enue, when more jobs rolled in, e.g., a televi- *with Butler-Valet Karl Huzala As he later put it:
 Now, a chair is a machine to sit in.
A home is a machine to live in.
The human body is a machine to be worked
by will.
A tree is a machine to bear fruit.
A plant is a machine to bear flowers and seeds.
And ... a heart is a suction-pump.
Does that idea thrill you?
Not until the late 20s did Loewy, Norman Bel
Geddesindustrial designs greatest prophet
and visionaryand a handful of pioneers, in-
cluding Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss,
Harold Van Doren, Lurelle Guild, thrill the indus-
trial world with an art for the Machine Age.
They pursued the simple principle that every
object can have an ideal form which, with
economy and grace, can express its function.
Through centuries of trial & error many of mans
simplest tools the ax helve, the plowshare, the
ox yoke had achieved a utilitarian perfection
of design. In essence, industrial design was a
brave attempt to bring the same simplicity to all
the goods and tools of modern living. The de-
pression, when industrialists were willing to try
anything to boost sales, gave the designers their
first big chance to show what they could do.
The Lusty Child. There were early flops, but all these years, Im not even sure that I like him! package for Lucky Strike in 1942 (Lucky Strike
the flops were soon outnumbered by notable suc- Everything he does calls attention, with skilled green has gone to war).
cesses. Trim, clean-lined stoves, oil heaters, re- showmanship, to his work, so that observers at Eggs & Needles. Loewys business has grown
frigerators and washing machines outsold their times get the strange feeling that he too is a so large that he now has three working partners:
ugly predecessors and those of competitors. design by Loewy, of course. A. Baker Barnhart, who has charge of all pack-
Streamlining, which had the laudable purpose Despite his shyness, he is a crack salesman aging, product and transportation design; Will-
of cutting down wind resistance in trains, cars, who throws no artistic tantrums. Far from turn- iam Snaith, who manages all department-store
etc., became such a craze that it was even in- ing out designs with offhand sureness, he works work; Business Manager John Breen. There are
flicted on such static objects as desk sets. Little them over painstakingly until the client is satis- branch offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, South
by little the hardy, struggling band proved that fied. He also has an almost hypnotic power to Bend, Ind. and London. All of his designers think
their artistry could draw that prettiest curve of all impress, persuade and convince the toughest so much like him that, says an admiring rival, If
to businessmenan upward-sweeping sales tycoon. Even the American Tobacco Co.s late you meet any one of them you meet Loewy.
curve. George Washington Hill, who used to frighten Says the boss, who takes on jobs for as little
Today, the infant art of industrial design is fast advertising men out of their wits, wilted under as $500 or as much as $200,000: If you want
becoming as potent a sales force as advertis- Loewys gentle suasion. He paid him the whop- me to do a big thing like a tractorthere are so
ing. Many big companies, like General Motors, ping fee of $50,000 just for designing a new white many obvious things you could do to make it
General Electric and Westinghouse, have long
since built up design departments of their own,
but smaller companies, who cannot afford to do
so, must depend exclusively on freelance spe-
cialists like Loewy.
With the return of the buyers market, every
U.S. manufacturer is cudgeling his brainand
the brains of designersto make his product
work better, feel better, look better and sell bet-
ter than those of his rivals. This year U.S. busi-
ness will spend some $500 million improving
the way its products look. Of that sum, Raymond
Loewy Associates expects to collect $3,000,000,
the biggest gross ever. And Loewy expects that
his personal income, which has averaged
$200,000 for the past five years, will be boosted
also.
The Shy Salesman. Suave, grey-haired, me-
dium-sized (5 ft. 10 in.), Loewy talks in a sub-
dued voice that is, at the same time, apologetic
and compelling. His face is reposed, gentle, sad,
and as inscrutable as that of a Monte Carlo crou-
pier. Obsessively shy, he is always Mr. Loewy
even to his longtime associates. Even to those
who know him well he is something of an
enigma. Said one longtime acquaintance: After
better-looking that I would take it for very little.
