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ART
DECO,
SCANDINAVIANS & STREAMLINING IN THE USA. |
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Organic
form, space ships, cars & the rise of youth culture |
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"Industrial design, as I know it, ‘delivers the
goods’. It is a serious profession which combines
good taste, technical knowledge, and common sense..."
Raymond Loewy.
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Raymond
Loewy on his
streamlined locomotive |
Art
Deco is the term now used to refer to the popular styles and
designs of the period between the wars, the 1920s and 1930s.
Art Deco at that time was simply known as ‘moderne,’
or ‘modern’.
It is a term that covers a range of designs popular
in the inter-war years. Art Deco sought to portray through design
the essence of modern living. This could embrace the
age of machines, technology, jazz, and other symbols of 20th
century progress.
Typically identified by stylistic features such as extravagant
ornamentation, decorative geometry, or streamlining, Art Deco
originated in French ‘art moderne’. Popular in Paris,
it mixed exotic motifs of ancient cultures with art nouveau,
and elegant figures in active poses performing what might be
described as aerobic exercises.
In 1925 an exhibition was held in Paris, called
the ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels
Modernes’. This exhibition displayed the hand-made, decorative
goods aimed at the French ‘luxury’ market, which were succeeding
the well established style of art nouveau. Art nouveau had lost
its luxury appeal as it became popularised and mass produced.
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C
R Mackintosh clock 1919
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This
new style took inspiration from modern art, traditional sculpture,
and ancient Egypt. Tutankhamen’s tomb was unearthed in 1922,
and its complete collection of treasures inspired popular taste
in design. Ancient Egyptian motifs appeared in designs everywhere.
Coiled adders, chariots, porcelain goddesses, and other old
Egyptian styles became part of Art Deco as a result.
France
had been the centre of the art nouveau movement, and ‘moderne’,
the style that now succeeded it, retained the exotic imagery
and expensive craftsmanship of the earlier style. Curvilinear
art nouveau was out, but its later offshoot, the geometric style
which developed in Germany and Austria was in; especially the
rectilinear style pioneered by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and
in particular the forms he inspired at Hoffmann’s Werkstatte
in Vienna. However, figure drawing and sculpture remained popular
in France, and the new style retained hand crafting, and figurative
shapes, and combined these with the new geometric art form developed
by Picasso and Braque, Cubism.
The modernist movement was engaged in finding a
style that would serve society at large. Cheap, robust, mass
produced and functional goods. The designers of ‘moderne’
in France had other ideas:
"We are forced to work for the rich...it is the
elite which launches fashion and determines its direction.
Let us produce, therefore, for them."
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Cubic coffee set 1927 |
Two
major countries were absent from the Paris exhibition, Germany
and the United States. The former, because of political considerations
(it had just lost the war), and the latter because it had 'almost
nothing to exhibit in the modern spirit' -or so they said. It
seems ironic that those two countries absented themselves from
the Paris exhibition, because art deco grew from the principles
of modernism, which were shaped in Germany as a theoretical
mass movement; and the forces of advertising and popular commercial
appeal in the United States smoothed and shaped it to the mass
market. There it evolved into ‘streamform’.
Modernism,
particularly the austere form we now associate with the Bauhaus,
was developing among the avant garde designers as an intellectual
expression of the age of the machine and technology. The pioneers
of modernism had rejected market-led consumerism, instead aiming
for mass-produced goods that concentrated on social utility
and usefulness. Popular taste, on the other hand, demanded more
comfort and more indulgence on the part of designers, and by
the 1930s, modernism had become just another style.
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Art
Deco tablelamp
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After
the Paris exhibition, selected exhibits travelled the world,
appearing in American museums. This new ‘moderne’ style
took off after the exhibition and coexisted with the modern
movement, which because of its limited popularity remained for
some time an expensive, exclusive style. ‘Moderne’, or
art deco, became hugely popular and hand-making was replaced
by mass production, repeating the experience of art nouveau.
It adapted well to machine manufacture, adapting modern geometric
design with new materials such as plastics.
