American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow

by David A. Hanks, Anne Hoy

The twentieth-century's fast cars, trains, and planes promised to conquer space and time; their aerodynamic styling and metallic bodies embodied a new and modern beauty that enchanted American designers from the late 1920s to the 1950s. Streamlining became popular for everything, including toy scooters, typewriters, power tools, teakettles, Coca-Cola bottles, Lucky Strike packaging, Fiestaware pitchers, Studebaker cars, Greyhound buses, and the 20th Century Limited train.This book celebrates streamlining as epitomized by the work of Raymond Loewy, Donald Deskey, Henri Dreyfuss, Russel Wright, and Norman Bel Geddes, and introduces other industrial designers, also highlighting the resurgence of streamlining among international vanguard designers from the 1980s to the present.Patent drawings and period photographs demonstrate the usage of these dynamically styled objects. Two hundred objects drawn from the Eric Brill Collection (recently donated to the American Friends of Canada)

Genres: Design

280 pages, Hardcover

First published August 30, 2005

Reviews

[Nell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every so often, when I wonder why so much bad design surrounds us, I get this book from the library and peruse it again--more for the photos than the text, but it does explain the technological, economic, and social aspects of how streamlined design arose, got modified, and endures.

[sinfull_scarlet · Rating 5 out of 5]

fabulous! lovely pictures and detailed descriptions of art deco pieces