But if you want me to redesign a sewing needle,
Id charge $100,000. After all, how can you im-
prove a needle? Its like the perfect functional
shape of an egg.
As the great packager who tricks up boxes
and labels, Designer Loewy lures U.S. consum-
ers into buying more soap, lard, perfume and
hair oils. If he did nothing more than such trivial
things, consumers might well wonder what ben-
efit, if any, they get from his work. But he also
works just as hard making all manner of things
better and more usable. His new vacuum cleaner
(Singer) is the first which is designed to be hung
up flat against a closet wall. Foley Bros, depart-
ment store, in Houston, was the first department
store designed so that a shopper could walk
through the store making purchases, and have
them all waiting for her when she returned to
her car in the store garage. Though Loewys work
does not have the imaginative sweep of Designer
Bel Geddes visions of triple-decked planes, ro-
tary airports and submarinelike ocean liners, he
has a greater influence on current design and
modern living than any other designer simply
because his pen is in so many different inkpots.
Chain Reaction. A small problem often leads
to much bigger ones. For example, the job of
streamlining International Harvesters tractors led
to designing a distinctive new building (1,125
have been built) in which to sell them .
Loewys first job for the Pennsylvania Railroad
was designing a trash can. That was success-
ful, so he went to work blueprinting a new loco-
motive. To find out what was wrong with old en-
gines. Loewy rode them for thousands of miles,
noting such things as the absence of a toilet for
the crew (he installed one), and the fact that
smoke sometimes obscured the engineers vi-
sion (he devised a vane to deflect it). He wound
up designing not only new locomotives but whole
new trains for Pennsylvania (Broadway Limited,
Spirit of St. Louis, The General. Liberty Lim-
ited, etc.), and modern new stations as well. Now
he is pondering the biggest problem of all: find-
ing a better and more profitable way to handle
all the roads freight.
His methods often mystify clients. When
Chicagos Armour & Co. hired Loewy to rede-
sign and repackage its 700-800 different prod-
ucts, he disappeared for about six months. Said
Vice President Walter S. Shafer: We didnt know
what he was doing. Actually, Loewymen were
out talking to hundreds of housewives who
bought the products. When Loewy came back
he told Armour to abolish all the multicolor la-
bels that it had been using, and substitute a
simple two-color pattern throughout. Armour
saved enough money on color-printing alone to
pay for the designers services. As Lever Bros.
Charles Luckman, another client, put it: Ray-
mond keeps one eye on imagination and one
eye on the cash register.
Flash of a Knife. In 1943 when he began
designing the first postwar Studebaker, Loewy
decided that current cars were too bulky, too
laden with chromium spinach and schmalz,
and had too many blind spots. What he wanted
was slimness, grace and better visibility. To his The Locomotive God. Loewy first dreamed
staff he mapped the grand strategy: Weight is of building cars and locomotives in Paris, where
the enemy . . . Whatever saves weight saves he was born and spent the first 26 years of his
cost. The car must look fast, whether in motion life. His father, Maximilian, was a Viennese jour-
or stationary. I want it to look as if it were leap- nalist; his mother, Marie Labalme, a sturdy
ing forward; I want built-in motion ... If it looks Frenchwoman who prodded her children by con-
stopped it is a dead pigeon ... I want one that tinually telling them: Better to be envied than
looks alive as a leaping greyhound. pitied. Young Raymond, the third of three sons,
He augmented his permanent staff in the filled his school notebooks with so many
Studebaker plant from 28 to 39, talked each sketches of locomotives, automobiles and air-
design over with engineers to see if it was fea- planes that his parents sent him to engineering
sible. From hundreds of tentative designs school.
