American Design History Bibliography of Sources

American Design History: A Bibliography of Sources and Interpretations
Author(s): Jeffrey L. Meikle

Source: American Studies International , April 1985, Vol. 23, No. 1 (April 1985), pp. 3-40
Published by: Mid-America American Studies Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41278744
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American Design History: A

Bibliography of Sources and
Interpretations
by Jeffrey L. Meikle
INTRODUCTION
extent around the production, distribution, and consumption of manu-

Despite extent facturedfactured
aroundobjects,
the objects,
design importance the design
history is a field that hasproduction, of history design distribution, is in a a field culture that and has consumption organized attracted to relatively of a manu- great
attracted relatively
little attention from cultural historians. Willing to accept as historical evidence
the works of both pre-industrial craftsmen and elite artists, they have been
relatively slow to analyze and interpret either the manufactured artifacts that
make up the fabric of everyday life or the processes that have brought them into
existence. Only in the past few years have scholars formed professional
organizations devoted to promoting the history of design. The members of Great
Britain's Design History Society consider American as well as European devel-
opments, and currently support a Newsletter and are projecting a Journal of Design
History. In the United States, the more recent Design History Forum, an informal
network of historians and design instructors, is attempting to gain recognition
from the College Art Association. Almost simultaneously, Design Issues , an
independent academic journal devoted to design philosophy and history, has
just begun publication.
As might be expected, definitions of design are as varied as the intentions of
those who practice it, philosophize about it, or trace its history. For example, the
WPA compilers of the superb Index of American Design (a massive selection of
which was published by Clarence Pearson Hornung as Treasury of American
Design [1973]) understood their Depression mandate as the recording in water-
American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXI11, No. 1

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color of weathervanes, quilting patterns, figureheads, and other anonymous

examples of vernacular crafts. A few years earlier, in an educational study of Art
in Industry (1929), Charles R. Richards had defined design as the application of
artistic talent to the decoration of architectural and interior surfaces, hardware,
and furnishings. Both of these conceptions of design seem narrow, however,
when compared with that of R. Buckminister Fuller, a technocratic visionary
who spent over forty years developing a "world design science" that aimed at
nothing less than global monitoring and control of natural and human re-
sources.
Operating between these extremes, most commentat

have understood the objects of the modern design process
the "industrial design" process - to be manufactured arti
ments in which they are offered to a consuming publ
definition, design is the process of creating working
reproduction by machines. Design also encompasses t
packaging, styling, retail displays, and commercial archite
mass produced goods are distributed to consumers. And fin
pundits speak of ephemeralization and the post-indus
encompasses the packaging and delivery of services,
information to both mass audiences and large specialized
description of design does not rigidly limit the meaning
suggest, however, that design developed historically as pa
Revolution, that design typically mixes utilitarian and ae
that an artifact produced by the design process - if succe
reflects group values than a lone artist's urge for self-exp
from the realms of the merely decorative or the uni
significance for the cultural historian as the source from w
century Americans have had to choose the very stuff of t
ORIGINS AND METHODS OF DESIGN HISTORY
Although "design history" as a professional specialization is quite

its origins date back to the uneasy 1930s, when architects, designers, a
critics became self-consciously aware that the human race had entere
called Machine Age. Rapid technological development, formerly respo
extreme social dislocation and human suffering during the Industria
tion, seemed about to yield a static period of material and spiritu
forecast by Lewis Mumford as civilization's "neotechnic phase" in his i
Technics and Civilization (1934). A measured, even ponderous tome, M
analysis of technological man supported the more staccato pronou
contained in Le Corbusier's manifesto Towards a New Architecture , w
become available to an English-speaking audience in 1927. By identify
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reform and the creation of an efficient technocratic civilization with the rise of a
new machine-style architecture, Le Corbusier had imbued design, understood

in a broad sense, with a simplistic but persuasive moral imperative. Following
these leads, Nikolaus Pevsner, a young German art historian living in England,
initiated the study of design history by publishing his Pioneers of the Modern
Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936). Concerned not so much
with architecture as with a larger concept of design that encompassed architec-
ture, Pevsner sketched out the inexorable progress of functionalism in Europe -
from the spoiled hopes of the Great Exhibition of 1851, its magnificent Crystal
Palace filled with regressively eclectic machine-made goods, through the reform-
minded but backward-dreaming Arts and Crafts movement, to the cold, pure,
"totalitarian" (or comprehensive) vision of the modern movement.
In shaping this seminal work, Pevsner focused on the individual heroes of
the struggle for functional design. Siegfried Giedion, another pioneer of design
history, focused instead on the artifacts of mass production and on their almost
imperceptible effect on the people who use them. His Mechanization Takes
Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948) revealed an ambivalence
about technological progress that was unusual for a philosophical champion of
modernism. Bolstering his analysis with an impressive array of then obscure
facts and illustrations, Giedion traced the mechanization of such basic human
activities as agriculture, baking, slaughtering, the making of furniture, cooking,
and bathing. While celebrating the democratization of things and marveling at
the efficient intricacy of mechanical solutions, he also lamented an accompany-
ing loss of closeness to the organic and the natural. An eccentric, unclassifiable
volume, Mechanization Takes Command remains an essential starting point for the
cultural analysis of manufactured artifacts.
Pevsner's and Giedion' s works stimulated a trickle of postwar studies, some
devoted to the intellectual history of the concept of functionalism, others
devoted to the exploration of mass production or mechanization in America, and
all of them informed by the progressive orientation of European modernism. In
1947 Harold A. Small had edited Form and Function , a selection of nineteenth-
century American sculptor Horatio Greenough' s transcendentalist writings on
the fitness of organic design and architecture. When considered in relation to
later essays by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Greenough' s literary
work suggested American origins for the modern movement, a conclusion
reached in Charles R. Metzger's monograph on Emerson and Greenough: Transcen-
dental Pioneers of an American Esthetic (1954). Other intellectual and literary
studies suggested broader sources for functionalism, however. In his Origins of
Functionalist Theory (1957), Edward Robert De Zurko traced the appearance of
mechanical, organic, and moral definitions of functionalism in classical, medie-
val, renaissance, and modern intellectual history, ending with Greenough. And
Alf Boe, ignoring American contributions in From Gothic Revival to Functional
Form: A Study in Victorian Theories of Design (19 57), instead focused on British
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theorists responding directly to the confrontation of craftsmanship and mass

production.
In the meantime, however, John A. Kouwenhoven had asserted the
essential significance of the American experience to the development of modern-
ism in his crucial work, Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization (1948;
reprinted in 1967 as The Arts in Modern American Civilization), which postulated
the emergence of an American technological vernacular culture marked by
economy, simplicity, flexibility, and utility. Manifested in the American system
of manufactures, in the balloon frame house, in the simplicity of machine tools
and the ingenuity of patent furniture, in the skyscraper and in jazz, this
vernacular style stood, according to Kouwenhoven, in sharp contrast to the
artificiality of imported European culture with its overstuffed hothouse eclecti-
cism. Appropriately one of the first examples of a truly interdisciplinary
American Studies scholarship, Made in America was not "about7 7 design any
more than it was about a dozen other subjects, but it confirmed Le Corbusier's
notion that European modernism had sprung from practical American engineer-
ing; it also remained an inspiration for historians concerned with the artifacts of
industrial civilization. Even Herwin Schaefer, who countered Kouwenhoven7 s
thesis in 1970, did so with considerable respect and acknowledgement of his
debt. Arguing in Nineteenth Century Modern: The Functional Tradition in Victorian
Design that America had no monopoly on the technological vernacular, Schaefer
provided convincing visual evidence that nineteenth-century inhabitants of both
Europe and America preferred "functional77 design for machinery and vehicles,
and "hothouse77 design (if they could afford it) for domestic interiors and
furnishings.
Until quite recently, few historical studies of American design appeared,
partially because both Pevsner's progressive and Kouwenhoven7 s vernacular
interpretations reinforced a notion that twentieth-century European modernism
represented the culmination of a positive evolutionary trend, and because of a
related assumption that commercialism had corrupted the design of twentieth-
century American consumer products. The only full-scale treatment of American
design history is Arthur J. Pulos7s American Design Ethic: A History of Industrial
Design to 1940 (1983). Pulos, who plans a second volume covering the past forty
years, wrote from within the paradigm developed by Pevsner and Kouwenho-
ven. Although his perspective included commercial industrial designers like
Raymond Loewy, who were concerned as much with merchandising as with
aesthetics, Pulos celebrated an "ethic77 whose internal logic inexorably led the
Conestoga wagon and the automobile, the long rifle and the electric iron, each to
its eventual perfect typeform. Profusely illustrated, American Design Ethic provid-
ed an excellent visual catalogue of American artifacts, both pre-industrial and
industrial, organized along the somewhat outmoded lines of progressive his-
tory.
Nearly a quarter of a century earlier, however, a revisionist student of

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Pevsner had suggested an alternate course for design historians to follow.

Reyner Banham' s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), an intellectual
study of the written manifestos of European modernists, emphasized above all
else that designers and architects of the early twentieth century had not united
behind a cohesive philosophy. The heroic histories of Pevsner and Giedion
(Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition [1941]) had erected a
myth, useful but inaccurate. Constructivists and Futurists, Werkbund and
Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, had expressed a diversity and
exuberant arbitrariness greatly at odds with their subsequent reputations. And
to the extent that some of them did espouse a ponderously serious functional-
ism, Banham professed to find more fascinating the chrome trim and romantic
speed lines of American commercial design. After the publication of Theory and
Design, which quickly became a classic, Banham continued to analyze expressive
consumer design and popular culture in witty, sometimes celebratory, some-
times ambivalent journalistic essays later collected and edited by Penny Sparke
as Design by Choice (1981). Banham's inclusive, non-progressive approach
became typical of design historians in Great Britain, especially those with an
interest in the United States. This populist openness characterized the following:
Design History: Fad or Function? (1978), an anthology of papers presented at the
founding meeting of the Design History Society; Stephen Bayley's In Good Shape:
Style in Industrial Products 1900 to 1960 (1979), an international anthology of
essays written by designers and case studies of representative products; and Art
and Industry: A Century of Design in the Products We Use (1982), a catalogue that
accompanied the opening exhibit of the Boilerhouse Project at the Victoria and
Albert Museum. The ambivalence that marked much British post-Banham
fascination with American commercial design appeared most distinctly in
Stephen Bayley's brief essay on Harley Earl and the Dream Machine (1983), an
analysis that alternately praised and castigated the General Motors designer
most responsible for the look of the postwar American automobile. More
balanced were three general design histories that embodied Banham's inclusivist
perspective: John Heskett's amazingly compact Industrial Design (1980), covering
both Europe and America from the early nineteenth century to the present, the
best available historical introduction for either layman or specialist; Edward
Lucie-Smith's History of Industrial Design (1983), a chatty, well-illustrated lay-
man's narrative; and Penny Sparke's Consultant Design: The History and Practice of
the Designer in Industry (1983), a brief essay on the design process itself as
organized in England and America from the mid-nineteenth century onward.
For the most part, the British seriously considered American design a topic
fit for historical inquiry sooner and more intensively than did Americans
themselves. During the postwar years, however, a few works examining the
history of American design began to appear. Most were written by designers or
design educators. In the 1950s, for example, James S. Plaut briefly explored
"Industrial Design in the United States" (1954), and Herwin Schaefer included

