viz. - Norman Bel Geddes

Bel Geddes, Brasilia, and Cities from the Air

Calliope — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 17:17:25 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Norman Bel Geddes, Airliner #4 rendering, ca. 1929-1932

Touring the Harry Ransom Center's Norman Bel Geddes exhibit a few weeks ago, my fellow viz. staffers and I were struck by how many of the designer's projects never made it past the drawing board. Bel Geddes' sketches of giant, amphibious aircrafts (see "Airliner #4" above) are prime examples of the far-fetched schemes his studio was hatching in the 30s alongside commercially viable designs, like this handsome pair of seltzer bottles featured in an earlier post. But, as other viz. contributers this week have remarked, articulating what is not and will never be seems like an inevitable part of a theorizing and designing the future. It certainly makes strolling through the Ransom Center's "I Have Seen the Future" exhibit feel like a trip into a delightful, hybrid world of fiction and history.

Geddes' plans for airborne commercial and recreational spaces (the 451 passengers aboard the flying machine, above, would have access to a gymnasium and a full orchestra) interest me because they present a counterpoint to the "auto-centric America" with which Geddes' work is usually associated. It's likely that Geddes' designs influenced both American aviation and automotive systems, but for an untrained industrial designer like Geddes, the first of these frontiers must have seemed significantly more difficult to modernize, if only from an engineering standpoint. The challenge of hoisting into the air a full spectrum of modern amenities makes Geddes' airplanes look almost cartoonish. Yet, when we recall that the horizon of space travel was not so far off, Geddes' airliners look less dream-like than before.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (with tail fin), ca. 1933

Geddes' concepts for land vehicles, even, borrow design elements from the skies. Like a plane, this motor car is both winged and streamlined so as to travel swiftly down the chute-like highways that Geddes envisioned for cities of the future.

Moreover, several of Geddes' larger projects play with ideas of suspension and aerial perspective. The people entering the General Motors building (pictured below), which Geddes helped to design for the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, look as though they're levitating as they stream into the exhibit on a swirly staircase. The shape of the ramp reflects the free-flowing highway system that Geddes' Futurama exhibit proposed as a solution for urban congestion. (The Futurama exhibit was housed by the GM building, below.) It also mirrors the building's uppermost edge, the slope of which resembles the path of an airplane at lift off. The structure clearly employs the architectural metophor of slope to signify scientific progress, economic growth, and/or social mobility for commercial and nationalistic purposes.

Image Credit: thefrailestthing.com

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Bel Geddes' famed Futurama installation, the focal point of GM's "Highways and Horizons" World's Fair pavilion, required a mobile, aerial perspective to be fully absorbed by its spectators. Visitors were conveyed around the model on a track positioned above the miniature city. Because the onlookers studied the cityscape from the perspective of a plane, during a time when private flights were uncommon--and commercial aviation nonexistent--Geddes' exhibit must have been doubly displacing for its viewers. Glimpsing at an urban future that prized efficiency, utility, and mobility surely presented them with a unique experience. But apart from that, the shifting aerial vantage point that the ride simulated must have seemed marvelous and novel in itself, since it is unlikely that many of Futurama's spectators had ever hovered over any city--past, present, or future.

General Motors, Futurama Spectators, ca. 1939

Image Credit: Screenshot of Google Maps

I now want to hover over another modernist city--a real one that happens to be the capital of Brazil. In 1956, when the Brazilian President commissioned Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to build Brasília, the nation's new capital seat, the architects had already collaborated on another definitive modernist project: the award-winning Brazilian pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. (As you will recall, this particular World's Fair was also the site of Bel Geddes' Futurama exhibit.) Beyond this instance of proximity between the designers' work, there are additional interesting parallels between Bel Geddes' vision and the mature designs of the Brazilian duo. The Brasília project, for instance, literalizes Bel Geddes' bird's-eye conception of the modern city by organizing the city's roads and structures in the shape of a plane (see the Google Maps image above). A decade-and-a-half after Bel Geddes used aerial perspective to show that cities could be planned and networked with well-designed infrastructure, Costa and Niemeyer memorialized the airplane--a symbol of transcendent viewpoint (?)--within the structure of a modern metropolis.