The
years after the war, the 1920s, were a boom time of jobs, money
and consumerism and people bought goods that had ‘consumer appeal’.
They looked for goods that exhibited status, more than just
functionalism.
In the United States, Ford Model T cars were dropping
in sales, as customers rejected their standardised shapes in
favour of General Motors who introduced stylish new models each
year -Cadillacs, Pontiacs, Chevrolets; a new car for each new
year.
Functionalism,
embodying the standardisation of models, parts and assembly,
became outmoded as consumers, now used to the new technology,
wanted novelty as well as functional design. Design was becoming
market-led and this continued through the 1930s up to and after
the Second World War.
In the 1920s, speed was a novelty and intoxicating.
Cars, aeroplanes and skyscrapers, which enthralled the Futurists,
became Art Deco style.
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Trenchant clock |
The
Wall Street Crash of 1929 is the dividing line between the '20s
and the '30s and between European ‘moderne’ and American
‘streamlining’. Jobs, money and consumerism evaporated
and the need for cheaply-made merchandise with public appeal
grew as the Depression lengthened. Extravagant decoration gave
way to greater simplicity and restraint in design to allow easy
machine mass-production, and cheap prices.
A new profession emerged in the 1930s, as industrial
designers applied art deco styling to consumer products, to
attract Depression buyers. This new styling was alluring and
looked expensive, but it could be mass-produced by machines
at lower cost.
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Walter
Dorwin Teague
1932 prototype for a car
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The
distinct moods of the two decades dramatically affected the
arts of each. The upbeat years of the 1920s, characterized by
complex forms, exotic materials and exuberant designs gave way
in the 1930s to rectilinear forms, sleek, streamlined finishes,
synthetic materials and an infatuation with speed, dynamism
and the image of a 'new world' beyond the dreary depression
years. Streamlining represented a vision of the future, which
was an escape during the early 30s.
A dissenting voice in this new approach was the 1934 Machine
Art exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. It promoted
commodity designs that revealed the inner workings of things
instead of hiding them behind contrived facades. Featured were
commercial and household products made by and inspired by machines.
Machine parts such as gears, cams, and axles took on new importance
as models for product design. Its models were the Bauhaus ethos
of ‘functionalism’ (form follows function), and the austere,
pure modernism of ‘international style.’
In America, however, the alliance of style, commerce
and industry meant that the modern, mass-produced vision of
the new industrial designer had found its home. The United States
had been responsible for much new technology - typewriters,
telephones, aeroplanes - and these were evolving and improving.
The industrial pioneers there were inventors, creating new products
which had to be manufactured as inexpensively as possible to
keep them affordable. And in the competitive marketplace, survival
depended on new products and new ideas. Industrial products
were flooding the market as mass production became widespread
and the challenge to make them attractive and sell them was
the main reason for the emergence of the industrial designer.
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Van Dorin radio |
During
the Great Depression, industrial design proved itself by a demonstration
that in a shrinking market the product ‘designed’ by an industrial
designer would win out over an otherwise similar and equal product.
Over this time, modernism's motivating spirit was transformed
from reactionary to visionary, because design and industry became
united as designers brought marketing skills to their profession.
American art deco designs featured sweeping, parallel lines
and rounded corners which was ideal for machine production,
thus Art Deco became the first high fashion adapted for the
assembly line.
Harold Van Doren created one of the first plastic
radios in 1930. Shaped like a stepped skyscraper, with the parallel
lines of late art deco style, this radio came out just as broadcasting
was taking off, at the time of popular music, especially jazz
- noisy, syncopated and upbeat.
Zigzag constructions with consecutively receding
levels were inspired by pyramids and the new look of the city,
where zigzag designs were commonly used in skyscrapers for aesthetics,
but mainly to conform to the new building code that decreed
skyscrapers must reduce their ground area as they grew, to allow
at least some sunshine in between buildings.