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American developments in "Design: An International Survey: 1851-1956"

(1958). Jerry Streichler's useful but still unpublished doctoral dissertation on
"The Consultant Industrial Designer in American Industry from 1927 to 1960"
(1962), the first book-length treatment of American design history, focused on
the twentieth-century professionalization of design as a commercial tool, on the
evolution of a routinized commercial design process, and on the standardization
of educational programs for fledgling designers. A brief stylistic survey of design
history organized around architecture, interiors, products, graphic design, and
photography, Ann Ferebee's History of Design from the Victorian Era to the Present
(1970) emerged from her lecture courses at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School
of Design.
Eventually historians stimulated by a 1970s pop culture revival of Art Deco
motifs and guided by wider perspectives of cultural history began to analyze the
formative years of the uniquely American commercial industrial design profes-
sion. Architectural historian David Gebhard initiated the trend with an essay on
"The Moderne in the U.S. 1920-1941" (1970), which focused primarily on styles
of commercial buildings but also suggested their fundamental coherence with
contemporaneous styles of consumer products. One of Gebhard's students,
Kathleen Church Plummer, developed his insight further in an article on "The
Streamlined Moderne" (1974), which briefly discussed industrial designers like
Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, and Walter Dorwin Teague, and
suggested psycho-social implications of the streamlining that they popularized
during the 1930s. These hints were developed in a pair of books that, taken
together, provided adequate analysis of the early years of American commercial
design. Writing from the perspective of an art historian, Donald J. Bush focused
in The Streamlined Decade (19 75) on the design - both exterior and interior - of
airplanes, trains, automobiles, steamships, and other vehicles enclosed, wheth-
er for aerodynamic or stylistic purposes, in streamlined shells. While Bush
emphasized in his analysis the aesthetic validity and expressiveness of a
commercial design style that had been previously dismissed as vulgar and
inappropriate, Jeffrey L. Meikle in Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in
America, 1925-1939 (1979) focused on the economic imperatives motivating early
commercial designers and offered a more detailed exploration of the cultural
meanings of streamlining.
American Studies Perspectives

Although relatively few cultural historians had addressed the subject of
design, many scholars had already explored the emergence of a consumption-
oriented public. While this body of scholarship only tangentially addressed the
subject of design, it remained relevant to future cultural histories of design. The
pioneering work for students of America as a consumer society was David M.
Potter's People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954),
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which suggestively analyzed the effects of material affluence on Americans.

Potter's treatment of advertising as the commercial lubricant of a consumer
society (a metaphor often also applied in the 1930s to industrial design) no doubt
stimulated his student Otis Pease to undertake his own study of The Responsibil-
ities of American Advertising: Private Control and Public Influence , 1920-1940 (1958).
Both Potter and Pease suggested the symbiotic complicity of advertiser and
consumer in the ubiquitous commercial relationship, but later historical analyses
of advertising focused on its manipulative aspects. In Captains of Consciousness:
Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (1976), for example, Stuart
Ewen advanced the hypothesis that advertising serves as a device for shifting
discontent from the realm of work, with its potential for unified social action, to
the forever unfulfilled realm of individual dreams of future consumption. He
and Elizabeth Ewen carried this Marxist analysis further, extending it from
advertising to clothing fashions, in Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping
of American Consciousness (1982).
As the most obvious innovation of the consumer society, advertising
understandably attracted more initial attention than did design. All the same,
architectural historian James Marston Fitch described " The Esthetics of Plenty"
in an essay collected in his Architecture and the Esthetics of Plenty (1961). After
noting a discrepancy between the Platonic geometry of the Seagram Building
and the "absurd vulgarity" of the latest Detroit automobile, Fitch attributed the
poor design of American consumer goods to the overwhelming variety of new
materials and manufacturing techniques and to the economic abundance that
allowed people to consume without a chastening sense of limitation. Rarely
discussing design itself, Daniel J. Boorstin provided in The Americans: The
Democratic Experience (1973) an encyclopedic survey of the democratization and
standardization of experience through mass reproduction of goods, ideas, and
images. As ambivalent as Giedion regarding the cultural ramifications of
expanding technology, Boorstin in a sense updated Mechanization Takes Command
by analyzing techniques of mass distribution and consumption instead of those
of mass production. Neil Harris discussed evidence of that very transition in the
fiction of William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and
Sinclair Lewis. His essay on "The Drama of Consumer Desire" (1981) developed
insights he had first explored in an essay on "Museums, Merchandising, and
Popular Taste: The Struggle for Influence" (1978), which portrayed the depart-
ment store as the formative influence on public taste during the first third of the
twentieth century. The cultural perspective established by Potter, Boorstin,
Harris, and others remained strong into the 1980s. An anthology edited by
Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption:
Critical Essays in American History , 1880-1980 (1983), contained articles on, among
other things, the therapeutic aspect of advertising, sociologist Robert S. Lynd's
consumption-oriented analysis of Muncie, Indiana, and the "packaging" of the
U.S. manned space flight program.
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Material Culture Perspectives
As attractive as this American Studies cultural approach might appear, the

design historian had available other more discrete methods and tools for
interpreting manufactured artifacts and their environments. Semiotic and struc-
turalist interpretations of design appeared, along with other less exotic commen-
taries, in several papers delivered at a conference held at Princeton University in
1964, the proceedings of which were edited by Laurence B. Holland as Who
Designs America? (1966). The essays of The Man-Made Object (1966), edited by
Gyorgy Kepes, followed no single coherent theme, but their authors generally
reflected a belief that the designed environment, taken to be everything shaped
by human intention, might best be understood as interrelated systems of
symbols, signs, or language. Similar assumptions underlay most contributions
to Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste (1969), a volume whose European art historical
perspective nonetheless patronizingly cast popular design in the worst possible
light as an affront either to good taste or to Marxist aspirations.
American art historians, historical anthropologists, and museum specialists
devoted to the study of material culture proved, perhaps in the tradition of the
vernacular, to be somewhat less rigidly theoretical than their European counter-
parts. More than any other scholar, Thomas J. Schlereth contributed to popular-
izing a field that had become known in the 1970s as "material culture studies."
Artifacts and the American Past (1980), a collection of Schlereth's methodological
and bibliographical essays on the interpretation of artifacts, ranged widely from
eighteenth-century historic houses to twentieth-century commercial architec-
ture, from the Centennial Exposition of 1876 to the evidential significance of
mail-order catalogues. His next volume, Material Culture Studies in America
(1982), proved even more useful to design historians. An anthology of previous-
ly published articles by a wide range of scholars, it contained six theoretical
essays, five methodological pieces (including E. McClung Fleming's influential
"Artifact Study: A Proposed Model" [1974]), and twelve case studies demon-
strating various historical, anthropological, and art historical methods of inter-
pretation applied to both pre-industrial and industrial artifacts. Schlereth erred
perhaps in seeming to erect material culture studies as a distinct field. As Jules
David Prown observed in his essay on "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to
Material Culture Theory and Method" (1982), the study of artifacts functioned
best as a tool in the service of general cultural analysis. Just one of many possible
applications appeared in The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self
(1981), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton's imaginative
study of the projective significance of household possessions treasured by a
cross-section of Chicagoans.
Despite a spate of works on design history beginning in the 1970s, few if
any demonstrated the populist inclusiveness of Banham, the cultural sweep of
Potter and Boorstin, and the meticulous attention to real artifacts of the material

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culture school. Most design curators and art historians described and catalogued
unique craft objects or "aesthetically valid" examples of "good design" while
ignoring the products of true mass production. And most cultural historians
who turned their attention to commercial design lacked the skill of precise
artifact description and analysis. For the most part, a truly informed history of
American design and of its successive phases remained to be written. However,
scores of published primary and secondary sources are available for future
scholars. Among them are philosophical writings by designers, popular ac-
counts of contemporary design trends, manuals of interior design and home
furnishing, engineering textbooks for designers, how-to manuals for business-
men, catalogues of museum exhibitions devoted to contemporary trends or
historical movements, picture books for antique collectors or nostalgia buffs,
sourcebooks produced during period revivals, biographies and retrospectives,
industry casebooks and yearbooks, related works of cultural history, and a
dozen or so important periodicals. Some of the more significant of these sources
are described below, organized primarily by chronology.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BACKGROUND
During the nineteenth century, as pre-industrial crafts yielded to f

production and mass distribution of goods, Americans first became con
with the intersection of art and technology. In Civilizing the Machine: Te
and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (1976), John Kasson analy
aesthetics of machinery" and suggested that traditional ornament
machine tools and their products indicated not a desire to deny the infl
technology but a desire to integrate it into everyday life. David P.
explored a similar motivation in The American Home: Architecture and Socie
1915 (1979), which described the increasing sophistication of utilit
construction techniques in houses that continued to reflect the conserv
romantic aesthetic of Andrew Jackson Downing. Although functionalis
later castigated late-nineteenth-century Americans for their "retrogra
classicism, Richard Guy Wilson's portrayal of The American Renaissanc
1917 (1979) convincingly suggested that neoclassical art, interiors, arch
and urban planning reflected America's confident coming-of-age as a c
civilization. The traditional decorative arts, including cabinet-making,
excellent photographic coverage in the Metropolitan Museum of Ar
century America: Furniture and Other Decorative Arts (1970); Robert B
Centuries and Styles of the American Chair 1640-1970 (1972); Catherine
interdisciplinary Wallpaper in America: From the Seventeenth Century to Wo
(1980); and Robert Bishop and Patricia Coblentz's American Decorative A
Years of Creative Design (1982). Illustrations of typical nineteenth-centu
trial artifacts and manufactured products appeared in Benjamin Butter

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The Growth of Industrial Art (1892); in 1876: A Centennial Exhibition (1976), an

exhibit catalogue edited by Robert C. Post; and in David A. Hanks's Innovative
Furniture in America from 1800 to the Present (1981), which included an essay by
Rodris Roth on patent furniture. Finally, to conclude a listing of some of the
major sources on mainstream nineteenth-century design, John R. Stilgoe's
Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (1983) analyzed the
environment of buildings and structures that evolved around the railroad right-
of-way.
The Arts and Crafts Movement
According to Pevsner's account, which remained standard for decades, the