When you visit the "I Have Seen the Future" exhibit at the Ransom Center, as I hope you will, do not despair that the miniature buildings of the Futurama exhibit remained forever in the realm of fantasy, like the buildings of present-day Legoland. Brasília is a very real place that, at ground level, shares Bel Geddes' modernist aesthetics, and from the sky, pays tribute to a globalized present that indeed has been shaped by aviation.

Image Credit: uccla.net

The viewpoints expressed in this blog post are strictly those of viz., and do not in any way represent the opinions of The Harry Ransom Center.

Bel Geddes, Surprising Office Buildings of the Early Twentieth Century, and an American Work Ethic

Jay Voss — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 23:36:25 +0000

(Image credit: Harry Ransom Center)

The other day I was walking through the Harry Ransom Center and noticed some very cool designs for office buildings that Bel Geddes penned in the late 1920s (pictured above). I wasn’t surprised that he had come up with such things, of course – the ongoing Bel Geddes exhibition at the Center, “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America,” features an exceptional range of content, from baseball stadiums to cruise ships to Worlds Fair exhibits. By I did stop for a second and wonder “Why an office building?” It’s Bel Geddes design for the Toledo Scale Factory Machine Shop. What’s so striking about the design is its focus on aesthetics. This isn’t surprising, of course, given that in most everything Bel Geddes ever designed, function follows form. But this notion is quite contrary to the Modernist architecture of the period, and I couldn’t help but think of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building. Aesthetically the structures are similar, but Wright’s focus is on his building’s interior, which he made into a temple of work. The exterior of Wright’s building is completely in the service of its interior. But somehow Wright’s trademark consideration of lighting resulted in a building that looks like Bel Geddes’. Yet they are vastly different structures, despite appearances. Except for cost considerations. When Toledo Scale’s president presented Bel Geddes plans to the company’s board of directors, he warned that the building “would cost lots of money and be extremely different, even weird looking.” Wright’s plans inspired a similar response.

(Image credit: zeospot.com)

Wright’s Johnson Wax building (above) shares much of the abstract futurism of Bel Geddes’ design. In the Toledo Scale Factory Machine Shop design, why two buildings and a circular structure interconnected by a pathway? As for the Johnson Wax Building, why stacked ovals combined in weird angles? Which of course makes me wonder what Bel Geddes was up to in the first place. If one’s an architect, their work is entirely dependant on clients. Clients are one half of architects’ equations. If an architect has no clients, their work will rarely materialize. If Frank Lloyd Wright never had one single client, it’d be as if Beethoven never had one single orchestra or quartet willing to play his music. But Bel Geddes approach to his work is much different (granted, I know Bel Geddes was not an architect by trade). He had "clients," but seeing some of these projects through seems to have been the last item on his agenda. Bel Geddes seems to have been quite content that some of his designs remained in the abstract, though a few of them did actually materialize. He’s like a fashion designer, I suppose. And so why dapple into corporate aesthetics?

(Image credit: worldarchitecturemap.org)

I’ve always thought that the main room in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building is one of the most elegant spaces in America (pictured above). For this room Wright designed lily pad-like stems out of concrete that are strong enough to support something like twenty times their own weight. These stems undergirded a glass ceiling, and in between the pads natural light falls easily on the workers below. More so than most other office buildings in America, Wright created a workspace in which the outside weather conditions determined the working interior environment. This space is a celebration full of respect for all that those inside are up to. It is not some cynical glass cube that inadvertently makes its residents specimens. It’s a democratic space celebrating the American brand of ambition. And this is not to suggest that Bel Geddes merely designed zoos, of course. Rather, I can see Frank Lloyd Wright taking a note from the designer’s earlier building. Wright was not the kind of person who could admit something like this.

(Image credit: Harry Ransom Center)

Check out the Harry Ransom Center’s Bel Geddes exhibition if you get a chance – it’s well worth the trip.

The views expressed herein are expressly those of a graduate student, and they have nothing to do with how the Harry Ransom Center thinks or feels about Bel Geddes, although I’m nearly certain they’d be sympathetic.

