Engineered to Sell by Jan L. Logemann

Author:Jan L. Logemann [Logemann, Jan L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226660295
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

The European emigrés who came to the United States from politically charged traditions of interwar design reform were unlikely candidates to succeed in the context of American consumer capitalism or in an American society marked by the politics of the emerging Cold War. It comes as little surprise that FBI informants regularly speculated about possible communist sympathies among Bauhaus members or that in 1941 police searched the house of the fifty-eight-year old Harvard professor Walter Gropius, because they had been (falsely) tipped off that his “cellar was stocked with ammunition, guns etc.”120 Looking back at the complicated history of the American Bauhaus’s engagement with commercial design in the United States, we can ask how significant its impact ultimately was. Independent commercial designers, such as Loewy or Teague, vastly outmatched their Bauhaus contemporaries with regard to the practical design work they produced. Design historians like Regina Blaszczyk, furthermore, have cautioned against overestimating the mass market influence of elite designers while overlooking the legions of “fashion intermediaries,” the vast number of unknown design professionals in companies, department stores, and ad agencies who were much more intimately tied to the production process and ultimately more responsive to consumer inputs.121

Still, the radical modernist and reform-minded emigrés were an important part of the story of midcentury American consumer design in several ways. They helped shape the professional discourse during a formative period for American industrial design. As teachers in Chicago and elsewhere they passed on their concepts and methodologies, now adapted to an American context, to a new generation of American industrial designers. Their own commercial and experimental design work set standards that were discussed by trade journals and displayed in exhibitions such as “Good Design.” Their work inspired, if often in modified form, the work of other professionals. As we have seen, American art directors and other fashion intermediaries in many ways took their cues not only from consumers but also from their emigré teachers and colleagues.

In 1946, Time magazine reported on the Chicago Bauhaus and on the work of Moholy-Nagy, emphasizing the corporate support for the Institute of Design coming from companies such as Marshall Fields, United Airlines, and Sears. Their support, the magazine noted, was supposed to “pay off in the form of broadly trained designers equipped to create new products for future markets.”122 Critics of the emigrés often underestimated the degree to which the Werkbund, Bauhaus, and other reform traditions of the 1920s had already kept consumer appeal and mass production in mind. Designers such as Kramer, Bayer, or Breuer did not see a contradiction between original artistic achievement and commercial success. More important, the social engineering ideas that influenced the design philosophy of groups such as CIAM and the Bauhaus struck a chord among more commercially oriented consumer engineers. Their emphasis on functional modernism, on rationality and efficiency resonated in the contexts of productivity efforts, New Deal planning, and wartime and postwar consumption.

As we move toward postwar affluence, however, some of the designs championed by the emigrés proved to be too sober and too cerebral.

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