Arts and Crafts movement represented a significant step in the progression
toward a twentieth-century modernism. Despite the fact that John Ruskin and
William Morris advocated a return to the medieval guild system as an antidote to
the alienation of workers in the industrial factory, their desire to improve public
taste and morality through an honest style of design marked them as proto-
modern. Stripping away excess machine-made ornamentation that imitated
historical styles seemed in retrospect as modern as the parallel dictates of Le
Corbusier. Gillian Naylor's intellectual history of the movement as it developed
in Great Britain, The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of Its Sources , Ideals and
Influence on Design Theory (1971), remained definitive despite publication of
Lionel Lambourne's Utopian Craftsmen: The Arts and Crafts Movement from the
Cotswolds to Chicago (1980). American collectors and historians took interest in
such designer-entrepreneurs as Gustav Stickley and Elbert Hubbard after the
appearance of Robert Judson Clark's exhibit catalogue, The Art and Crafts
Movement in America 1876-1916 (1972), which contained exquisite photographs
with informative captions and an exhaustive bibliography. Subsequent works
included Isabelle Anscombe and Charlotte Gere's Arts and Crafts in Britain and
America (1978); David M. Cathers's Furniture of the American Arts and Crafts
Movement: Stickley and Roycroft Mission Oak (1981), a responsible guide for
collectors; and Gustav Stickley: The Craftsman (1983), Mary Ann Smith's study of
the domestic architecture inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement. As David
A. Hanks demonstrated in his Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright (1979), the
pioneer American modernist owed a great debt to the followers of William
Morris, but Wright also predicted the future prominence of the industrial
designer who would create prototypes for machine reproduction. Wright's
prophecy appeared in a lecture on "The Art and Craft of the Machine,"
delivered with intentional irony at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Society of
Chicago in 1901. The text is most readily available in Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings
and Buildings (1960), edited by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., and Ben Raeburn.
Most historians of the Arts and Crafts movement located its origins in Great
Britain without considering its significance on the Continent. Alan Windsor's

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biography of Peter Behrens: Architect and Designer (1981), on the other hand,
focused on the early years of the German designer's career, when his graphics,
paintings, and early domestic architecture reflected a romantic conservatism less
sunny than that of William Morris. More revealing for historians of American
design history was Behrens' s association with the AEG, the large German
electrical firm. Fully catalogued by Tilmann Buddensieg and Henning Rogge in
their massive Industriekultur : Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907-1914 (1984),
Behrens' s comprehensive design assignment included industrial architecture
and commercial salesrooms, lighting fixtures and consumer appliances, sales
catalogues and typefaces - in short, a corporate image orchestrated by a large
office of draftsmen and designers subordinating individual expression to the
creation of a common house style. American business firms did not employ such
overarching design schemes until after World War II, but the rationale remained
similar. Far different in approach was Eliel Saarinen: Finnish- American Architect
and Educator (1979), whose biography by Albert Christ-Janer revealed a Finnish
interpreter of the Arts and Crafts. Saarinen' s Cranbrook School in Bloomfield
Hills, Michigan inculcated young designers and architects with a respect for
organic materials and a sense of the interrelatedness of the applied arts. The
considerable legacy of his somewhat Victorian vision appeared in Robert Judson
Clark's Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision 1925-1950 (1983), a comprehen-
sive exhibition catalogue.
COMMERCIAL INDUSTRIAL DESIGN, 1920-1940

However much the Arts and Crafts movement in its various incarnations
influenced the rise of an ascetic modernism, its philosophy denied the central
fact of design in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - the over-
whelming predominance of factory production of consumer goods. European
modernists insisted that their primary task was to discover a machine-age style
to replace the historical styles that manufacturers had copied with such eclectic
abandon. However, when American businessmen decided to modernize their
products in response to increased competition during the recession of 1927 and
the ensuing Depression, they chose designers who purveyed a flashy machine-
age expressionism rather than an ascetic purism or strict functionalism. The
industrial designers who began to form a new profession in the early 1930s
looked first for inspiration to France, rather than to the Germany of the Bauhaus,
and later to the aerodynamic forms of automobiles, trains, and airplanes - the
most romantic expressions of technological progress.
Scholarly studies of Art Deco, a design manifestation that purists had
previously dismissed as a regressive hothouse extravagance with no relationship
to true modernism, multiplied during the 1960s and 1970s after a major
exhibition in Paris, the catalogue of which, edited by Francois Mathey, appeared

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as Les Annees "25": Art Deco/Bauhaus/Stijl: Esprit Nouveau (1966). Two years later,
Bevis Hillier's Art Deco of the 20s and 30s (1968), the best introduction to the
subject, traced the "mechanization" of motifs of French design as they spread to
England and America - still, however, limited primarily to luxury interiors,
furniture, objets d'art, and the graphics of elite periodicals. Catalogues of two
subsequent exhibits, Judith Applegate, Art Deco (1970) and Bevis Hillier, The
World of Art Deco (1971), fueled the interest of Deco enthusiasts, who soon could
enjoy the advice of Katharine Morrison McClinton's Art Deco: A Guide for
Collectors (1972), as well as a spate of lavish picture books, the most useful of
which was Art Deco (1980) by Victor Arwas. The earliest American Adaptations
of French Art Deco, which appeared in the skyscrapers of New York architects
Ely Jacques Kahn, Raymond Hood, and others, received competent documenta-
tion and analysis in Don Vlack's Art Deco Architecture in New York , 1920-1940
(1974) and in Cervin Robinson and Rosemarie Haag Bletter's Skyscraper Style: Art
Deco New York (19 75).
Despite the best historical intentions, however, few of the plethora of books
on Art Deco that appeared after 1965 escaped the nostalgic aura that surrounded
the subject. Although they offered magnificent photographic documentation of
the most striking (and the most elite) manifestations of the style in both Europe
and America, contemporary publications provided the best account of the arrival
of machine-age design in the United States. Shortly after the exposition at which
the French had introduced their new style to the world, the U.S. Department of
Commerce published its official commission's report on the International Exposi-
tion of Modern Decorative and Industrial Art in Paris , 1925 (1926). Although the U.S.
had not exhibited at the fair, the businessmen, department store executives,
designers, and educators who had served as the nation's official delegates hoped
to avoid foreign dominance of trade by encouraging American adoption of the
latest styles in fashion and household furnishings. Within a few years of the
Paris expo, American art museums and department stores had mounted exhibits
of imported Art Deco, and decorators and their clients could study new
developments in such handbooks as Leon Deshairs's Modern French Decorative
Art (1926) and Katharine Morrison Kahle's Modern French Decoration (1930).
New York designers and craftsmen of both American and European origin
quickly adopted French motifs and began to adapt them for a machine-age
civilization, a process traced by Edwin Avery Park in his New Backgrounds for a
New Age (192 7), which discussed Hood, Kahn, Hugh Ferriss, Paul T. Frankl,
Rena Rosenthal, Lucian Bernhard, Winold Reiss, and Walter Kantack, among
others. Typical exhibits of "modernistic" furniture, crafts, and interiors included
The Little Review's Machine-Age Exposition (192 7); The Architect and the Industrial
Arts: An Exhibition of Contemporary American Design (1929), sponsored by the
Metropolitan Museum; and Decorative Metalwork and Cotton Textiles (1930),
organized by the American Federation of Arts. The sense of an exhilarating new
era, filled with the possibilities of skyscrapers, jazz, fast cars, radio, movies, and

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a style that encompassed them all, received its most complete expression in
three books by Paul T. Frankl, himself a designer of "skyscraper furniture": New
Dimensions: The Decorative Arts of Today in Words & Pictures (1928), Form and Re-
form: A Practical Handbook of Modern Interiors (1930), and Machine-Made Leisure
(1932). Rudolph Rosenthal and Helena L. Ratzka surveyed the ambience of this
decorative arts milieu in The Story of Modern Applied Art (1948), and it later
received excellent historical treatment by Karen Davies in At Home in Manhattan:
Modern Decorative Arts , 1925 to the Depression (1983).
The Annual of American Design 1931 (1930), edited by R. L. Leonard and
C. A. Glassgold and sponsored by the American Union of Decorative Artists
and Craftsmen (Audac), included a photographic portfolio of luxury designs by
Eugene Schoen, George Howe and William Lescaze, Lee Simonson, Winold
Reiss, and others, but its essays by Mumford, Frankl, Simonson, and Richard F.
Bach of the Metropolitan Museum nonetheless pointed away from craftsman-
ship toward true industrial design - the creation of mass-production prototypes
whose machine-age styling would improve the level of public taste and thus
contribute to moral reformation. By that time, as businessmen felt the Depres-
sion's bite, they had begun to turn for economic motives to modernistic
designers whose touch might renew tired products. When R. L. Duffus sur-
veyed the current state of art and art education in The American Renaissance
(1928), he predicted that artistic talent of the future would find its outlet in
automobiles and apartment houses rather than in easel painting. His later study,
The Arts in American Life (1933), written with Frederick P. Keppel as a contribu-
tion to Herbert Hoover's Research Committee on Social Trends, contained two
chapters on art and business, one focusing on advertising, the other on
"commercial design." Keppel and Duffus described the use of modern art in
advertising, the employment of "stylists" to guide the retail offerings of
department stores, the recognition of women as the key to consumption, and
Henry Ford's multi-million-dollar retooling for the Model A to keep up with
style. As the trend toward design for mass production gathered momentum,
even Frederick Kiesler, a "serious" European modernist, offered a convincing
account of Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (1930).
Despite criticisim from purist arbiters of taste, the new commerical industri-
al designers of the 1930s, people like Geddes, Teague, Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss,
and Harold Van Doren, sincerely attempted to mediate between commercial
motives and aesthetic standards. One of the most important publicists for their
new profession, advertising executive Earnest Elmo Calkins, argued in Business
the Civilizer (1928) that business patronage of the artistic impulse manifested in
consumer design would spark a cultural awakening equal to that of the
Renaissance. Two package and product designers associated with the Calkins &
Holden agency, Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens, analyzed the more commercial
side of industrial design in a treatise on Consumer Engineering: A New Technique
for Prosperity (1932), a manifesto for the behaviorist manipulation of consumers

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Henry Dreyfuss. 20th Century Locomotive, New York Central. Photograph by Robert
Yarnall. Smithsonian Institution, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Henry Dreyfuss Archive, New
York, New York.