New Forms for Old Needs in Norman Bel Geddes’s "House of Tomorrow"

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:43:11 +0000

Image Credit: Metropolis Magazine

Walking through the Harry Ransom Center’s excellent Norman Bel Geddes exhibit, one thing that struck me is that while Bel Geddes is particularly famous for his large industrial designs—radios, cars, cities, and stadiums, for example—he also directed his talents towards the intimate spaces of the American home. Before Bel Geddes designed prefabricated homes for the Housing Corporation for America in 1939, or published his 1932 book Horizons, he wrote an article called “The House of Tomorrow” for the April 1931 issue of the Ladies Home Journal. The “twentieth-century style” he describes is one that he sees uniting form and function anew for the needs of the twentieth-century individual—or rather, what he imagines the twentieth-century individual to be.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Norman Bel Geddes's Horizons

Bel Geddes’ design philosophy is evident both within the article and in his manifesto Horizons, published the following year. As Bel Geddes and others saw himself principally as a set designer, he reframes his interest in industrial design as a kind of art for the modern era, where design has greater importance than ever before:

We are entering an era which, notably, shall be characterized by design in four specific phases: Design in social structure to insure the organization of people, work, wealth, leisure. Design in machines that shall improve working conditions by eliminating drudgery. Design in all objects of daily use that shall make them economical, durable, convenient, congenial to every one. Design in the arts, painting, sculpture, music, literature, and architecture, that shall inspire the new era. (4-5)

Bel Geddes here presents himself as an artist, who, like all others, “is sensitive to his environment” (6). He carefully notes the circumstances of life in 1930s America—post-industry, mid-Depression—and argues that they require new approaches to design in all these four phrases. He also works to break down the divisions between these different areas when he argues that “in the point of view of the artist who fails to see an aesthetic appeal in such objects of contemporary life as a railway train, a suspension bridge, a grain elevator, a dynamo, there is an inconsistency” (11). Bel Geddes argues that as modern life has centered increasingly around work, there is a greater need for conveniences, objects that function to promote ease and efficiency. Thus, while late nineteenth century art defined itself through Walter Pater’s formulation of “art for art’s sake,” Bel Geddes sees art in the perfect union of form and function

Visual design is concerned with form, space, color; with the proportioning of solids and voids and the rhythmic spacings of these elements. The governing factor as to what is pleasing to the eye is the idea, which is of an emotional nature—an emotion of pleasure, satisfaction, excitement, exhilaration, stimulation. (18)

What’s interesting here is how much emphasis Bel Geddes in this quotation places on the emotions of the artist. Elsewhere in Horizons, when he predicts that twentieth-century art will detach itself from galleries and statuary, he describes what he sees as the continuity between the art of the past and tomorrow: “The work of the artist always has been, and will be, a distinctly individual product—the antithesis of ‘machine-made.’ Fundamentally, the artist is an emotional person in that he relies more upon his feelings and intuitions than upon reasoning” (11). It’s easy to think that functional design must be based upon reasoning, but Bel Geddes flips the script to emphasize emotion, feeling, and intuition—language typically associated with the feminine.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

However, does publishing “The House of Tomorrow” in Ladies Home Journal necessarily imply that the twentieth-century figure he imagines is a feminine one? There could be a reading of the article that would point out the fact that the house is pink, that would consider the intertextual relationship between the drawings and discussion of design with the inset poem, “Hunches” by Elizabeth Boyd Borie, that would connect Bel Geddes’ intuitive designs with feminine thinking and feminine spaces. Yet such a reading might be incongruous with the Ladies Home Journal’s history, a magazine which published not only the muckraking work of Jane Addams but also Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural designs. This widely-read magazine, like Bel Geddes himself, often contemplated questions of function, questions Bel Geddes emphasizes in “The House of Tomorrow.”

In fact, Bel Geddes quickly establishes the reasons he sees for a change in home planning and design: “The keynote of all the good contemporary work is that it must perfectly suit its ultimate purpose. We have returned to simplicity because we have realized in this age that the overornamentation and elaboration of the past are not in keeping with us today. We are more forthright people than were our forefathers, we bother less with forms and conventions, and so it is surely fitting that we carry our ideas into our homes.” This description of the modern American individual is one perhaps that sounds suited equally to our age as to the 1930s; he neatly transitions from thinking about the people to the houses that should shelter such folks.

