Mr. Streamlining

Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) is the subject of a new book. We don’t think of Bel Geddes as the designer of an iconic product as are his contemporaries Walter Dorwin Teague (the Kodak Brownie), Raymond Loewy (the International Harvester tractor), Henry Dreyfuss (the classicBell telephone handset), or Eliot Noyes (the IBM Selectric typewriter). What Bel Geddes is best remembered for is bringing the streamlining style to a variety of consumer products. He has been criticized for indiscriminately streamlining radios as well as cars, although this does not seem any different than architects giving décor or chairs the Baroque—or the Bauhaus—look. Bel Geddes was famously responsible for the Futurama exhibit in the General Motors pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. One of the people who worked on that project was a young Eero Saarinen, and as Jeffrey L. Meikle points out in an interesting essay in the book, Bel Geddes’s extravagant brand of “commercial modernism” (as opposed to functional modernism), was an important influence on Saarinen’s later work. Indeed, it is a marked–if dubious–credit to Bel Geddes that he pioneered the public image of the high-profile designer that would become a later fixture in the architectural world. Enter the starchitect.