Fat Man The mushroom cloud of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki Japan, 1945
Cold War European Military Alliances
The Kitchen Debate U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the American NaNonal ExhibiNon Sokolniki Park, Moscow, 1959
Would it not be bePer to compete in the relaNve merit of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?
ideology + design = “the good life”
ideology + design = “the good life”
the Marshall Plan: containment through consumerism
freedom = consumerism
fashion +wealth +mobility
“the world’s most eloquent possession”
Cadillac Fleetwood USA, ca. 1950’s
the “new look” Dior, 1947
leisure Nme + consumerism AT&T Princess phone, Henry Dreyfuss, 1959
consumer lifestyles: homemaking as purchasing
O l i v e ^
an Italian shopping trip…
Eliot Noyes: Director of Design IBM
IBM and the imaging of an American corporaNon
Technological change should be encouraged to meet our own increasing industrial needs, to simulate our social and economic progress, and to face successfully the long-‐term challenge of internaNonal Communism. -‐Thomas Watson Jr., 1960
IBM and the imaging of an American corporaNon
IBM: Data Processing Center
IBM’s “White Room” the aestheNcs of the informaNon age
all American modernism
Charles and Ray Eames: leg splints to lounge chairs
Charles and Ray Eames: leg splints to lounge chairs
A design may be called organic when there is an harmonious organizaNon of the parts within the whole, according to structure, material, and purpose. Within this definiNon there can be no vain ornamentaNon or superfluity, but the part of beauty is none the less great -‐-‐ in ideal choice of material, in visual refinement, and in the raNonal elegance of things intended for use.
Eliot Noyes, 1940
Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen: chair “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” compeNNon at MoMA, 1940
“ra1onal elegance of things intended for use…”
Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests in our power to assimilate the machine. UnNl we have absorbed the lessons of objecNvity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly human.
The economic: the objecNve: and finally the integraNon of these principles in a new concepNon of the organic -‐-‐ these are the marks, already discernible, of our assimilaNon of the machine not merely as an instrument of acNon but as a valuable mode of life. Eliot Noyes, “Organic Design in Home Furnishings,” catalogue, MoMA, 1940
Ergonomics
the science of the average (American)
Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People, 1955
Eames House: Eames Storage Unit
easy boxes for modern living
Eames Storage Unit (ESU)
Glimpses of the U.S.A. designed by Charles and Ray Eames for American NaNonal ExhibiNon Sokolniki Park, Moscow, 1959
Glimpses of the U.S.A.
Glimpses of the U.S.A. designed by Charles and Ray Eames for American NaNonal ExhibiNon Sokolniki Park, Moscow, 1959