Image Credit: Alcade / The Harry Ransom Center

His solutions include moving the bedrooms from the front of the house to the back, nearer to the sunshine and expansive yards that are beautiful to behold. Even as he proposes to build more with steel girders and concrete, which might sound ugly, he notes that “in pursuit of light and air, since we are not bound down by any arbitrary limits, we can make our windows stretch the whole length of our rooms,” and likewise turn our roofs into flat spaces suitable for gardens. The emphasis he places on light, convenience, and the unity between interior and exterior design all bespeak his interest in making the home a place that does not trap its inhabitants but allows them “to take full advantage of all the innumerable aids to more convenient living that have been evolved in the past few years.” This emphasis on function is much in line with the kinds of rhetoric used in 1940s and 1950s advertising that encourages women to buy appliances to help with their domestic labor, but what’s refreshing is how ungendered his language is throughout the piece. If Bel Geddes expects the modern house “to assure complete satisfaction of every material and psychic need of the owner” (138-9), it seems that ownership is shared equally between the men and women in the space. Women have since the Victorian period been seen as the domestic goddesses, but Bel Geddes contemplates a twentieth century where their needs and interests extend beyond the interiors outward. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, considering that Bel Geddes changed his name to include the “Bel” when he published his early writings alongside his first wife and collaborator Helen Belle Sneider, but Bel Geddes’s futurism offers new forms for old needs for women as well as men.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

The Lesser Known Bel Geddes: An Assessment of the Harry Ransom Center Exhibit

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 21:43:29 +0000

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

The Divine Comedy, scene rendering: In a path of blue-white light Beatrice steps down from her chariot to meet Dante, 1921-1930

Norman Bel Geddes lived a sixty-five years that connect two worlds, the Victorian past of 1893, the Atomic Age of 1958. His work reflects and resists that trajectory. The current exhibit on Bel Geddes at the Harry Ransom Center (UT Austin) divides his career into phases or stages of development. A highly creative childhood segued into a successful career as a stage and costume designer for New York Theater. Of all his work—in industrial design, in architecture, in “futurism”--his set and costume design remains my favorite. But in an important sense, Bel Geddes never left the theater.

In his thirties, Bel Geddes painted some wonderful watercolors of his stages and costumes. The famous one is of his most ambitious—indeed wildly ambitious—production of The Divine Comedy. There’s a great story attached to this endeavor. Bel Geddes recounts in his autobiography a period of creative fallow. He had set his desk against a blank white wall, so over-active and confused was his imagination. He says he learned every crack, contour, and bump of that white wall. One day, looking up at one such barely perceivable irregularity of texture, it appeared to expand and swirl. Soon it was a horrible vortex. Bel Geddes rose from his desk, stumbled backwards, crashed against the bookshelf and fell to the ground. As he recovered from this vertigo he recognized that his eyes were fixed on a book that had fallen next to him. It was Dante’s great work. Bel Geddes opened a page at random, so the story turned myth goes, and decided to employ his imagination in a massively scaled, and complete, production of The Divine Comedy.

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

Figures of dancers for Palais Royal Cabaret, 1922.

The watercolors from this period of wonderful creative exertion should strike to the heart of any fan of science fiction, anime, or fantasy. It was in this same foundational period of Bel Geddes creative life that he decorated the Palais Royal Cabaret, one of Paris’s most fashionable spots between the wars.

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

Costume design for Gypsy Woman in The Miracle.

Bel Geddes turned next to industrial and interior design. I find his work of this period—including a range stove that influenced design for decades—understated, sleek, modern. Seltzer bottles for 1939:

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

In this period, Bel Geddes designed an energy-conserving house, which was less practicable than provocative. Bel Geddes, the stage man, persisted throughout his career.

It was in the booming forties and fifties that Bel Geddes’s ambitions could be matched by material resources. It seems to me that Bel Geddes was better when pressed by limitations. Ambition turns monomaniacal when it is paired with fame—which Bel Geddes had by then come by—and seemingly unlimited resources. Bel Geddes started modeling cars of the future, tanks for the army, a cruise-liner, an ocean-liner of the skies, baseball parks, and of course the Futurama for the 1939 World’s Fair.

Image Credit: GM Media Archives, General Motors LLC.