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and restoration of economic prosperity through product redesign. The results of

such efforts appeared in Albert Q. Maisel's 100 Packaging Case Histories (1939).
The concept of "consumer engineering" reflected a desire for an efficiency of
distribution equal to the efficiency of production pioneered by Frederick
Winslow Taylor and analyzed in Samuel Haber's Efficiency and Uplift : Scientific
Management in the Progressive Era 1890-1920 (1964). Five American advertising
and business executives expressed similar ideas in their responses to a question-
naire distributed by Englishman Geoffrey Holme and reprinted as a central part
of his Industrial Design and the Future (1934). The more aesthetic, even visionary,
side of industrial design during the Depression appeared in Sheldon Cheney
and Martha Candler Cheney's Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design
in 20th-century America (1936). They glorified the expressionist aesthetic of
streamlining in terms nostalgically echoed much later by Martin Battersby in The
Decorative Thirties (1971) and by Martin Greif in Depression Modern: The Thirties
Style in America (19 75), two volumes which, taken together, comprised an
adequate visual catalogue of the style.
Marta K. Sironen's History of American Furniture (1936) included obscure
biographical information on a score of contemporary designers, some of whom
had branched out from furniture into applicances, radios, and other mass-
produced consumer goods, but works by and about individual designers
provided the most detailed accounts of the profession and its founders. Norman
Bel Geddes, a flamboyant individual with roots in stage design, celebrated the
Machine Age and popularized streamlining in his promotional Horizons (1932),
while his Magic Motorways (1940) touted a high-speed transcontinental highway
system that he had devised for the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the New
York World's Fair of 1939. More staid and philosophical than Geddes, Walter
Dorwin Teague wrote Design This Day: The Technique of Order in the Machine Age
(1940) in order to explore industrial design's potential contributions to Mum-
ford's harmonious neotechnic phase of civilization. Contrary to Geddes and
Teague, who projected the future of their profession, Harold Van Doren
provided in his Industrial Design: A Practical Guide (1940) a balanced explanation
of all aspects of the field, from modeling techniques to various methods of billing
clients. Two autobiographies, Raymond Loewy's Never Leave Well Enough Alone
(1951) and Henry Dreyfuss's Designing for People (1955), contained useful
anecdotal material regarding the 1930s, and two others, William Bushnell Stout's
So Away 1 Went! (1951) and Otto Kuhler's My Iron Journey: An Autobiography of a
Life with Steam and Steel (196 7), summarized the careers of engineers who
specialized in the design of innovative airplanes, automobiles, and trains.
Exhibit catalogues devoted to the work of individual designers included David
Gebhard and Harriette Von Breton, Kem Weber: the Moderne in Southern California
1920 through 1941 (1969); Lois Frieman Brand, The Designs of Raymond Loewy
(1975); Jennifer David Roberts, Norman Bel Geddes: An Exhibition of Theatrical and
Industrial Designs (1979); David A. Hanks and Derek Ostergard, Gilbert Rohde

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(1981); William J. Hennessey, Russel Wright: American Designer (1983); and Martin
Eidelberg, ed., Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry (1984).
As creators and promoters of a self-conscious machine-age style, commer-
cial designers of the 1930s contributed much to the use of synthetic plastics in
consumer products. Often used during the Depression as substitutes for more
costly materials, plastics proved especially adaptable to the soft curves of
streamlining, and, in fact, plastics molding techniques actually promoted the
use of streamlined forms. M. Kaufman's First Century of Plastics: Celluloid and Its
Sequel (1963) and J. Harry DuBois's Plastics History U.S.A. (1972) outlined the
history of chemical and technical innovations in plastics development and
application, while Robert Frieders Pioneer Plastic: The Making and Selling of
Celluloid (1983) discussed economic and social aspects of new materials from an
analytical perspective that could usefully be applied to the truly synthetic
plastics of the 1920s and 1930s. Design aspects of plastics remained a significant
concern after their initial application to consumer products, but debate contin-
ued to center on the question of using plastics to imitate other materials or to
take advantage of their own unique characteristics. Thelma R. Newman advocat-
ed "plastics as plastics" in her treatment of Plastics as Design Form (1972), and
Sylvia Katz catalogued the design possibilities of the many varieties of synthetics
in her Plastics: Designs and Materials (19 78). As plastics began to share in the
mystique of Art Deco and to attract collectors who could not afford unique
decorative objects, two coffee table books - Katz's Plastics: Common Objects,
Classic Designs (1984) and Andrea DiNoto's Art Plastic: Machine Age Designs for
Living (1984) - provided pictorial histories of plastic products.
Commercial designers of the 1930s drew much of their inspiration from the
aerodynamic forms of airplanes and locomotives and in turn found themselves
commissioned to design automobiles and entire passenger trains. Raymond
Loewy, who worked frequently for the Pennsylvania Railroad, contributed a
volume on The Locomotive: Its Esthetics (1937) to a short-lived industrial art series
whose first title had featured Le Corbusier on the beauties of the airplane.
Streamliners received exhaustive photographic documentation by Lucius Beebe
in Trains in Transition (1941) and by Eric H. Archer in Streamlined Steam (1972),
while historian of technology John H. White, Jr., meticulously detailed the
technical, functional, and stylistic evolution of The American Railroad Passenger
Car (1978).
Like the railroad, the automobile and its environment stimulated studies at
every conceivable level of competence and sophistication. The American Car Since
1775 (1971), published by Automobile Quarterly , proved to be the best reference
work for tracing both major and minor change in auto body design over the
years, especially when supplemented with larger color photographs of selected
automobiles featured in Automobile Quarterly's World of Cars (1971). America's
new roadside landscape of the 1920s and 1930s owed much to industrial
designers, some of whom designed prototype service stations for major oil

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companies, and to the commercial styles that designers had popularized.

Despite the frankly avowed nostalgia of works devoted to the commercial
vernacular of roadside architecture, they represented virtually the only system-
atic attempts to record a vanishing landscape. Photographer John Margolies and
neo-realist painter John Baeder documented gas stations, diners, and tourist
cabins and motels in books entitled, respectively, The End of the Road (1981) and
Gas , Food , and Lodging (1982), the latter of which reproduced dozens of air-
brushed "linen-finish" postcards as well as Baeder' s paintings. More specialized
works included John Baeder' s paintings of Diners (1978); an informal history and
photographic study of the American Diner (1979) by Richard J. S. Gutman, Elliott
Kaufman, and David Slovic; and Warren James Belasco's lively scholarly account
of Americans on the Road: From Autocamps to Motel , 1910-1945 (1979).
Briefly, during the late 1930s, it seemed to responsible critics that the new
industrial designers had supplanted traditional architects as trendsetters in
architectural style. For the most part this reputation derived from the highly
visible contributions of industrial designers to major expositions held in Chica-
go, San Diego, Dallas, San Francisco, and New York. Commissioned to design
theme buildings and general exhibition halls as well as private pavilions for their
corporate patrons, designers popularized streamlining as an architectural style
that promised to transcend its commercial origins and become America's major
expression of modernism. Arnold L. Lehman's short catalogue to an exhibit on
1930' s Expositions (1972) included representative views of each of the decade's
major fairs, and Stanley Applebaum edited a large selection of formal photo-
graphs of The New York World's Fair 1939/1940 (19 77) taken by Richard Wurts and
others. Historians analyzed the meaning of the decade's most important fair in
Dawn of a New Day: The New York World's Fair , 1939/40 (1980), an exhibit catalogue
edited by Helen A. Harrison with additional perceptive essays by Joseph P.
Cusker, Warren I. Susman, Eugene A. Santomasso, and Francis V. O'Connor.
Despite the prophetic grandeur of the fair, however, and its implicit promise
that the new industrial designers would create the shape of things to come, it
marked the end of an era rather than the opening of a new age. Across the great
divide of World War II, commercial designers lost their status to a group of
younger designers who tended to conceive of their work in militantly aesthetic
terms.
GOOD DESIGN
The most visible designers of the immediate postwar decades drew

tion not from the commercial tradition, which continued without fan
from the tradition of the Bauhaus and, most directly, from Bauhaus in
who had fled Hitler's Europe. The influence of purist design had develo
tentatively in America during the 1930s. Although Americans looked
American Studies International , April 1985, Vol. XXlll, No. 1

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for inspiration, they did so with an astonishingly open receptivity. For example,
Sheldon Cheney's account of The New World Architecture (1930) encompassed
Eric Mendelsohn and Walter Gropius, French decoration and Le Corbusier, the
Weissenhofsiedlung and Ely Jacques Kahn, all without any consciousness of
impropriety. However, even as Art Deco overwhelmed American commercial
design, a trickle of books began to define a more austere modernism for
architecture and interiors. These included Dorthy Todd and Raymond Morti-
mer, The New Interior Decoration (1929); Herbert Hoffman, Modern Interiors in
Europe and America (1930); and Maurice Casteels, The New Style: Architecture and
Decorative Design (1931).
Representing only one of many definitions of modernism, their perspective
gained powerful support from two Museum of Modern Art exhibits whose
catalogues, The International Style (1932) by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip
Johnson, and Machine Art (1934) by Philip Johnson, promoted a neo-Platonic
functionalism and made disparaging references to American skyscrapers,
French fashions, and the absurdity of non-vehicular streamlining. MoMA's
position on design and architecture received considerable reinforcement with
the tragic forced arrival in America of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe,
Marcel Breuer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, and others, as described in
William H. Jordy's account of "The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America:
Gropius, Mies, and Breuer" (1969) and documented in Hans M. Wingler's
massive sourcebook, The Bauhaus: Weimar , Dessau , Berlin , Chicago (1969). Johnson
and the museum cemented their conception of design with a major exhibit on
the Bauhaus 1919-1928 (1938), its catalogue edited by Herbert Bayer and Walter
and Ise Gropius, and MoMA's tenth-anniversary retrospective, Art in Our Time
(1939), included in its pointedly named "Industrial Design" section only chairs
by Le Corbusier, Mies, Breuer, and Alvar Aalto, along with a prefabricated
bathroom designed by Buckminster Fuller.
Russell Lynes provided a good running account of MoMA's impact on
design in his historical survey, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of The
Museum of Modern Art (1973). On the eve of American entry into World War II,
the museum indicated the focus of its future involvement by exhibiting the
winning entries in a competition organized by Eliot F. Noyes on Organic Design
in Home Furnishings (1941). Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen first came to public
attention as furniture designers by fulfilling the judges' criteria of aesthetic
quality, versatility, and capability of mass production. After the war, Edgar
Kaufmann, Jr., conducted MoMA's design activities with an intention that went
back to the Arts and Crafts movement. Through a series of "Good Design"
exhibits held in conjunction with the Merchandise Mart of Chicago and through
such catalogues and publications as Prize Designs for Modern Furniture from the
International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design (1950), What is Modern
Design? (1950), and What is Modern Interior Design? (1953), Kaufmann sought to
elevate public taste and improve the tenor of modern life. The permanent design

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Henry Dreyfuss. Mercury Train Bar, New York Central, 1940. Photograph by Drix Duryea.
Smithsonian Institution, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Henry Dreyfuss Archive, New York,
New York.