Loewy pulled a curve here, a hood there, a But at 21, the student engineer was called off
fender sweep yonder, then mocked up about to World War I as a private. At the front, he deco-
a dozen experimental models in clay, one-quar- rated his dugout with flowered wallpaper, drap-
ter size, and worked on them. Says eries and tufted pillows. He designed himself a
Studebakers President Harold S. Vance: I have new pair of pants because the government-is-
seen Loewy shake his head in disapproval, then sue pants were badly cut (I enjoyed going into
take out a knife and with one sweep correct the action well-dressed). After four years of war
clay model to perfection. during which he was burned severely by mus-
When the final model was chosen and tard gashe came out a captain, with a swatch
mocked up full-size, Loewy called in Stude- of ribbons on his chest but no money in his pock-
baker officials and dramatically whisked the ets. His older brother Georges, a doctor in Man-
coverings off the model. Loewy feels that it hattan, urged Raymond to join him. At 26, still
is the first impression that counts; either it wearing his captains uniform (the only clothing
clicks or it doesnt. he had), Loewy sailed for the U.S. with a total
It clicked so well that in the last three years capital of $40. Aboard ship, his sketching so im-
Studebaker has broken all its peacetime records pressed Sir Harry Gloster Armstrong, then Brit-
for sales and profits. Not all Studebaker dealers ish consul general in New York, that he gave
liked the 1950 models, which came out last Au- him a note of introduction to Publisher Conde
gust. Some did not like the rocketlike hood and Nast.
nose air intake that resembles the 1949 Ford. The publisher, in turn, was also impressed by
But Loewys answer is in the sales. While most the Parisian suavity and horizon-blue uniform
other independent car-makers were having rough of the dapper young officer. He put him to work
going, Studebaker sold more cars in September on fashion illustrations for Vogue, and Loewy
than any month in its history. From receivership swiftly demonstrated his unmatched ability to im-
less than 15 years ago, Studebaker has climbed press all the right people.
back, is now the biggest independenta smaller Before long, the benefit of his shrewd, apprais-
fourth to the Big Three. ing eye was being respectfully sought by such

merchandising bigwigs as John Wanamaker and
Horace Saks.
One day in 1927, at a friends home, he met
Britains Sigmund Gestetner, maker of a famed
old duplicating machine whose design had not
been appreciably changed in 30 years. Loewy
lugged the duplicator up to his apartment and
built a clay model embodying his ideas. Gestet-
ner liked it so well that he paid Loewy $2,000 for
it and used the same design for 15 years after-
ward. (Gestetner paid him a yearly retainer not
to design for any competitor.) Overnight, Fash-
ion Artist Loewy decided to become an indus-
trial designer.
75% Transportation. Loewy quickly found out
that industrial design was not easy: it was 25%
inspiration and 75% transportation. He lugged
briefcases of designs from one manufacturer to
another around the U.S., barely sold enough to
keep body and penthouse together for his first
wife, Nebraska-born Jean Thomson. (Divorced
in 1945, they parted the best of friends, and
she still has a 4% interest in his company.)
His first big chance came when Sears, Roe-
buck & Co. hired him in 1934 to dress up its
Coldspot refrigerator, an ugly machine with a
dust trap under its spindly legs, and corrugated
shelves inside. Loewy moved the motor from
top to bottom, chopped off the legs, and installed
the first non-rusting aluminum shelves ever to
be used in a refrigerator. The Coldspot became
a single smooth, gleaming unit of functional sim-
plicityand with it Sears sales shot up five-fold
by 1936. Loewy had been paid only $2,500 for
the job (and had spent nearly three times that in
expenses), but Sears was glad to pay him
$25,000 for his next job. His reputation was
made.
The Flea Market. As fortune followed fame,
he began spending some of the fortune on his
personal tasteswhich are expensive. He usu-
ally spends part of the winter in the $100,000
dream house he designed and built in the desert
near Palm Springs, Calif., complete with a swim-
ming pool which curves into the living room.