General Motors, Futurama Spectators, ca. 1939

The massive Futurama could never again be matched. I think Bel Geddes understood that. The works of his middle and old age show a returning humility. Understated Bel Geddes, like understated Dickens, is a rare and fine commodity:

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

Prototype case for Emerson Patriot radio, ca. 1940-941

Very likely Bel Geddes could not do otherwise than imagine the future. I think there is a sort of futuristic old-fashionedism about Bel Geddes at his best. This style, which shows up in his stage and costume design, in his industrial design, in his home design--should be distinguished from the old-fashioned futurism, the supermans and skyscrapers that dominated the sci-fi pulp, of the 40s and 50s. Bel Geddes is an old-fashioned futurist when he does Futurama. But at his best, Bel Geddes was, I suggest, a futuristic old-fashionist, as in this never-completed plan for the British Imperial Hotel in Nassau:

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

Job No. 684, Colonial Hotel - Nassau, 1954-1956

Futuristic old-fashionedism: the will to conserve mated with the will to create. One among many strands of the modernist tapestry.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

We Have Sold The Future: The Uses of Future Hopes and Fears in Petroleum Industry Advertising

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 02:59:39 +0000

Image Credit: Shell

The future of Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama is optimistic. Clean architecture and efficient technology aid people as they move through the business of their day. As promised in a series of 1937 Shell advertisements in Life magazine using the words of Bel Geddes, the city of tomorrow will alleviate many commuting frustrations. Until that city emerges, however, the ads offer Shell gasoline as a way to save money and reduce wear and tear on car engines while stuck in stop-and-go traffic. This use of a hopeful future contrasts with the darker tomorrows that lurk behind many of today's petroleum advertisements, drawing attention to the double-edged sword of appeals to the future.

Image Credit: Shell

In the 1937 ads, the Shell Corporation promotes its product as a stopgap to deal with the failings of the present until the the arrival of a better future. The first ad quotes Bel Geddes promising that by 1960 stoplights will be a thing of the past, as cars use underpasses and express streets to reach their destinations. The second ad has Bel Geddes reassure us that "children won't play in the streets" and pedestrians will not impede the flow of traffic. A third ad shown below places Bel Geddes in profile next to a quote about pedestrians, express and local traffic all having their own paths.

Image Credit: Shell

Two ads contrast photographs of overcrowded and traffic-choked streets of the late 1930s with the clean, efficient cityscape sketches and models of Bel Geddes. In two of the ads, a third visual bridges the present and future: photos of smiling, happy motorists posed in their cars with Shell gasoline pumps in the background. The ad text spells out the argument: "The regular use of Super-Shell will cut the cost of your stop and go. There's a Shell dealer near you."

Image Credit: Chevron

That such hassle-free commutes failed to materialize is personally a source of disappointment (especially as I dodge vehicular traffic while walking to the bus stop each morning), but the failure of the future to live up to our highest hopes isn't terribly surprising. What does provide some measure of uncertainty, if not surprise, is the choice advertisers or any other rhetor has to make when using an appeal to the future: do we look forward with hope or trepidation? The Shell ads of 1937 presented the company's product as a bridge to a better future, but many oil ads today offer products as a bulwark against encroaching problems.

Image Credit: Chevron

The petroleum industry now wrestles with a future fraught with the threat of global climate change, industrial disasters and resource depletion, even as technological innovation also promises to open up new areas for resource extraction and create greater fuel efficiency. Chevron's website speaks to many of the issues the future brings when it comes to the petroleum industry: Energy Supply and Demand, Energy Policy, Energy Efficiency and Conservation, Emerging Energy, Environment, Climate Change, and others. The first Chevron image above acknowledges the consumer desire to "use less energy" and it promises that Chevron too will help governments and businesses to become more energy efficient. The ad does not explicitly state that people wish to use less energy to save money (let alone consider the idea that oil reserves will one day run out), and the ad uses a positive, can-do tone. Yet, the ad cannot avoid responding to troubles on the horizon.

A second Chevron image from its Supply and Demand web page acknowledges greater energy demands in the future, showing a picture of skyscrapers under construction that look much more like the buildings of today than the futurism of Bel Geddes in the Shell ads from 1937, reigning in optimism for a more realist and incremental outlook.