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collection of the museum, surveyed by Arthur Drexler and Greta Daniel in their
Introduction to Twentieth Century Design (1959), contained only objects that met
the criteria of aesthetic quality and historical significance. The collection, which
was also readily accessible through The Design Collection: Selected Objects (1970),
'thus served not as an index to the artifacts of everyday life in the twentieth
century but as a record of the preferences of a particular economic, social, and
cultural elite. Other art museums followed MoMA's lead in promoting an
uplifting "good design," but they did so with greater openness, including in
their exhibits appliances and other products whose formal complexity or
mundane predictability precluded their presentation as sculptural objects. These
more catholic exhibits included Good Design Is Your Business (1947) at the Albright
Art Gallery of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy; A. H. Girard and W. D. Laurie,
Jr.'s Exhibition for Modern Living (1949) at the Detroit Institute of Arts; and
William Friedman's 20th Century Design: U.S.A. (1959), also at the Albright.
Good design was also publicized by Walter P. Paepcke, the founder of the
Container Corporation of America, as part of a more general postwar crusade to
promote a cosmopolitan humanism. Attracted by the 1930s industrial design
movement, Paepcke had employed modern artists and illustrators to produce
his company's advertising - with such success that the Chicago Art Institute had
organized an exhibit of Modern Art in Advertising: Designs for Container Corporation
of America (1946). As a result of this initial exposure to art in industry, Paepcke
sponsored the New Bauhaus and the Institute of Design in Chicago, engaged
Herbert Bayer to oversee the "Great Ideas of Western Man" advertising series,
and encouraged the International Design Conference to use his new humanistic
center at Aspen, Colorado, as a base. James Sloan Allen engagingly and
perceptively reconstructed Paepcke' s multifarious activities in The Romance of
Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism , and the Chicago-Aspen crusade for
Cultural Reform (1983), and Reyner Banham edited The Aspen Papers: Twenty Years
of Design Theory from the International Design Conference in Aspen (1974), a
collection that provided an excellent guide to the thoughts of designers and
observers of design as they waxed topically philosophical.
Among postwar practitioners of "good design," George Nelson most
successfully articulated the problems involved in maintaining a sense of quality
while at the same time attempting to please commercial clients. His essays on
such topics as consultant versus in-house designers, stylistic obsolescence,
prefabrication, city planning, and urban renewal were marked by both careful
thought and a ready wit. They were collected in Problems of Design (19 57) and
George Nelson on Design (1979), and Nelson also created a tough, vital primer on
How to See: Visual Adventures in a World God Never Made (19 77). Other useful
explorations of the philosophy of design included Anni Albers, On Designing
(1961); David Pye, The Nature of Design (1964); and John F. Pile, Design: Purpose,
Form and Meaning (1979).
American designers who worked in the tradition of the International Style

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continued to remain open to European influences. Although the somewhat

clinical austerity of the Bauhaus had guided Philip Johnson in his definition of
"machine art" in 1934, designers of the late 1940s and 1950s tended to prefer a
more informal style evoked through the use of natural materials and textures,
warmer hues, and "organic" curves. They turned from Germanic influences to
the design of the Scandinavian countries, where the Arts and Crafts orientation
remained strong, as documented by Eileene Harrison Beer in Scandinavian
Design: Objects of a Life Style (19 75) and by Scandinavian Modern Design 1880-1980
(1982), a lavish catalogue edited by David Revere McFadden with contributions
by a number of Scandinavian scholars. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, Americans
turned for inspiration to Italian designers who had learned to utilize plastics and
chrome with an elegance that seemed to humanize the materials of technology, a
result whose development was traced by Emilio Ambasz and other scholars in
Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design
(1972). Americans also closely watched another foreign innovation, the creation
of comprehensive corporate design programs similar to Behrens's pioneering
work for the AEG. Wolfgang Schmittel surveyed the programs of Braun,
Citroen, Olivetti, Swissair, and others in Design/ Concept/ Realisation (1975), which
demonstrated a cohesiveness approached in the U.S. only by Eliot Noyes at
IBM.
Although the forces of "good design" had begun the postwar era with high
hopes of winning the American public away from superficial styling and the
glamorous waste of annual model changes, those designers who desired to
remain "untainted" by commercialism often found their work limited to luxury
furniture so expensive that it could be afforded only by wealthy individuals or
business corporations. All the same, American work ranked with the best of
Europe by anyone's standards. Useful studies devoted to individual designers
included Sybil Moholy-Nagy's life-and-letters biography of her husband, Moho-
ly-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (1950); Richard Kostelanetz's collection of the
writings of Moholy-Nagy (1970); Arthur Drexler's brief Charles Eames: Furniture
from the Design Collection (1973); the catalogue of the Renwick Gallery's exhibit, A
Modern Consciousness: D. J. De Pree/Florence Knoll (19 75); Ralph Caplan's Connec-
tions: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (1976); Caplan's breezy history of The
Design of Herman Miller (1976), the furniture company whose designers included
Gilbert Rohde, George Nelson, the Eameses, and Robert Propst; Eric Larrabee
and Massimo Vignelli's sprawling authorized history of Knoll Design (1981); and
Arthur A. Cohen's definitive study of Herbert Bayer: The Complete Work (1984).
Numerous works surveyed the accomplishments of "good design" in
furniture, usually from within an aesthetic perspective similar to that of the
Museum of Modern Art. George Nelson's early volume on Storage (1954) proved
more revealing than most because its extensive coverage of shelf systems,
cabinets, buffets, and storage walls included many that later critics would have
considered in bad taste. As an architectural problem in miniature, the chair

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attracted the attention of many designers. Surveys of chair design included

Gilbert Frey, The Modern Chair: 1850 to Today (1970), with measured line
drawings that permitted accurate comparisons; Carol Hogben's catalogue of an
exhibit on Modern Chairs, 1918-1970 (1971), with an excellent essay by Banham
on "The Chair as Art"; and Clement Meadmore's photographic survey of The
Modern Chair: Classics in Production (1975), limited to those examples that
"transcended the confines of time and fashion." John F. Pile's Modern Furniture
(1979) discussed not only the history of the subject but also the uses of various
materials and construction techniques. The most complete photographic sur-
veys appeared in Karl Mang's History of Modern Furniture (1979) and in New
Furniture: An International Review from 1950 to the Present (1982), edited by Klaus-
Jiirgen Sembach.
In 1983 the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted a definitive international
exhibit of furniture, lighting, housewares, and small appliances. Its catalogue
Design Since 1945 , edited by Kathryn B. Hiesinger and George H. Marcus,
offered the fullest existing survey of "good design," with excellent photographs
accompanied by essays by a dozen prominent designers, annotated biographies
of featured designers, and an excellent bibliography of international design and
its history. A landmark event in design criticism and history, Design Since 1945
nonetheless reflected the domestic surroundings of only a minority of the
inhabitants of the countries represented. As sociologist Herbert J. Gans pointed
out in what might be considered a "dissenting" essay on "Design and the
Consumer," the exhibit presented the design history of an economic and social
minority. George Nelson, who created the exhibit's installation, later comment-
ed wistfully that he would someday like to see a display of best-selling products
rather than award-winning designs.
POSTWAR COMMERCIAL DESIGN
The products most often used by postwar Americans - and whi

majority of designers, both private consultants and members of in-hous
found themselves working on - rarely appeared in museum exhibit cat
With the exception of Tupperware and the Chemex coffeemaker, whose
and simplicity appealed to educated tastes, few observers focused on ev
things like toasters and irons, refrigerators and air conditioners, electri
and sewing machines, or automobiles and gas stations, unless for a
hostile comment. Most documentary records of mainstream design thu
nated not from museums but from professional organizations or in
designers. The Society of Industrial Designers (later the Industrial Desi
Society of America) invited its members to contribute their favorite wor
U.S. Industrial Design (1951), a collection that stressed the integration
engineering, and merchandising but did not attempt "to make, or

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judgments as to what is beautiful/' Don Wallance's Shaping America's Products

(1956) included case studies of work by leading commercial designers chosen for
the skill with which they resolved sometimes conflicting claims of beauty,
utility, profit, and ease of manufacture. Ralph Caplan edited Design in America:
Selected Work by Members of the Industrial Designers Society of America (1969), which
featured consumer products, business machines, packaging, and commercial
exhibits chosen by a jury of designers, and typical work of the 1960s also
appeared in Jay Doblin's One Hundred Great Product Designs (1970). Corporate
identity programs were explored by Ben Rosen in The Corporate Search for Visual
Identity: A Study of Fifteen Outstanding Corporate Design Programs (1970), while
Ivan Chermayeff and others described representative applications of design by
the federal government in The Design Necessity (1973). Finally, Raymond Loewy' s
retrospective survey of his career, Industrial Design, almost inadvertently re-
vealed much about the profession in general during the postwar decades.
Writings about postwar industrial design continued to stress the commer-
cial element so important during the formative 1930s. An address by Loewy on
"Selling Through Design/' which had shocked some members of the Royal
Society of Arts at the time of its delivery, was reprinted by John Gloag in
Industrial Art Explained (1946). Designer J. Gordon Lippincott stressed the
profession's economic mission even more directly in Design for Business (1947), a
primer for potential clients that defined American industry's major problem as
"stimulating the urge to buy" and promoted industrial design as the key to
uniting aesthetic appeal with utility in products, the goal being to "imbue the
consumer with the desire of ownership." Designing for Production (19 57), a text
for product engineering students by Edward N. Baldwin and Benjamin W.
Niebel, advised the hiring of an industrial designer to provide complicated
mechanisms with attractively formed housings. Ironically, while purist critics
praised European design and singled out the writings of Loewy and Lippincott
for ridicule, a delegation of designers, engineers, and educators sponsored by
the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation issued an enthusiastic
report on Industrial Design in the United States (1959), surveying the economic
significance of American design practices and recommending their adoption in
Europe.
REFORM IN THE 1960s AND 1970s
As the postwar era progressed, however, the American industrial desig

establishment began to question some of its own more commercial excesse
spirit of reform reflected both a heightened social consciousness and irritati
continuing criticism from the "good design" purists. The Case for Good De
(1963), a booklet of essays published by the American Management Associa
one of the earliest economic promoters of product redesign in the late 192

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emphasized the sophistication of taste of American consumers. Two other

promotional volumes - Arthur J. Pulos's Opportunities in Industrial Design Careers
(1970) and Thomas F. Schutte's anthology of essays on The Art of Design
Managment: Design in American Business (19 75) - emphasized technical, function-
al, and aesthetic aspects of design, the implication being that commercial success
depended on quality rather than on salesmanship.
In part, this change of emphasis reflected increasing awareness of ergonom-
ics, an applied science that studied other physical, physiological, and psycholog-
ical factors involved in human interactions with complex machines. Developed
originally by designers of military equipment during World War II, ergonomics
directly addressed the problems of the user of a machine or product. First
publicized through such military manuals as Wesley E. Woodson's Human
Engineering Guide for Equipment Designers (1954), ergonomics reached mainstream
commercial designers through The Measure of Man: Human Factors in Design
(1959), measurement charts and data sheets compiled by Henry Dreyfuss. Niels
Diffrient, a former associate of Dreyfuss, carried on the work with a series of
complex data wheels and accompanying guidebooks published as Humanscale
(1974-1981).
The social turbulence of the 1960s and early 1970s also stimulated industrial
designers, like many other Americans, to a greater sense of social responsibility
than they had known during the immediate postwar years. Concern for the
environment, for the situation of minority groups, and for the problem of
dwindling energy resources surfaced in the contradictory writings of two
designers, R. Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek, each of whom expressed
discontent with narrowly commercial conceptions of industrial design. Fuller,
who had functioned as a maverick on the periphery of the profession since the
1930s, advocated in his prolific, difficult writings a comprehensive "world
design science" that would rely on computerization to obtain a total picture of
the earth and its shifting needs and resources. Fuller described the development
of his vision in Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure
(1963), and his career received sympathetic treatment by Robert W. Marks in The
Dymaxion World of Buckminister Fuller (1960) and by John McHale in R. Buckmin-
ster Fuller (1962). Shortly after Fuller's death, William Marlin edited The Artifacts
of R. Buckminster Fuller: A Comprehensive Collection of His Designs and Drawings
(1984). At its extreme, Fuller's ideas inspired counterculturalist Stewart Brand to
create The Whole Earth Catalog and eventually to promote Space Colonies (19 77),
the ultimate comprehensive design project.
Unlike Fuller, who contemplated grand designs, Victor Papanek counseled
designers to consider the particular problems of the aging, the handicapped, the
poor, and the inhabitants of developing nations. His Design for the Real World:
Human Ecology and Social Change (1972) constituted a blistering attack on
traditional practices and a challenge to designers to move out from the security
of corporate capitalism. Papanek followed up this highly influential work with

