Industrial Design. As industrialization accelerated and consumer goods proliferated after 1865, competition forced manufacturers to focus on product appearance. Ordinary citizens aspired to comfort, even luxury: patent furniture, lush domestic interiors, eclectic mail‐order goods. New materials like celluloid simulated expensive ivory and tortoiseshell. Although an industrial‐design profession did not exist in the late nineteenth century, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright articulated its principles in 1901 by advising artists to abandon craft production and create prototypes for factory reproduction.

After 1900, manufacturers struggled to give form to electrical appliances, automobiles, and other new technologies. Consumers often demanded the future in the guise of the past. The “horseless carriage” was just one novelty whose acceptance depended in part on traditional associations. Engineers planning new products were uncertain how to proceed. Art schools trained applied artists to create commercial art and decorative furnishings but offered no training in new technologies. In the 1920s, some decorators adopted French “modernistic” styling to express the tempo of the Machine Age. Promoted by architects and museum curators, Art Deco reached industry in the later 1920s.

Industrial design emerged as a business response to the Great Depression, an application of the principles formulated by the efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor. Commercial artists and stage designers turned to product design and employed streamlining as a comprehensive style for the Machine Age. Borrowed from aerodynamics, streamlining transformed automobiles, washing machines, and radios. For manufacturers it lubricated the flow of goods to consumers; for consumers it promised a future of material abundance. Consultant industrial designers such as Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, and Walter Dorwin Teague became celebrities. General Electric, Sears Roebuck, and other companies established in‐house design departments. Some designers sought to transform society, as at the utopian New York World's Fair of 1939, but more commercial considerations inspired Egmont Arens to describe his profession as “consumer engineering.” During World War II, designers boosted morale by visualizing postwar products in magazine advertisements: prefabricated housing, bubble‐domed automobiles, and push‐button telephones. The profession became institutionalized in the American Designers Institute (1938) and the Society of Industrial Designers (1944); both later consolidated as the Industrial Designers Society of America (1965).

Beginning in the 1930s, art, business, and government contributed to a “high modernism” lasting into the 1960s. The Museum of Modern Art promoted a succession of noncommercial design statements: an abstract “machine art,” a warmer “organic design,” and a reformist “good design.” Refugees from Nazism like László Moholy‐Nagy brought to America the advanced ideas associated with the Bauhaus, the German school of design founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. Influenced by this climate of opinion, Walter Paepcke, president of the Container Corporation of America, supported Chicago's Institute of Design and established the Aspen Design Conference for business leaders and policy‐makers. Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames designed organic furniture for institutional and corporate America. George Nelson publicized high modernism through the journal Industrial Design and such official consumerist celebrations as the U.S. pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair (1958) and the Moscow trade fair (1959).

“Good design” principles rarely inhibited profit‐driven corporate marketers, however, whose approach was epitomized by the chrome‐laden chariots produced by the postwar American automotive industry. Abandoning 1930s idealism, J. Gordon Lippincott's Design for Business (1947) insisted that industrial design existed only to increase a client's profits. Although well‐trained designers graduated from many educational programs in the 1950s, few became consultants. Most joined in‐house departments that treated design as cosmetic styling that often became anonymous, dull, and repetitive. Harley Earl's styling division at General Motors, founded in the late 1920s to rationalize planned obsolescence, introduced flaring tailfins and two‐tone paint jobs that influenced the appearance of gas pumps, coffee tables, sectional sofas, and even suburban carports. Amoeba and boomerang shapes of the “populuxe” era reflected faith in scientific progress and a cornucopia of essentially disposable products.

Reactions against postwar excess, mirroring countercultural disgust with American affluence, often targeted industrial design. Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World (1972) dismissed much design as worthless and admonished designers to address the needs of poorer nations, the disabled, and the aging. Beginning in 1968, Stewart Brand's series of Whole Earth Catalog s promoted decentralized living with limited reliance on technological systems. Such views contributed to subsequent environmentally sensitive “green design” and “eco design” movements. A series of expensive product‐liability lawsuits forced corporations to adopt design awareness for safety as well as profits.

