Faculty of Art and Design

ABSTRACT

Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) was one of America’s most prominent industrial designers working between 1927 and 1950. My study investigates his designs and rhetoric as rational and non-rational expressions of modernity. The aspects of modernity explored include: modernism, mass culture, consumption, production, identity and gender. The study investigates Bel Geddes’s designs of stage sets, architecture, products, and world fair exhibits, and the rhetoric he used to promote such designs. Through such projects and their emphases on art, desire, intuition, spirituality, order, and science, Bel Geddes fasshioned his image as a ‘practical visionary’.
Chapter one, ‘Both Artist-Engineer and Practical Visionary: The Imaging of Industrial Design in Horizons (1932)’, investigates how Bel Geddes sought to present the field of industrial design as one of logic and foresight, by promoting himself, and by proxy all industrial designers, as rational and imaginative artist-engineers. This dual discourse was offered in Bel Geddes’s monograph Horizons – the central focus of this chapter. Chapter two, ‘Shaping the Audiences of Dramatic Design’, explores Bel Geddes’s move from advertising and stage design in the 1910s and 1920s to architectural design, investigating in particular his designs (1928-1932) of theatres, window displays, an advertising agency auditorium, and a restaurant for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933. In the creation of these designs Bel Geddes was informed by his knowledge of drama, psychology and audience behaviour. Such architectural designs were meant to impress, excite and transform their audiences – to encourage emotional, psychological or ideological change. Chapter three, ‘Industrial Architecture: The Factory, Petrol Station Design and the Mass Produced Home’, explores the rhetoric and designs which expressed Bel Geddes’s belief in the material benefits of industrial production and the symbolic value of the machine. The chapter looks at Bel Geddes’s designs (1929-1945) of a factory development, a petrol station, and a mass production house. These designs were intended to promote Bel Geddes and his clients as progressive, modern and far-sighted, and presented the machine as both rational and non-rational, with the ability to both order society and provide it with a spiritual basis. Chapter four, ‘Streamlining: Both a Mechanical and Organic Aesthetic’, investigates Bel Geddes’s streamlined designs (1928 and 1950) of vehicles and other products and their accompanying rhetoric. The chapter explores Bel Geddes’s flexible streamlined aesthetic, which alternately foregrounded mechanical and natural aspects, depending on the era and the requirements of the design. Chapter five, ‘Consumer Research: Constructing the Ideal Consumer and a Popular and Modern Aesthetic, 1930-1945’, investigates NBG & Company’s consumer surveys and resulting design recommendations which sought to promote a modern, popular and technologically progressive style aimed at purchasers with average tastes and middle incomes. Chapter six, ‘Futurama and the War Models Exhibit: The Production and Consumption of Model Worlds and Bel Geddes’s Masculine Image’, explores the creation and reception of three of Bel Geddes’s miniature modelling projects, his futuristic model cities created for a Shell Oil advertising campaign (1937) and for the General Motors Futurama shown at the New York World’s Fair (1939-40), and the models depicting World War II battles built and photographed for Life magazine (1942), and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (1944). Such projects helped to create a masculine and prophetic image for Bel Geddes.

This chapter explores American attempts in the 1920s and 30s to define a uniquely American design style. The chapter closely examines the discourse emanating from contemporary design writing which contrasts European and American design. The chapter rejects the notion that streamlining was a distinctly American contribution to design; explores European influences, including emigre designers, and recognizes American design as a transatlantic phenomenon.

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While all of our senses aid our first contact with material and form, arguably, it is the visual qualities of an object’s surface that first draws us in. It is only later, perhaps, that the other senses – touch, smell, taste, and hearing – become engaged. Different lighting conditions create varying surface effects from soft matte to shiny gloss – each suggesting its own set of meanings.  This paper is concerned with plotting a range of, often paradoxical, cultural and historical meanings of the slippery phenomenon of shininess – one dependent on perceptual instability and, arguably, lacking essence. Shininess suggests a multitude of historically specific meanings: from the pre-modern presence of ancestral spirits to the promise of modernity, from the threat to tradition to the superficiality of postmodernity. Shininess suggests inner health through the glow of radiant hair and skin. The alluring shine of gold attracts, while the disgusting shine of slime repels. Gleaming gold jewellery indicates wealth and permanence, whereas a shiny mass-produced product may seem cheap and disposable. Such superficial shine is strongly linked to postmodern theory, where surface experiences and effects are identified with the era of late-capitalism. However, shine is not always inherent in an object; but is sometimes a result of the owner’s labour or the labour of others. Thus, shined boots, polished silver, etc. can connote working class pride as well as leisured social status. Shininess affects the multitude of smooth-surfaced objects that reflect light: everything from gleaming stainless steel to bright plastic. While this paper will explore the slippage of meaning across a range of objects and eras, instability will be the constant fundamental lens through which we understand our subject, not just the unstable subjectivity of individual perception, but the ever shifting light and constant physical transformation of materials and surfaces.

Biographies:
Professor Tom Fisher, Nottingham Trent University
Tom Fisher has been Professor in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University since 2007. His academic background combines Art History and Sociology and he co-edited an edition of the Journal of Design History on Shininess in 2013 with Nic Maffei. He is a member of the Design Research Society Council and leads the Special Interest Group OPEN<http://www.designresearchsociety.org/joomla/sig2.html> (Objects, Practices, Experiences, Networks). He has led research funded by the AHRC on industrial heritage and Defra on sustainable clothing.

Dr. Nicolas P. Maffei, Norwich University of the Arts
Dr. Maffei is a Senior Lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts. He has written about modern American design as an avant-garde and popular expression. More recently he has focused on shine as a branding message connoting modernity in the post-war American steel industry. This work was part of a Special Issue he co-authored on shininess in design (Journal of Design History, Oxford University Press, 2013). Dr. Maffei will co-chair a panel entitled ‘Surface Affects and Shiny Things: Bringing Meaning to Light’, at the Association of Art Historians annual conference, University of East Anglia, April 2015. He is presently co-authoring a book on the impact of digital technology on traditional graphic design forms (Bloomsbury).