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How Things Don't Work (19 77), a collaboration with James Hennessey. Aimed at
consumers, it demonstrated how ordinary people could design and implement
alternative solutions to everyday problems that commercial designers had
botched. His most recent work, Design for Human Scale (1983), advocated
decentralizing mainstream commercial design by addressing the needs of large
but specialized groups, rather than those of an imagined mass audience.
Although Papanek's books too often revealed a self-congratulatory smugness,
they nonetheless attracted widespread attention to problems that most design-
ers had ignored. His influence appeared in such works as Design for Need: The
Social Contribution of Design (19 77), a collection of symposium papers edited by
Julian Bicknell and Liz McQuiston; and Joseph A. Koncelik's sensitive, practical
study of Aging and the Product Environment (1982).
STYLE IN THE 1980s
As part of American culture's general retreat from social consciousness in

the 1980s, reform issues became submerged in a reawakening of interest in sty
Oddly enough, considering the vehemence with which high-style "good
sign" advocates of the 1950s had roasted design for the masses, popular cultu
became the inspiration for much high-style design of the 1980s. Back in the
1960s, fueled by an admiration similar to that of Reyner Banham, essayist T
Wolfe had explored the styles of custom cars and Las Vegas architecture in T
Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965). Following Wolfe's lea
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour had issued Learning
from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (1972), whi
celebrated the naive excesses of popular design as an antidote to the sterility
the Internationalists. Two years later, in Popular Culture and High Culture: A
Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (1974), Herbert J. Gans advocated the notion o
cultural democracy and criticized "experts" who purported to know what wa
best for the public. Gans based his work to some extent on Russell Lynes' earli
account of The Tastemakers (1954), but his denigration of cultural standards
stemmed from the activist 1960s. Not entirely coincidentally, his conclusion
also paralleled an extremely non-activist eclectic pluralism, based on rece
popular culture, that soon engulfed high-style design and began, in circu
fashion, to influence popular design.
A decade after historians and critics had discovered Art Deco, they began t
discover and reevaluate the "bad design" of the postwar era, usually from
nostalgic or slightly sensationalist perspective. Be vis Hiller led the way with T
Decorative Arts of the Forties and Fifties: Austerity/Binge (19 75), a quirky b
perceptive work whose ad hoc comments usually struck home. His subsequen
survey of The Style of the Century, 1900-1980 (1983) contributed little not found
his earlier works. While Hillier evoked nostalgia, Philippe Garner's catalogue

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Contemporary Decorative Arts from 1940 to the Present (1980) focused on the
apparently avant-garde, on those luxury items that ran slightly against the grain.
More perceptive was Cara Greenberg's sprightly review of Mid-Century Modern:
Furniture of the 1950s (1984), which illustrated, in a graphic style ironically
borrowed from "good design" exhibit catalogues, all of the kidney-shaped tables
with spikey metal legs, pole lamps with flared shades, and amoeboid ash trays
passed over by the "good design" exhibits.
Although Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin enjoyed considerable success with
High Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home (1978), a manual that
echoed functionalist ideas of the early twentieth century, the quick rise and fall
in popularity of high tech marked it as merely one stylistic expression among
many in a fluid situation. Surveying the exuberant eclecticism of Michael
Graves, Charles Moore, and others, Robert Jensen and Patricia Conway defined
a trend toward Ornamentalism: The New Decorativeness in Architecture & Design
(1982). However, as soon as Americans had become accustomed to the visual
excesses of home-grown postmodernists, whose allusions at least usually
referred to the high architectures of Europe, they were faced with the work of
Italy's Memphis design consortium, loosely headed by Ettore Sottsass, Jr., who
archly explained that the group's name referred both to ancient Egypt and to the
home town of rock-'n'-roller Chuck Berry. Discussed by Barbara Radice in
Memphis: The New International Style (1981) and by Andrea Branzi in The Hot
House: Italian New Wave Design (1984), the expensive furniture of Sottsass and his
associates reflected a fascination, disguised through elaboration, with the
formica surfaces and brash imagery of American popular culture - a fascination
shared by contemporary American designers like Steve Ditch. As Joan Kron
suggested in Home-Psych: The Social Psychology of Home and Decoration (1983), a
book intended for a popular market, the personal environment had become a
symbol of one's self, to be reshaped as often as one changed lifestyle or followed
fashion. In the trendy 1980s, when design seemed entirely a matter of surfaces,
even Ralph Caplan, a thoughtful design critic who looked back to the time when
designers considered their work to be of fundamental significance for the human
race, found it necessary to grace a collection of his essays with the odd title, By
Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and
Other Object Lessons (1982).
PERIODICALS AND REFERENCE WORKS
The periodical literature devoted to design and architecture is inde

The Art Index. Since 1983, new books have received extensive discussion in
Design Book Review. During the formative period of the commercial industrial
design profession, The Industrial Arts Index included design articles in business
and technical journals. Before World War II, American design supported few

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29
journals of its own, but developments were generously covered by Architectural

Forum , Architectural Record , and Pencil Points (later Progressive Architecture). Arts
and Decoration and International Studio reported on the influence of French
decorative arts after 1925, while Advertising Arts and Modern Plastics functioned
as de facto design magazines in the 1930s. The British journal Art and Industry
frequently covered American developments during the 1940s. More specifically
devoted to design were Design Quarterly (from 1946), Industrial Design (from
1954), and Design Issues (1984). Winterthur Portfolio primarily concentrated its
historical coverage on the pre-industrial period, but its theoretical articles
proved invaluable. The Newsletter of Great Britain's Design History Society
occasionally addressed American issues, and the Bulletins of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art provided extensive coverage of
relevant exhibits. Useful reference works included Alice Irma Prather-Moses,
The International Dictionary of Women Workers in the Decorative Arts: A Historical
Survey from the Distant Past to the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century (1981), and
the World Design Sources Directory 1980 (1980), which listed 250 international
design organizations, as well as journals, archives, and museum collections
devoted to design.
CHECKLIST OF WORKS RELATING TO AMERICAN
DESIGN
Surveys and General Works

Ames, Kenneth L. "American Decorative Arts/Household Furnishings/' A
can Quarterly , 35 (1983), 280-303.
Bishop, Robert Charles. Centuries and Styles of the American Chair. New
E. P. Dutton, 1972.
Bishop, Robert Charles and Coblentz, Patricia. American Decorative Art: 36
of Creative Design. New York: Abrams, 1982.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York: R
House, 1973.
Design History: Fad or Function? London: The Design Council, 1978.
De Zurko, Edward Robert. Origins of Functionalist Theory. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1957.
DuBois, J. Harry. Plastics History U.S.A. Boston: Cahners, 1972.
rerebee, Ann. A History of Design from the Victorian tra to the Present. New York:
Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970.
Fitch, James Marston. Architecture and the Esthetics of Plenty. New York: Columbia
Fleming, E. McClung. "Artifact Study: A Proposed Model." Winterthur Portfolio,
9 (1974), 153-173.

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30
Fox, Richard Wightman, and Lears, T. J. Jackson, eds. The Culture of Consump-
tion: Critical Essays in American History , 1880-1980. New York: Pantheon,
1983.
Frey, Gilbert. The Modern Chair: 1850 to Today. New York: Architectural Book
Publishing Co., 1970.
Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous
History. New York: Norton, 1969 (orig. 1948).
Hanks, David A. Innovative Furniture in America from 1800 to the Present. New
York: Horizon Press, 1981.
Heskett, John. Industrial Design. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Kaufman, M. The First Century of Plastics: Celluloid and Its Sequel. London: The
Plastics Institute, 1963.
Kouwenhoven, John A. The Arts in Modern American Civilization. New York:
Norton, 1967 (orig. Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization [1948]).
Lucie-Smith, Edward. A History of Industrial Design. New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1983.,
Lynn, Catherine. Wallpaper in America: From the Seventeenth Century to World War
I. New York: Norton, 1980.
Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934.
Pevsner, Nikolaus. Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter
Gropius. Baltimore: Penguin, 1972 (orig. Pioneers of the Modern Movement from
William Morris to Walter Gropius [1936]).
Potter, David M. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
Prown, Jules David. "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture
Theory and Method." Winterthur Portfolio, 17 (Spring 1982), 1-19.
Pulos, Arthur J. American Design Ethic: A History of Industrial Design to 1940.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983.
Schaefer, Herwin. "Design: An International Survey: 1851-1956," pp. 393-430.
In Modern Art: A Pictorial Anthology , ed. by Charles McCurdy. New York:
Macmillan, 1958.
Schlereth, Thomas J. Artifacts and the American Past. Nashville: American
Association for State and Local History, 1980.
tion for State and Local History, 1982.