Summer always finds him back in France, where
he has three homes. His relaxing spot is Le
Torpillou (the Little Torpedo), a bright, red-tiled
villa overlooking the Cote dAzur at St. Tropez,
and littered with such things as underwater fish-
ing gear, which he seldom uses. Near Rambouil-
let, outside Paris, he has a i6th Century manor,
La Cense, once a lovecote for Henri IV; it teems
with game which Loewy seldom hunts, but he
admires the elegant design of its peacocks. Last
year he acquired an apartment on Paris Quai
dOrsay, decorated it with everything from braced
halberds with baby-pink shafts and ribboned
bows to crystal chandeliers picked up at Paris
flea market.
In his Manhattan apartment, Loewy has
blithely mixed a modern mirror fireplace, French
period pieces, an Oriental shrine and a crystal
chandelier reminiscent of Versailles. Instead of
scattering his considerable collection of modern
art (Picasso, Miro and Matisse) about the room,
he hung them all frame-to-frame on one wall,
used a big Dufy as a hinged cover to conceal
his television set which is built into the wall. Some
visitors might quail at such a mish mash, but
Mrs. Loewy loyally approves it all, saying I think
he has good taste. Loewy himself has given a
more complex definition of his special talents.
Says he: Good design keeps the user happy,
the manufacturer in the black, and the esthete
unoffended.
Clay Impressions. In the brave new world of
industrial design, the brave new designers were
hard at work trying to keep users happier by hun-
dreds of new products.
Must telephones have their numbers where
the dialing finger obscures them? Designer
Dreyfuss new telephone for the Bell System has
the numbers outside.
How could chairs be made more comfortable?
Manhattans Designer Egmont Arens thought it
could be done by taking clay impressions of fat,
skinny and in-between posteriors. A one-piece
plastic chair with compound curves more com-
fortable than straight lines was being popped
out by General American Transportation Corp.
at the rate of one every five minutes.
Did all refrigerators and home freezers have
to be white and hard to keep clean? Milwaukees
Designer Brooks Stevens, who designed the Mil-
waukee Roads gleaming new bubble-domed
Hiawatha train, thought not; he had already
turned out a blue freezer (for Ben Hur) which
was making bigger companies sit up and take
note.
Must theaters have only a small number of
seats in the choicest orchestra rows? At
Manhattans Savoy-Plaza hotel, Designer Bel
Geddes was transforming about 10,000 square
feet of lobby, dining and storage space into a
modern theater which, devoid of a proscenium
arch and extending the stage into the audience,
boosts the orchestra seating from the average
300 to 800, using fewer rows of seats.
There were fine, luxurious new trains, buses,
steamships and airliners built and abuilding. De-
signer Dreyfuss, who had conceived the New
York Centrals first modern 20th Century trains,
had many a super-modern ocean liner interior
on the boards. Designer Teagues cozy lounges,
snack bars and dressing rooms were already
aloft in Boeings new Stratocruiser. Not even the
U.S. toilet had been neglected. Thanks to De-
signer Dreyfuss and the Crane Co., it was now
available in form-fitting shapes.
The New Frontiers. For all the work that had
been done, there still remained vast, unexplored
regions of ugliness and inefficiency for the U.S.
industrial designer to tackle. Designer Loewy last
week summed up a few of the challenges:
The world is filled with archaic objects mail-
boxes which look like alarm boxes, banks which
look like places to break out of rather than places
to enter.
Noise is a parasite. Anything noisy is poorly
designed. And taxicabs! Why should you crawl
into a cab on your hands & knees and then be
unable to get out of the deep seats once you get
into them? Subways are dirty, noisy, unattrac-
tive. The American soda fountain is disgraceful;
anyone who has ever smelled the midsummer-
night stink of a sloppy soda fountaindecayed
hamburger, sour milk, mustard and vanillacan
never forget it. The same goes for a telephone
booth. Must one be crowded into a cramped,
unventilated closet, use a mouthpiece which has
been breathed into by thousands of people? Why
not a two-way loudspeaker instead? Lincoln
Steffens advised his son, who was worrying
about what remained to be done, that nobody
had yet made a faucet that didnt leak. Well, it
no longer leaksbut why not do something
about the faucet itself? Is it necessary?