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Ecko
radio 1932
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Although
used in the 20s, plastic came into its own during the depression
years, being easily moulded into any popular shape. Most importantly,
it reduced production costs and required little or no hand finishing.
The latest styles became affordable. On these radios, decorations
of lightning bolts, comets, and arrows were used to suggest
dynamism, science, and movement. Squares and other geometric
shapes of deco style derived from cubism and other high art
styles, and all became popular.
Plastic benefitted industry, facilitating the smooth,
streamlined look, and gained mass appeal. Consumers liked the
smooth, easily cleaned surface that it produced, as well as
the artistic moulded shapes.
Van Doren, originally an engineer, wrote about the
new profession and defined the designer’s role as :
‘to...enhance the product’s desirability in the eyes
of the purchaser through increased convenience, better adaptability
of form to function; through a shrewd knowledge of consumer
psychology and through the aesthetic appeal of form, colour
and texture.’
The
new professional designers emerging: Norman Bel Geddes, Walter
Dorwin Teague and Raymond Loewy among others, came to industrial
design from careers in advertising and display arts.
Industry, impressed by the Paris exhibition of 1925 and
the art deco style that emerged there, turned to them to redesign
their functional inventions. They were the developers of this
new design language, streamlining. The complicated machinery
of the thing was hidden away behind a smooth, aerodynamic exterior.
Streamlining evolved from the study of aerodynamics,
the elimination of wind-resistance, during the 1920s and it
had a huge influence on industrial design in the early 20th
century. Inspired by forms developed in aircraft factories,
it became synonymous with simplified lines and continuous, sculptural
forms.
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Norman Bel Geddes
soda syphon
1935 |
Walter
Dorwin Teague designed cameras for Kodak in the late 20s, and
developed streamlined shapes for these as well as cars. He developed
an aesthetic that he called ‘visible rightness’, which meant
that beauty was inherent in all objects. During the 20's he
travelled to Europe to look at the work of Le Corbusier and
particularly the exclusive French designers producing French
‘moderne’ style. After his return he applied this largely classical
inspiration to commercial ends, improving existing forms through
his refinement.
Raymond Loewy along with Norman Bel Geddes, was the leading
designer of the streamline style.
For him, the teardrop shape was a metaphor
for modern life, embodying the speed, dynamism and glamour of
technological change. And designers used its shape in their
cars, aeroplanes, and even pencil sharpeners. Originally developed
by Loewy to improve the speed and efficiency of railway engines,
cars, and aeroplanes the teardrop came to signify an overall
‘modern’ look that was applied indiscriminately to manufactured
objects; each and everything, regardless of its mobility.
Streamlining came to evoke the romance of
technology and the machine. It was a more marketable and attractive
style than the box-like formalism of modernism from Europe,
exemplified in the products of the Bauhaus. In 1929 the Gestetner
Corporation was the first to hire Loewy as an industrial designer.
His job was to modernize their loud, mechanical and messy duplicating
machine (a small office printer that was later replaced by the
photocopier), which worked well, but was ugly, clumsy and smelled
of methylated spirits.
In a few days, Loewy solved the problem by simply
encasing the bulky copier in a sleek housing. The transformation
was superficial (it still reeked of meths), but it made the
machine easier to clean and protected both the mechanism and
its operator. Shrouding mechanical structures with a sleek covering
skin became one of Loewy's trademarks, an aerodynamic styling
that demonstrated his optimistic belief in a sleek, ultramodern,
and mechanized future.
The new advances in metal forming for the automotive industry
led to similar construction principles in domestic whiteware
- washing machines, stoves etc, with the use of formed metal
skins replacing cast structures.
Visiting England in the 1940s, Loewy compared attitudes
to industrial design in both countries:
‘This partnership with industry and our philosophy
of design is about securing greater sales appeal...I have
heard much here in England about the aesthetics of design.
This to me is strange. We seem to find that the aesthetics
of an industrial product will take care of themselves automatically
after we have provided a balance between function, simplicity
and utility.’