Sironen, Marta K. A History of American Fu
White, John H., Jr. The American Railroad Pa
Nineteenth Century
Anscombe, Isabelle, and Gere, Charlotte. Ar
New York: Rizzoli, 1978.
B0e, Alf. From Gothic Revival to Functional F
Design. Oslo: Oslo University Press, 1957.
American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No

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31
Butterworth, Benjamin. The Growth of Industrial Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1972 (orig. 1892).
Cathers, David M. Furniture of the American Arts and Crafts Movement: Stickley and
Roycroft Mission Oak. New York: New American Library, 1981.
Clark, Robert Judson, ed. The Arts and Crafts Movement in America 1876-1916.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Friedel, Robert. Pioneer Plastic: The Making and Selling of Celluloid. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
Handlin, David P. The American Home: Architecture and Society 1815-1915. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1979.
Hornung, Clarence Pearson. Treasury of American Design. 2 vols. New York:
Abrams, 1973.
Kasson, John. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America ,
1776-1900. New York: Grossman, 1976.
Lambourne, Lionel. Utopian Craftsmen: The Arts and Crafts Movement from the
Cotswolds to Chicago. London: Astragal, 1980.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. 19th-century America: Furniture and Other Decora-
tive Arts. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970.
Metzger, Charles R. Emerson and Greenough: Transcendental Pioneers of an American
Esthetic. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1970 (orig. 1954).
Naylor, Gillian. The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of Its Sources , Ideals and
Influences on Design Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
Post, Robert C., ed. 1876: A Centennial Exhibition. Washington, D.C.: Smithson-
ian Institution, National Museum of History and Technology, 1976.
Schaefer, Herwin. Nineteenth Century Modern: The Functional Tradition in Victorian
Design. New York: Praeger, 1970.
Stilgoe, John R. Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
Wilson, Richard Guy, ed. The American Renaissance, 1876-1917. Brooklyn: The
Brooklyn Museum, 1979.
Twentieth Century
Automobile Quarterly. The American Car Since 1775. New York: L. Scott Bailey,
1971.
Automobile Quarterly's World of Cars. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971.
Bayley, Stephen, ed. In Good Shape: Style in Industrial Products 1900 to 1960. New
York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1979.
Boilerhouse Project. Art and Industry: A Century of Design in the Products We Use.
London: The Conran Foundation, 1982.
Clark, Robert Judson. Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision 1925-1950. New
York: Abrams, 1983.
DiNoto, Andrea. Art Plastic: Machine Age Designs for Living. New York: Abbeville
Press, 1984.
Drexler, Arthur, and Daniel, Greta. Introduction to Twentieth Century Design. New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959.

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Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the
Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Haber, Samuel. Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era
1890-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Harris, Neil. "The Drama of Consumer Desire," pp. 189-216. In Yankee
Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures. Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981.
Influence," pp. 140-174. In Material Culture and

by Ian M. G. Quimby. New York: Norton, 19
Hillier, Bevis. The Style of the Century , 1900-1
Hogben, Carol, ed. Modern Chairs, 1918-1970.
Katz, Sylvia. Plastics: Common Objects, Classic
Lynes, Russell. Good Old Modern: An Intimate Port

Art. New York: Atheneum, 1973.
McFadden, David Revere, ed. Scandinavian Modern
Abrams, 1982.
Mang, Karl. History of Modern Furniture. New Yo
Meadmore, Clement. The Modern Chair: Classics i
Nostrand Reinhold, 1975.
Plaut, James S. "Industrial Design in the United
(autumn 1954), pp. 118-136.
Russell, Frank, ed. A Century of Chair Design. Ne
Sparke, Penny. Consultant Design: The History an
Industry. London: Pembridge Press, 1983.
Streichler, Jerry. "The Consultant Industrial Des
from 1927 to 1960." Ph.D. dissertation, New Yo
Design: 1900-1945
American Federation of Arts. Decorative Metalwork and Cotton Textiles. New York:
American Federation of Arts, 1930.
Appelbaum, Stanley. The New York World's Fair 1939/1940. New York: Dover,
1977.
Applegate, Judith. Art Deco. New York: Wittenborn Art Books, 1970.
Archer, Eric H. Streamlined Steam. New York: Quadrant Press, 1972.
Arwas, Victor. Art Deco. New York: Abrams, 1980.
Baeder, John. Diners. New York: Abrams, 1978.
Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First M

1967 (orig. 1960).
Battersby, Martin. The Decorative Thirties. New Y
Bayer, Herbert; Gropius, Walter; and Gr

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII,

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33
Beebe, Lucius. Trains in Transition. New York: Appleton-Century, 1941.

Belasco, Warren James. Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel , 1910-
1945. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979.
Bush, Donald J. The Streamlined Decade. New York: Braziller, 1975.
Calkins, Earnest Elmo. Business the Civilizer. Boston: Little Brown, 1928.
Casteels, Maurice. The New Style: Architecture and Decorative Design. New York:
Scribner, 1931.
Cheney, Sheldon. The New World Architecture. New York: Longmans, Green,
1930.
Cheney, Sheldon, and Cheney, Martha Chandler. Art and the Machine: An
Account of Industrial Design in 20th-century America. New York: Whittlesey
House, 1936.
Davies, Karen. At Home in Manhattan: Modern Decorative Arts , 1925 to the
Depression. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1983.
Deshairs, Leon. Modern French Decorative Art. London: Architectural Press, 1926.
Duffus, R. L. The American Renaissance. New York: AMS Press, 1969 (orig. 1928).
Franken, Richard B., and Larrabee, Carroll B. Packages That Sell. New York:
Harper, 1928.
Frankl, Paul T. Form and Re-form: A Practical Handbook of Modern Interiors. New
York: Harper, 1930.
York: Payson & Clarke, 1928.

Gebhard, David. 'The Moderne in the U.S. 1920-1941. "
Quarterly , 2 (July 1970), 4-20.
Greif, Martin. Depression Modern: The Thirties Styl
University Books, 1975.
Gutman, Richard J. S., and Kaufman, Elliott, with Sl
New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
Harrison, Helen A., ed. Dawn of a New Day: The New
New York: New York University Press, 1980.
Heap, Jane, ed. Machine-Age Exposition Catalogue. Ne
1927.
Hillier, Bevis. Art Deco of the 20s and 30s. New York
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and Johnson, Phili

Hoffmann, Herbert. Modern Interiors in Euro
Limited, 1930.
Holme, Geoffrey. Industrial Design and the Fu
Johnson, Philip. Machine Art. New York: Mus
Jordy, William H. "The Aftermath of the Bau
and Breuer," pp. 485-543. In The Intellectual
1930-1960, ed. by Donald Fleming and Berna
Kahle, Katharine Morrison. Modern French Dec
Kahn, Ely Jacques. Design in Art and Industry
American Studies International, April 19

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34
Keppel, Frederick P., and Duffus, R. L. The Arts in American Life. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1933.
Kiesler, Frederick. Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display. New York:
Brentano, 1930.
Klein, Dan. All Colour Book of Art Deco. London: Octopus Books, 1974.
Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. New York: Praeger, 1963 (orig. trans.
1927).
Lehman, Arnold L. 1930's Expositions. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1972.
Leonard, R. L., and Glassgold, C. A., eds. Annual of American Design 1931. New
York: Ives Washburn, 1930.
Lesieutre, Alain. The Spirit and Splendour of Art Deco. New York: Paddington
Press, 1974.
Loewy, Raymond. The Locomotive: Its Esthetics. New York: The Studio, 1937.
McClinton, Katharine Morrison. Art Deco: A Guide for Collectors. New York:
Clarkson N. Potter, 1972.
Maisel, Albert Q. 100 Packaging Case Histories. New York: Breskin, 1939.
Margolies, John. The End of the Road. New York: Viking Penguin, 1981.
Ma they, Francois. Les Annees "25": Art Deco/Bauhaus/Stijl: Esprit Nouveau. Paris:
Musee des Arts Decora tifs, 1966.
Meikle, Jeffrey L. Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-
1939. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979.
Menten, Theodore. Art Deco Style. New York: Dover, 1972.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Architect and the Industrial Arts: An Exhibition of
Contemporary American Design. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1929.
Museum of Modern Art. Art in Our Time. New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1939.
Noyes, Eliot F. Organic Design in Home Furnishings. New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1941.
Park, Edwin Avery. New Backgrounds for a New Age. New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1927.
Pease, Otis. The Responsibilities of American Advertising: Private Control and Public
Influence, 1920-1940. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958.
Plummer, Kathleen Church. "The Streamlined Moderne," Art in America, 62
(Jan.-Feb. 1974), 46-54.
Richards, Charles R. Art In Industry. New York: Macmillan, 1929.
Robinson, Cervin, and Bletter, Rosemarie Haag. Skyscraper Style: Art Deco New
York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Rosenthal, Rudolph, and Ratzka, Helena L. The Story of Modern Applied Art. New
York: Harper, 1948.
Scheidig, Walther. Weimar Crafts of the Bauhaus 1919-1924: An Early Experiment in
Industrial Design. New York: Reinhold, 1967.
Sembach, Klaus-Jiirgen. Style 1930: Elegance and Sophistication in Architecture,
Design, Fashion, Graphics, and Photography. New York: Universe Books, 1971.
Sheldon, Roy, and Arens, Egmont. Consumer Engineering: A New Technique for
Prosperity. New York: Harper, 1932.
American Studies International , April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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35
Taft, William Nelson. The Handbook of Window Display. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1926.
Teague, Walter Dorwin. Design This Day: The Technique of Order in the Machine
Age. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940.
Todd, Dorothy, and Mortimer, Raymond. The New Interior Decoration. New York:
Scribner, 1929.
U.S. Department of Commerce. International Exposition of Modern Decorative and
Industrial Art in Paris , 1925. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1926.
Van Doren, Harold. Industrial Design: A Practical Guide. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1940.
Veronesi, Giulia. Style and Design 1909-1929. New York: Braziller, 1968.
Vlack, Don. Art Deco Architecture in New York , 1920-1940. New York: Harper &
Row, 1974.
Walters, Thomas. Art Deco. London: Academy, 1973.
Wingler, Hans M. The Bauhaus: Weimar , Dessau, Berlin, Chicago. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1969.
Design: 1945 to the Present

Albers, Anni. On Designing. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1961.
Allen, James Sloan. The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism,
and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983.
Ambasz, Emilio, ed. Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems
of Italian Design. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972.
American Management Association. The Case for Good Design. New York:
American Management Association, 1963.
Art Institute of Chicago. Modern Art in Advertising: Designs for Container Corpora-
tion of America. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1946.
Baldwin, Edward N., and Niebel, Benjamin W. Designing for Production. Home-
wood, 111.: Richard D. Irwin, 1957.
Banham, Reyner, ed. The Aspen Papers: Twenty Years of Design Theory from the
International Design Conference in Aspen. London: Pall Mall Press, 1974.
Beer, Eileene Harrison. Scandinavian Design: Object

American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1975.
Bicknell, Julian, and McQuiston, Liz, eds. Design for Need: The Social Contribution
of Design. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977.
Brand, Stewart, ed. Space Colonies. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Branzi, Andrea. The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1984.
Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery. Good Design Is Your Business.
Buffalo: Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, 1947.