The kairos of the two eras influences the choices made by the ad creators—Art Deco's optimism vs. the pessimism of our millennial age. Below in a 2007 ad, Shell promises, "We invest today's profits in tomorrow's solutions," elaborating that "The challenge of the 21st century is to meet the growing need for energy in ways that are not only profitable but sustainable."

Image Credit: Shell

Even this nod to a potentially difficult future is couched in hopeful language befitting an ad promoting a company. Shell speaks of "tomorrow's solutions" and "challenges" not problems, though those problems lurk beneath the surface. Unlike the Shell of 1937 that looks to the forecasts of Bel Geddes futurism, the Shell of 2007 century takes on the task of describing and shaping the future. And, their future promises not utopian transformation but a kind of stasis, holding onto energy production that is at once sustainable, profitable, and able to meet the "growing need for energy." Another 70 years, and likely considerably less time, will tell whether such a prediction is any less utopian than a smooth rush hour commute.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Bel Geddes' "All-Weather, All-Purpose Stadium"

Jay Voss — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:11:31 +0000

(Image credit: Harry Ransom Center)

The other day I was walking through the ongoing Norman Bel Geddes exhibition over at the Harry Ransom Center, and I spotted a photo of the designer with Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. You wouldn’t believe my surprise. What in the world were Robinson and Campanella doing with Bel Geddes? Up until that point in the gallery, I’d seen absolutely nothing having to do with baseball. And I didn’t think I would. Bel Geddes aesthetic preoccupation with what on the surface appears to be simply aerodynamics suggests a version of the future that we’re still trying to attain, like Ahab and his whale. Whether our cities will ever look like his remains to be seen. Perhaps I’m missing the point a bit, and maybe much of Bel Geddes’ work represents aesthetic advertisements rather than specific blueprints. But one can’t deny that Bel Geddes’ designs intently seek the immediate, the sleek, and the fashionable. These are all preoccupations inherently at odds with the boredom of baseball.

One of the reasons we love baseball is that it’s a pastoral break from the present. In many ways it’s completely contingent upon the past. The successes and failures of players are measured against the successes and failures of all who have come before. In its design it can be a vestige of Victorian oddity. It’s the only sport I can think of in which the defense possesses the ball. It’s a countryside recreation that’s most often played in cities. It’s doesn’t require a clock. And in the absence of countdown and a suggestion of veldt, baseball offers one time to think. Before and after each out players and fans have time to recollect or ponder, whether the game or not the game. And in these pauses baseball is boring when compared to modern electronic life. We have an aversion to silence in modern America, especially in public places. When, for instance, was the last time you went to a coffee shop and there wasn’t music playing?

(Image credit: Harry Ransom Center)

Bel Geddes was photographed with Robinson and Campanella because in 1949 he designed a new stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The working title for this building was “All-Weather, All-Purpose Stadium,” although one’s got to think that had the project gone through this name would have been substituted for something a bit more intimate. Bel Geddes wanted the Dodgers to have a perfect park. No support posts obscured any views. The outfield wall was consistently 380 feet from home plate. The retractable roof could prevent rain delays. The artificial playing surface could negate a bad grounds crew. The shopping concourses were to contain entertainments for all sorts of fans. And maybe for these reasons I’m not sure if the stadium would have been the ideal park for modern fans. We like irregular outfield walls, real grass, cheap beer and O.K. food. I’d like to think of “All-Weather, All-Purpose Stadium” rather as an ideal entertainment venue. It was designed to seat 55,000 persons, but could make accommodations for as many as 90,000 if need be. Baseball parks only need to seat 45,000 max. As for the roof, I don’t mind a rain delay – such things just afford more time to think. At professional baseball games, music is played for certain concrete reasons (the Seventh Inning Stretch, for instance), and I wish I could report that Bel Geddes took this into consideration. More likely the case, however, the boredom of baseball might not have been apparent in 1949.

Conspicuous Radios

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Before creating the “Patriot” radio, Norman Bel Geddes had long been involved with traditional, cabinet radio design. And while many of his cabinet radios follow the robust, furniture-esque aesthetic common to radios of the day this radio, created for the New York World Fair, 1939, breaks that mold. The “Patriot,” rather than simply blending into the décor of a room, forcefully makes itself known. This radio, rather conspicuously, embodies a particular patriotic flair. Most prominently, it features the seven red and six white stripes of the United States flag. Its knobs feature stars, and in most models red, white, and blue are the predominate colors.

