Norman Bel Geddes

Norman Bel Geddes , 1893-1958, American designer, b. Adrian, Mich. as Norman Melancton Geddes. He began his career in 1918 as scene designer for the Metropolitan Opera. He became known for imaginative designs both for the New York stage and for numerous industrial products. Geddes also designed several theaters and other buildings in the United States and abroad.

Bibliography: See his posthumous Miracle in the Evening (1960).

His daughter, Barbara Bel Geddes, 1922-2005, b. New York City, an actress, created the role of Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and the title role in Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary (1961). Her film work included Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets (1950) and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). She also had a leading role in the 1970s and 80s in the television series Dallas.

Geddes, Norman Bel (1893–1958). American designer, he became identified with the style known as ‘streamlining’, based on aerodynamics. He designed the General Motors Pavilion at the New York World's Fair (1939), and published Magic Motorways (1940). He was responsible for many interiors, designed the Toledo Scale Company Building, Ohio (1929), and produced a scheme of prefabricated housing systems for the Housing Corporation of America (1940).

Bibliography

N. Geddes (1932, 1940, 1940a);
W. Kelley (ed.) (1960);
Welter (2002);

Bel Geddes, Norman [né Norman Melancton Geddes] (1893–1958), scenic designer. Born in Adrian, Michigan, he studied at art schools in Cleveland and Chicago before his first designs were seen at Los Angeles's Little Theatre in 1916. Coming to New York under the auspices of Otto Kahn, he created the sets for several Metropolitan Opera productions before turning to Broadway, where his work was seen in, among others, a revival of Erminie (1920), The Truth About Blades (1921), The Rivals (1922), The School for Scandal (1923), Reinhardt's The Miracle (1924), Lady, Be Good! (1924), Jeanne d'Arc (1925), Ziegfeld Follies of 1925, Julius Caesar, The Five O'Clock Girl (1927), The Patriot (1928), Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), Lysistrata (1930), Raymond Massey's Hamlet (1931), Flying Colors (1932), Dead End (1935), Iron Men (1936), The Eternal Road and Siege (1937), It Happened on Ice (1940), and Seven Lively Arts (1944). Although not an architect, he designed several theatres. Bel Geddes's interests were so broad that he eventually drifted away from the theatre, but in his earliest days he pioneered in abandoning the proscenium and foresaw the vogue for arena stages. He was an ardent modernist, so his 1920s' musical sets were masterpieces of art deco. However, his most famous theatrical achievements were his settings for The Miracle, Hamlet, and Dead End. Writing of the first, the Times's John Corbin observed, “The cathedral into which the Century Theatre has been transformed . . . is indescribably rich in color, unimaginably atmospheric in its lofty, aerial spaces.” His Hamlet made ingenious use of stairways and rostrums to suggest the various settings. Autobiography: Miracle in the Evening, 1960.