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Norman
Bel Geddes vanity 1932
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Loewy's
design philosophy was summarized in an acronym MAYA (most
advanced, yet acceptable), and was embodied in the clean,
functional, and dynamic products that he created. But it can
be said his greatest contribution to design was his discovery
that consumers buy and use something not so much for what the
product does but for what it means to them and how it
makes them feel. He redesigned the Coca Cola bottle, taking
the original 1915 shape, refining its existing curved form and
adding vivid white lettering to create the bottle that is still
in use today. He did a similar thing for the tobacco industry,
encasing an icky product in the sharp sophisticated Lucky Strike
package design.
Norman Bel Geddes began his career as a designer for the theatre,
turning to industrial design in the late 1920s, in part influenced
by Frank Lloyd Wright with whom he had worked prior to the 20s.
Wright was using the new materials in his interiors of the 30s,
designing streamlined aluminium furniture for his Johnson Wax
Building in 1937.
Geddes was hired by the Simmons Company to produce
bedroom sets in enamelled steel. He was proud of his designs
because they did not perpetuate the use of metal as a fake substitute
for wood. They were metal, so they were metal:
‘In creating these Simmons designs I have always kept
in mind the medium in which I was working and believe that
the furniture immediately reveals itself as metal.’
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1934 Chrysler
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This
idea of truth to materials was a change in thinking as it referred
now to manufactured materials, such as steel. In 1934, Bel Geddes
was involved in the redesign of the Chrysler Airflow, a car
that pioneered streamform in automobiles. This car established
a precedent in car design, featuring curved windows and flowing
body panels.
He also established an operating formula which he
always followed when engaged in product design, and which is
just as relevant today:
1. Determine the precise performance requirements for the
product.
2. Study the methods and equipment employed in the client’s
factory.
3. Keep the design programme within the budget.
4. Consult experts on the use of materials.
5. Study the competition.
6. Conduct consumer-use surveys on existing products in the
field.
After doing this, Geddes would visualise and draw the design;
the part of the process he said was the simplest, and the part
he said should always come last.
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| Dymaxion
house |
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A
contemporary of his, Richard Buckminster Fuller (‘Bucky’) was
a visionary designer, also engaged in streamlined designs. He
set his goal as ‘finding ways of doing more with less’.
Bucky began designing a series of revolutionary
products. The term he used for them, ‘Dymaxion’, was
derived from the words 'dynamic,' 'maximum,' and 'ion' and was
coined by an advertising firm to convey the spirit of the age.
The most famous of these was his design for a pre-fabricated
dwelling, the Dymaxion House. Its round shape minimized heat
loss and the amount of materials needed, weighing only a fraction
of a conventional house it could be placed on site from the
air. Assembled from permanent, prefabricated materials that
required no maintenance, the floor plan could be easily changed
as required.
Heated and cooled by natural means, it was designed
to be self sufficient, generating its own power with a diesel
generator. Bucky built a prototype, but like many of his designs,
it was never manufactured.
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Dymaxion car, and model A Ford
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In
1933, he developed the three-wheeled, rear engined, streamlined
Dymaxion Car. This car used the same engine and drive train
as the 1933 Ford Model A, but it was much faster and more fuel-efficient.
He intended it to fly, jump-jet style, when suitable alloys
and engines became available as he believed they would, in that
age of Science.
Three wheeled, and not much heavier that a VW Beetle,
the Dymaxion was nearly 20 feet long. Although it could U-turn
in its own length, it was too big for urban traffic, even in
America.
Ten years later, he made a smaller five-seater car with a tiny
engine at each wheel. This time, the front wheels steered, but
all three could be steered for tight city turns and sideways
movement into parking spaces. The rear wheel extended on a boom
to lengthen the wheelbase for travel at high speeds. With only
one engine needed for cruising, it was very fuel-efficient and
way before its time. Unfortunately, though the car performed
well, negative publicity resulting from an unfortunate fatal
accident in tests halted its production.