Image Credit: Tube Radio Land

It would be unfair, though, especially in retrospect, to label the “Patriot” radio as something like nationalistic kitsch. Even if it was produced in order to “create an optimistic and useful emblem of American technology, industry, and identity” (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History) it carries with it an unabashedly forceful design that cannot be brushed aside. Rather than merely carrying the trappings of or a symbol for a nationalistic spirit this radio operated, specifically as an object, to promote itself more than any nationalism. So that while a flab might be mobilized to act as mere symbol this radio carries with it more weight. And unlike the various wood-paneled cabinet radios that worked to hide themselves, to blend into parlors, the “Patriot” radio works actively captures a user’s attention. The music it relays becomes a sideshow.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Geddes also designed a portable shoulder radio for Philco in 1946. This predates the mass production of transistor based devices by roughly ten years. That it still relied on vacuum tubes rather than the significantly smaller transistors accounts for its relative size. Even taking tubes into consideration, though, this shoulder mounted radio imagines a future where music is nearly ubiquitous. In some ways, though, this imagined future isn’t ours. While our current musical commonplace is almost painfully private—headphones on every head and earbuds in every ear—Geddes’ shoulder radio trends toward both a publicly embodied object and a public sound. The radio, with its brilliant white speaker, draws the eye, so that publically it works on multiple senses. It presents mobile music and spectacle both, and we can begin to see this radio as the ancestor to the shoulder mounted boom boxes of the eighties.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Turning toward our current musicscape, though, and the exceedingly common iPod (and its progeny) there’s a vastly different design principle in play. These devices are conspicuously inconspicuous. For all of their sleek lines and glossy screens and solid weight they shrink away as objects. Instead, they present themselves, present their use, as accessories, devices, prosthetics for a particular attitude. They work exactly as they should, beautifully when used how they are intended to be used, but they do so underhandedly. These are objects that bottom from the top.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Upending the familiar hierarchy of use these objects become the users and the humans are cast as device. And while it isn’t anything uncommon for human’s to be used by objects—I think the case could be made that the outcome of good design is that the human user becomes the used—the iPod, especially, and its descendents are particularly pernicious in their deception. They order not only a specific relation between object and human but organize a breadth of relations. Our encounters with music (economically, situationally, emotionally, environmentally) are shaped now, in large part (whether or not you use an iDevice), by the force of Apples music player. And they do it by simply tucking into things—your pocket, palm, car, stereo, desk. They elide their own presence and appear as nothing more than a ‘natural’ extension to an already configured human body.

In Miniature: Bel Geddes’s “Doll House for Joan”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:25:05 +0000

Image Credit: SliceofGreen

In anticipation of the Harry Ransom Center’s upcoming exhibition of Norman Bel Geddes’s futuristic designs, I’ve become completely fascinated with the work of a man whom the Ransom Center describes as “an innovative stage and industrial designer, futurist, and urban planner who, more than any designer of his era, created and promoted a dynamic vision of the future—streamlined, technocratic, and optimistic.” This week, instead of focusing on the futurescapes of Bel Geddes after 1927 (the year Bel Geddes launched his industrial-design career), I will discuss a lesser-known Bel Geddes—the man as a father who built fantastic doll houses for his daughters. This man was a big dreamer (per French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, whom we’ll meet later in this post), one who dealt in miniatures.

In the Ransom Center’s finding aid for the “Norman Bel Geddes Theater and Industrial Design Papers” housed at the Center, I found an interestingly domestic reference—one for a “Doll House for Joan.” In this helpful finding aid, I learned that Bel Geddes sketched and drafted the doll house just as he would any architectural or urban plan. Even elevations—though on a miniature scale—were noted! Bel Geddes made this detailed doll house for one of his two daughters, Joan, sometime in the early 1920s. I’m fascinated to see that before Bel Geddes decided to shift gears from stage design for theater and film, he tried out some of his nascent architectural skills with a miniature structure. I’d like to think that Bel Geddes’s ambitions to become an architect and planner were encased in his building a doll house.