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Caplan, Ralph. By Design : Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the
Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982.
Caplan, Ralph, ed. Design in America: Selected Work by Members of the Industrial
Designers Society of America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969.
Chermayeff, Ivan, et. al. The Design Necessity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Rochberg-Halton, Eugene. The Meaning of Things:
Domestic Symbols and the Self. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Diffrient, Niels; Tillye, Alvin R.; and Harman, David. Humanscale. 3 vols.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974-1981.
Doblin, Jay. One Hundred Great Product Designs. New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1970.
Dorfles, Gillo, et al. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste. New York: Bell, 1969.
Dreyfuss, Henry. The Measure of Man: Human Factors in Design. New York:
Whitney Library of Design, 1959.
Ewen, Stuart, and Ewen, Elizabeth. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the
Shaping of American Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.
Friedman, William, ed. 20th Century Design: U.S.A. Buffalo: Buffalo Fine Arts
Academy, Albright Art Gallery, 1959.
Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of
Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1974.
Garner, Philippe. Contemporary Decorative Arts from 1940 to the Present. New York:
Facts on File, 1980.
Girard, A. H., and Laurie, W. D., Jr. An Exhibition for Modern Living. Detroit:
Detroit Institute of Arts, 1949.
Gloag, John. Industrial Art Explained. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1946.
Greenberg, Cara. Mid-Century Modern: Furniture of the 1950s. New York: Crown,
1984.
Hiesinger, Kathryn B., and Marcus, George H., eds. Design Since 1945. New
York: Rizzoli, 1983.
Hillier, Bevis. The Decorative Arts of the Forties and Fifties: Austerity IBinge. New
York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1975.
Holland, Laurence B., ed. Who Designs America?: The American Civilization
Conference at Princeton. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1966.
Hollein, Hans, ed. Man Transforms: An International Exhibition on Aspects of
Design. New York: Smithsonian Institution, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1976.
Jensen, Robert, and Conway, Patricia. Ornamentalism: The New Decorativeness in
Architecture & Design. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1982.
Kaufmann, Edgar, Jr. Prize Designs for Modern Furniture from the International
Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design. New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1950.
1953.
Kepes, Gyorgy, ed. The Man-Made Object. New
Koncelik, Joseph A. Aging and the Product E
Hutchinson Ross, 1982.

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Kron, Joan. Home-Psych: The Social Psychology of Home and Decoration. New York:
Clarkson N. Potter, 1983.
Kron, Joan, and Slesin, Suzanne. High Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for
the Home. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1978.
Lippincott, J. Gordon. Design for Business. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947.
Lynes, Russell, The Tastemakers. New York: Harper, 1954.
Museum of Modern Art. The Design Collection: Selected Objects. New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1970.
Nelson, George. George Nelson on Design. New York: Whitney Library of Design,
1979.
Brown & Co., 1977.
Newman, Thelma R. Plastics as Design Form. Ph

Organisation for European Economic Cooperatio
States. Paris: Organisation for European Econ
Papanek, Victor. Design for Human Scale. New
1983.
Papanek, Victor. Design for the Real World : Hum

York: Pantheon, 1972.
Papanek, Victor, and Hennessey, James. How
Pantheon, 1977.
Pile, John F. Design: Purpose, Form and Meanin
Pulos, Arthur J. Opportunities in Industrial De

Publishing and Distributing Corp., 1970.
Pye, David. The Nature of Design. New York:
Radice, Barbara. Memphis: The New Internation
Renwick Gallery. A Modern Consciousness: D. J
ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 197
Rosen, Ben. The Corporate Search for Visual Ident
Corporate Design Programs. New York: Van
Schmittel, Wolfgang. Design/ Concept /Realisat
Schutte, Thomas F., ed. The Art of Design M
Business. New York: Tiffany, 1975.
Sembach, Klaus-Jiirgen, ed. New Furniture: An
the Present. Teufen, Switzerland: Arthur Ni
Society of Industrial Designers. 51: U.S. Industr
1951.
Venturi, Robert; Scott Brown, Denise; and Izenour, Steven. Learning from Las
Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1972.
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Wolfe, Tom. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1965.

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38
Woodson, Wesley E. Human Engineering Guide for Equipment Designers. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1954.
Work by Individual Designers and Firms

BAYER , HERBERT Cohen, Arthur A. Herbert Bayer: The Complete Work. Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1984.
BEHRENS, PETER Buddensieg, Tilmann, with Rogge, Henning. Industriekultur:
Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907-1914. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984.
Windsor, Alan. Peter Behrens: Architect and Designer. New York: Whitney Library
of Design, 1981.
BREUER , MARCEL Wilk, Christopher. Marcel Breuer: Furniture and Interiors. New
DREYFUSS , HENRY Dreyfuss, Henry. Designing for People. New York: Gross-
man, 1974 (orig. 1955).
EAMES, CHARLES AND RAY Caplan, Ralph. Connections: The Work of Charles and
Ray Eames. Los Angeles: UCLA Art Council, 1976.
Drexler, Arthur. Charles Eames: Furniture from the Design Collection. New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1973.
Rubino, Luciano. Ray & Charles Eames: il collecttivo della fantasia. Roma: Kappa,
1981.
EARL, HARLEY Bayley, Stephen. Harley Earl and the Dream Machine. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
FERR1SS, HUGH Ferriss, Hugh. The Metropolis of Tomorrow. New York: Ives
Washburn, 1929.
FULLER, R. BUCKMINSTER Cetica, Pier Angelo. R. B. Fuller: uno spazio per la
tecnologia. Padova: CEDAM, 1979.
Fuller, R. Buckminster. Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical
Disclosure. Ed. by Robert W. Marks. New York: Collier, 1969 (orig. 1963).
McHale, John. R. Buckminster Fuller. New York: Braziller, 1962.
Marks, Robert W. The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. New York: Feinhold,
1960.
Marlin, William, ed. The Artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller: A Comprehensive

Collection of His Designs and Drawings. New York: Garland, 1984.
GEDDES, NORMAN BEL Geddes, Norman Bel. Horizons. Boston: Little, Brown
& Co., 1932.
Geddes, Norman Bel. Magic Motorways. New York: Random House, 1940.
Roberts, Jennifer Davis. Norman Bel Geddes: An Exhibition of Theatrical and
Industrial Designs. Austin: University of Texas, 1979.
GREENOUGH, HORATIO Greenough, Horatio. Form and Function. Ed. by
Harold A. Small. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947.
HERMAN MILLER FURNITURE CO. Caplan, Ralph. The Design of Herman Miller.
New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1976.
HOOD, RAYMOND Kilham, Walter H., Jr. Raymond Hood , Architect: Form

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39
Through Function in the American Skyscraper. New York: Architectural Book

Stern, Robert A. M., with Catalano, Thomas P. Raymond M. Hood. New York:
Rizzoli, 1982.
HOWE, GEORGE Stern, Robert A. M. George Howe: Toward a Modern American
Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.
KNOLL ASSOCIATES Larrabee, Eric, and Vignelli, Massimo. Knoll Design. New
York: Abrams, 1981.
KUHLER, OTTO Kuhler, Otto. My Iron Journey: An Autobiography of a Life with
Steam and Steel. Denver: Intermountain Chapter, National Railway Histori-
cal Society, 1967.
LOEWY, RAYMOND Loewy, Raymond. Industrial Design. London: Faber and
Faber, 1979.
Loewy, Raymond. Never Leave Well Enough Alone. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1951.
Brand, Lois Frieman, The Designs of Raymond Loewy. Washington, D.C.: Smith-
sonian Institution Press, 1975.
MIES VAN DER ROHE, LUDWIG Drexler, Arthur. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
New York: Braziller, 1960.
MOHOLY-NAGY, LASZLO Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. Moholy-Nagy. New York:
Praeger, 1970.
Moholy-Nagy, Sybil. Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality. New York: Harper,
1950.
ROHDE, GILBERT Hanks, David A., and Ostergard, Derek. Gilbert Rohde. New
York: Washburn Gallery, 1981.
SAAR1NEN, EERO Temko, Allan. Eero Saarinen. New York: Braziller, nd.
SAARINEN, ELIEL Christ-Janer, Albert. Eliel Saarinen: Finnish-American Architect
and Educator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
STICKLEY, GUSTAV Smith, Mary Ann. Gustav Stickley: The Craftsman. Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1983.
STOUT, WILLIAM BUSHNELL Stout, William Bushnell. So Away I Went!
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951.
VASSOS, JOHN Vasos, John. Contempo, Phobia and Other Graphic Interpretations.
New York: Dover, 1976.
WEBER, KEM Gebhard, David, and Von Breton, Harriette. Kem Weber: The
Moderne in Southern California 1920 Through 1941. Santa Barbara: University
of California, Santa Barbara, Art Galleries, 1969.
WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD Wright, Frank Lloyd. "The Art and Craft of the
Machine/' pp. 55-73. In Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings, ed. by
Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., and Ben Raeburn. New York: Horizon Press, 1960.
Hanks, David A. The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1979.
WRIGHT , RUSSEL Hennessey, William J. Russell Wright: American Designer.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983.
ZEISEL, EVA Eidelberg, Martin, ed. Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984.
American Studies International, April 1985 , Vol. XXIU, No. 1

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40
Periodicals and Reference Works
Advertising Arts.
Architectural Forum.
Architectural Record.
Art and Industry.
The Art Index.
Arts and Decoration.
Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art.
Design Book Review.
Design History Society Newsletter.
Design Issues.
Design Quarterly.
The Industrial Arts Index.
Industrial Design.
International Studio.
Modern Plastics.
Prather-Moses, Alice Irma. The International Dictionary of Women Workers in the
Decorative Arts: A Historical Survey from the Distant Past to the Early Decades of
the Twentieth Century. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981.
Progressive Architecture (earlier Pencil Points).
Winterthur Portfolio.
World Design Sources Directory 1980. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980.
Jeffrey L. Meikle is Assistant Professor of American Studies

and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has
been a visting professor at Universitat Wiirzburg. The
author of Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in
America , 1925-1939 (1979), he has also published articles on
design and on contemporary literature. He is presently
working on a history of plastics in American culture.

154.59.125.34 on Sat, 15 Jan 2022 18:59:55 UTC

American Design History Bibliography of Sources

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American Design History: A Bibliography of Sources and Interpretations

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American Design History: A

extent around the production, distribution, and consumption of manu-

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXI11, No. 1

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color of weathervanes, quilting patterns, figureheads, and other anonymous

Operating between these extremes, most commentat

ORIGINS AND METHODS OF DESIGN HISTORY

Although "design history" as a professional specialization is quite

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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new machine-style architecture, Le Corbusier had imbued design, understood

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theorists responding directly to the confrontation of craftsmanship and mass

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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Pevsner had suggested an alternate course for design historians to follow.

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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American developments in "Design: An International Survey: 1851-1956"

American Studies Perspectives

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol XXIII, No. 1

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which suggestively analyzed the effects of material affluence on Americans.

American Studies International , April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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Material Culture Perspectives

As attractive as this American Studies cultural approach might appear, the

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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During the nineteenth century, as pre-industrial crafts yielded to f

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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The Growth of Industrial Art (1892); in 1876: A Centennial Exhibition (1976), an

The Arts and Crafts Movement

According to Pevsner's account, which remained standard for decades, the

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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COMMERCIAL INDUSTRIAL DESIGN, 1920-1940

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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and restoration of economic prosperity through product redesign. The results of

American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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companies, and to the commercial styles that designers had popularized.

The most visible designers of the immediate postwar decades drew

American Studies International , April 1985, Vol. XXlll, No. 1

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American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1

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American Studies International, April 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 1