Bucky’s designs tended to be based on a geometry
that used triangles, circles and tetrahedrons more than the
traditional planes and rectangles. In 1948, he invented
the Geodesic dome, and was a pioneer in utilizing basic
geometical shapes in design.
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Deskey
furniture design
for Radio City Music Hall |
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Donald Deskey was an advertising executive before he
entered design. The rich interiors he designed, such as his
furniture for Radio City Music Hall in 1932 demonstrated his
enthusiasm for new building materials. Calling himself an ‘inventor’
and an admirer of the Bauhaus use of metals in furniture, he
used the new industrial materials: chrome steel, aluminium,
formica and bakelite in hundreds of modern designs.
The 1939 World's Fair, held in Flushing Meadows, New York, captured
the spirit of the times in the United States; optimism and futurism.
Norman Bel Geddes, a theatrical and industrial designer, created
a display for General Motors presenting a future shaped by automobiles
and superhighways. It foreshadowed how lifestyles were going
to change profoundly in the coming years.
But one of the most stunning displays was the pavilion of Finland.
Created by Alvar Aalto, a Finnish designer who described himself
as a humanist, he was one of the first major architects of the
modern movement to emerge in Scandinavia and Finland, and he
remains one of the most individual and poetic masters of functionalism
in modern architecture and furniture design.
Functionalism was one aspect of his design. His
work also was an expression of the organic relationship between
people, nature and buildings. Aalto's achievement lay in his
ability to coordinate those three components. He defined his
design work, or ‘building art’ he called it, as a synthesis
of life in materialised form and became widely known outside
his native Finland for his imaginative use of processed timber.
Modern
design is often criticised for its exclusiveness and inability
to harmonise with the demands of ordinary consumers. Alvar Aalto's
designs are an example of design that has managed to overcome
the barriers of style and taste. He believed in functionalism,
that the form of an article should be determined by its use,
and that it should be low cost. Although mass-produced, his
furniture was modern, elegant and retained the appealing imprint
of handicraft.
He developed his furniture designs to fit his architectural
projects, conceived as a comprehensive house design concept
- right down to the door knob. Drawn into the applied arts by
the idea of design as an integrated process, he said:
‘My furniture has rarely, if ever, come about as separate
designs. It is almost without exception created as part of
an architectonic whole...in other words, to go with my architecture.’
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Aalto chair
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His
furniture developed from simple sketches, and Aalto created
them in close collaboration with the craftsman. His most significant
building was in Finland, the Paimio Sanatorium, a building that
quickly established his reputation and demonstrated his pursuit
of artistic harmony through a synergy encompassing people, their
environment and the buildings in which they live. The furniture
he designed for the sanitorium had to be more comfortable than
the functional metal furniture then in vogue, for as he explained,
‘tubular and chromium surfaces are good solutions technically,
but psychophysically these materials are not good for the
human being. The sanitorium needed furniture that should be
light, flexible, (and) easy to clean. After extensive experimentation
in wood, the flexible system was discovered and a method and
material combined to produce furniture that was better for
the human touch and more suitable as the general material
for the long and painful life in a sanitorium.’
Aalto’s bent, laminated wood designs challenged the new metal
furniture and revealed processed wood as one of the new materials.
His use of bent, laminated plywood was explored by other designers
through the 30s, including, curiously, Marcel Breuer whose name
was synonymous with metal furniture, particularly from his time
at the Bauhaus, where he was among the first to exploit the
creative possibilities of tubular steel.
Breuer emigrated to Britain in 1935 to escape the
Nazis, and noticed the public aversion to metal furniture there.
He designed his wooden lounge chair as an easily made chair
which demanded no extensive factory facilities, unlike those
he made in metal. More fluid than his cube-shaped metal chairs,
the plywood frame echoed their continuous aluminium tube construction.
Bruno Mathsson produced a variation of Aalto’s chairs in 1934,
in Sweden. An originator of the Swedish modern movement in furniture,
he used laminated wood and hemp webbing in place of tubular
steel and leather. His designs came about after prolonged study
of the optimum positions for sitting, working and lounging.