Image Credit: Libraryland

Gaston Bachelard might agree with me. In The Poetics of Space (his magnum opus published in France in 1958), Bachelard muses about our relationships with “intimate places,” from childhood homes to closed drawers. His chapters weave poetry and personal experiences with dreams. The chapter most applicable to today’s discussion of Bel Geddes’s doll house is the one titled, simply, “Miniature.” In this chapter, Bachelard uses Poe and Rimbaud to discuss the power of miniatures in our everyday lives. The most wonderful thing about miniatures, according to Bachelard, is that “Values become engulfed in miniature, and miniature causes men to dream.” What’s important about miniatures isn’t their intricacy nor their accurate representation of reality. For Bachelard, “the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness . . . Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.” The ‘big’ (in terms of ideas, aspirations, and dreams) is encased in the ‘small’ (in terms of size, scale, and material).

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

I see glimmers of Bel Geddes’s future in his doll house from the 1920s. The structure is taller than it is wide (a nod to the tall skyscrapers in Bel Geddes’s future cities?). Its façade is clean and sparsely adorned (a design aesthetic made popular by Bel Geddes later in his career). And on its roof is a clothesline (as everything Bel Geddes designed was simultaneously fanciful and functional—see his designs of radios and restaurants). I’m tempted to believe, like Bachelard, that “when we examine images of immenseness, tiny and immense are compatible . . . If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing.” I see greatness in a doll house, domesticity in massive urban plans.

See the mini/immense doll house plans and accouterments yourself in the Harry Ransom Center’s archives now, or wait until September to see them in the Ransom Center’s Bel Geddes exhibition.

Future City from the Past: Norman Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:31:56 +0000

Image Credit: a456

I’ve been thinking a lot about future cities these days, though I’ve mostly been focusing on real-world metropolises as futuristic settings in TV shows and movies. Today, I’m going to shift gears to describe an idea for a future city from the past, Norman Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow” advertising campaign for Shell Oil from the late 1930s. The campaign predicts (critics might say “encouraged” or “enabled”) a car-centric, highway-laden, city whose residents “loaf along at 50 [m.p.h]—right through town.” Bel Geddes’ “tomorrow” continues to resound today.

Image Credit: a456

There’s a common theme in yesterday’s future city and today’s—the car. When last I spoke about possible future cities, I critically assessed artist Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II”, an installation where toy cars zipped across a future Los Angeles surrounded by huge strips of freeways. Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow” is eerily similar to the future city Burden envisions. Both futures see unimpeded cars as the epitome of modern efficiency. And both images of the future are utterly devoid of people. Bel Geddes explains this lack by telling the readers of Life Magazine (where the “City of Tomorrow” ad campaign ran for months) that “tomorrow’s children won’t play in the streets.”

Image Credit: a456

Despite these similarities, there is a difference between Burden’s art installation and Bel Geddes’s advertising campaign, and this crucial difference is one of context. Burden created his art installation for public viewing at the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA). Burden’s dealer Larry Gagosian footed the bill for Burden’s project, while LACMA board member Nicholas Bergguren later bought the project. The key point is that the stakeholders in the project’s success are art dealers and museum board members.

Image Credit: Best Ad

The stakeholders for Bel Geddes’s project’s success are a lot less innocuous. Shell Oil, one of the biggest petroleum distributors in the world, hired Bel Geddes for their massive, multi-segment advertising campaign. Looking at the elaborate advertisements, it’s obvious that Shell is using Bel Geddes’s designs to sell a future lifestyle that would make them millions (billions by today’s standards) if Americans decided to make it a reality. A transportation system dependent on cars would guarantee that gasoline would be a necessary commodity in the future. And it is exactly this gas-fueled future that was embraced wholeheartedly by the city planners of America in the decades following Shell’s campaign. Campaigns like Shell Oil’s “City of Tomorrow” lulled viewers into equating automobiles with ingenuity, modernity, and efficiency. Urban planners like Robert Moses and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright only realized what these viewers wanted to see: more roads, more highways, less impediments. Yet without artists and modelers like Bel Geddes to visualize a future of cars and people-less thoroughfares, what we have ended up seeing years down the line could have been a lot different.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

If the “City of Tomorrow” has piqued your interest, be sure to check out the Harry Ransom Center in the fall when their “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America” exhibition is up and running. Until then, visit the Ransom Center’s preview page for images and background related to the upcoming exhibition.