Just as the 1930s depression challenged designers to create a cohesive style for the Machine Age, global competition of the 1980s and 1990s compelled designers to give shape to the hardware and immaterial software of the information age. Prophets of quality urged executives to upgrade design from its status as a cosmetic afterthought and to expand the designer's responsibility to encompass corporate strategy. The result was a design revival reminiscent of the 1930s—with its utopianism based not on the machine but on flowing streams of electrons.
See also Advertising; Consumer Culture; Consumer Movement; Depressions, Economic; Electrical Industry; Modernist Culture; Scientific Management; World's Fairs and Expositions.

Bibliography

Jeffrey L. Meikle , Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925–1939, 1979.
James Sloan Allen , The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago‐Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform, 1983.
Arthur J. Pulos , American Design Ethic: A History of Industrial Design to 1940, 1983.
Thomas Hine , Populuxe, 1986.
Richard Guy Wilson,, Dianne H. Pilgrim,, and and Dickran Tashjian , The Machine Age in America 1918–1941, 1986.
Arthur J. Pulos , The American Design Adventure: 1940–1975, 1988.

Jeffrey L. Meikle

GROPIUS, WALTER 1883-1969

Architect

Founder of the Bauhaus

Walter Gropius's philosophy, his functionalist designs, and his renowned teaching abilities profoundly influenced the modern movement in Western architecture. As chairman of the Department of Architecture in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, he headed the top architecture school in the United States from 1938 to 1952. Under his direction Harvard architecture students began learning by doing, a technique he applied at the Bauhaus, the German school of architecture and design he had established in the early 1900s. While at Bauhaus, Gropius made a name for himself in architecture, furniture design, industrial design, and city planning. Other examples of his work include residences, housing developments, prefabricated houses, theaters, academic buildings, and factories constructed in the United States, Germany, and England.

Early Life

Walter Adolf Gropius was born on 18 May 1883 in Berlin, Germany, to a family long associated with architecture and painting. Having intended from an early age to become an architect, Gropius volunteered to work in the firm of Solf and Wichards at the Technische Hochschule in Munich. After serving in the military and later traveling through Europe, Gropius established his own practice in 1910. He designed factories and residences noted for their clean, functional lines, their austerity, and for the unusual materials he used, such as cement and steel.

Fascination with the Machine

After World War I Gropius became the director of the Grand Ducal Saxon school of arts and crafts in Weimar, Germany, which he later reorganized into the Staatliches Bauhaus. "The foundation and development of the Bauhaus," he wrote in The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (1935), "aimed at the introduction of a new educational method in art and a new artistic conception that derived development of all artistic form from the vital functions of life and from modern technical means of construction." Gropius was one of the first architects to take inspiration from modern technology and felt strongly that designers must explore the design elements the machine made possible. "The object of the Bauhaus," he wrote, "was not to propagate any 'style,' system or dogma, but simply to exert a revitalizing influence on design." He brought in leading names in painting, typography, furniture, ceramics, weaving, stage design, and other applied arts.

Emigrating from Fascism

In 1928 Gropius resigned the directorship of the Bauhaus to go into private practice in Berlin, where he designed important institutional structures. As chairman of the design committee of the Adler automobile company (1929–1933) he also designed automobile bodies. Dismayed at Adolf Hitler's Germany, Gropius left for London in 1934. In 1937 he and Marcel Breuer moved to the United States to complete a three-year project in Massachusetts. Over the next two years the two designed their own houses in Lincoln, Massachusetts; the Hagerty House in Cohasset, Massachusetts; the Abele House in Framingham, Massachusetts; and the Frank House in Pittsburgh. They also did projects for the Pennsylvania state exhibition at the New York World's Fair in 1939 and for Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

Harvard

In 1937 Gropius was named senior professor of architecture at Harvard University, and in 1938 the chair of the department where he trained a generation of architects. In 1941 the federal government commissioned him to design a 250-unit defense-housing project, Aluminum City, in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Gropius and Breuer provided the units at a cost of $3,280 each. Many critics believe Gropius's most significant American building was the Harvard Graduate Center (1950) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Designed by the Architects' Collaborative—a firm in which Gropius was one of eight partners, some of whom were his former students-—the Graduate Center was a testimony to modern architecture. In July 1952 Gropius retired from his position at Harvard.

Sources:

Dorothy Adlow, "Walter Gropius: An Architect Who Has Blazed a Way," Christian Science Monitor, 21 January 1952, p. 9;

"Retrospect in Boston," Time, 59 (21 January 1952): 58.