Like Aalto, he rejected the design principles of the austere
Germanic machine aesthetic in favour of organic forms and a
commitment to the use of natural materials.
The Scandinavians succeeded in maintaining a human
element in the use of natural materials, an organic sensibility
that the Bauhaus aesthetic had put aside.
The Swedish design for the telephone, by the sculptor
Jean Heiberg for Ericsson in 1930 became the prototype for telephones
worldwide.
The popularity of Art Deco peaked at the 1939 World's Fair in
New York City. After this, tastes changed. Many viewed streamlining
used needlessly in consumer products as kitsch. Household
furnishings, after all, have no need for speed, or to overcome
wind resistance. Overly decorative geometry had dropped from
fashion by World War II and simple geometry in furnishings became
the norm.
Scandinavian design, however, gained widespread
popularity in the United States after it was exhibited at the
New York Fair in 1939.
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| Eames
stack chair |
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The
1950s were a fertile time in the history of the furniture industry.
Designers with backgrounds in architecture created organically
shaped pieces using the new technologies and materials developed
during the war. Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, and Harry Bertoia
created sleek, elegant and functional designs. Their innovative
furniture stacked, flexed and folded, and it was rearrangeable
and interchangeable.
The 1946 plywood chair designed by Charles Eames
grew from experiments he made in 1940 with Eero Saarinen in
moulding chair shells with compound curves. The most influential
piece of furniture after the war, it was widely copied. Designed
as a stackable chair, it succeeded a similar stackable chair
produced before the war in Switzerland by Hans Coray. Consisting
of a perforated aluminium shell the Swiss chair could be entirely
made by machine. Designed as outdoor furniture, it is still
manufactured to its original design. The appeal of Eames’ chair
lay in its minimal cost of materials and the organic look of
the laminated wood.
These designers were visionaries, working with new
materials available after World War II: acrylics, polyester
resins, fiberglass, and foam rubber. They also used the advanced
technologies of wood lamination, die stamping, and arc welding
in new ways.
Poul Henningsen, a Danish lighting designer, studied the dispersion
of light to devise lamps such as his ‘artichoke’ of 1958
in which the light was controlled to give direct and indirect
illumination. The harshness of the light bulb was diffused by
reflection off the shades rather than by being masked by diffusing
materials. In this way, Henningsen was able to direct the light
downward with one shade, while at the same time casting light
upwards with another.
Adjusting the position of the bulb and the colour
of the shades enabled him to create different lighting effects
for differing interiors.
New Italian design was characterised by sculptural shapes. The
main postwar designers were trained architects without work,
and they turned their architectural vision to product design.
The resulting organic, sculptural forms of their technical products
and furniture used a varety of new materials especially plywood
and plastic foam as brightly coloured upholstery.
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Vespa |
In
1950, Marcello Nizzoli redesigned the Olivetti typewriter, creating
a light and efficient portable machine, a design that would
be copied for decades. Nizzoli enclosed the complex mechanism
of the Lettera typewriter inside a sleek, organic shell which
made it look less complex, smaller and easier to use and carry.
He took over the design of all Olivetti’s products
and their corporate image in 1936 and rejected the accepted
theories of machine design of the time ('form follows function').
His work was characterised by sculpturally conceived rounded
forms and organic shapes. He said he worked towards ‘a freedom
of fantasy’ in his design work, and he approached it as
an interaction of relationships between the consumer and machine.
Whereas in the United States, designers were engaged to improve
production efficiency and increase sales, Nizzoli was employed
simply as a sculptor to style the body shell of the typewriter
and other Olivetti products, to create a visual image.
While
the Olivetti machine was influential worldwide, another Italian
product, developed at about the same time had a far greater
influence, particularly among the city youth culture of continental
Europe and especially in Britain in the early 1960s, -the Vespa.
This motorscooter epitomised the revival that occurred in Italian
design after the war, prompting Teague to comment:
‘this is the season of spring in contemporary Italian
art, with all the freshness and vitality and experimentation
of a great revival’
QMR97
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