INDUSTRIAL DESIGN IN AMERICA 1954
The Society of Industrial Designers, Alvin Lustig [Designer]
Alvin Lustig [Designer], The Society of Industrial Designers [Editors]: INDUSTRIAL DESIGN IN AMERICA 1954. New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, Inc., 1954. First edition. Quarto. Printed uncoated dust jacket. Embossed oatmeal cloth stamped in black. Decorated endpapers. 224 pp. 399 black and white illustrations. 37 color plates. Jacket and book design by Alvin Lustig. A superb production that must be seen to be believed. Tiny spot to front jacket panel. A nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket. Uncommon thus.
8.5 x 11.25 hardcover book with embossed boards and 224 pages, 399 b/w illustrations and 37 color plates highlighting outstanding industrial design from 1954. Alvin Lustig's design for this volume rates among the best of his career, making this book both an extraordinarily useful reference volume, as well as a genuinely beautiful period object as well. Highly recommended.
Publishing to mark the 10th anniversary of the founding of The Society of Industrial Designers, this picture-and-text survey illustrates all the best of modern American industrial design. Includes many examples of furniture, ceramics, housewares, appliances, automobiles, buildings, retail displays, showrooms, radios, projectors, televisions, and many other objects designed for the burgeoning postwar middle class.
- Introduction: The Industrialization of Design
- Appearance Design
- Better Use of Materials
- Visual Selling Aids
- New Approaches
- Lowering Cost of Manufacturing
- Safety and Health
- Color
- Product Character
- Convenience of Use
- Designs Abroad
- Business Enterprises Served by S.I.D
- S.I.D. Consultant Design Offices
- S.I.D. Company Design Offices
- Contributing Foreign Design Organizations
Includes work by the following designers and companies: Mengel Furniture Company, Jack Morgan, Phil Cutler, Hunt Lewis, Waltman Associates, Melmac, Russel Wright, Viktor Schreckengost, Jon Hauser, Dave Chapman, Reino Aarnio, Mell Hoffman, Hettrick Manufacturing Company, Planner, Group, Winchendon Furniture Company, Raoul Lambert, Motorola T.V., Donald Deskey, Robert Davol Budlong, Harold Van Doren, Calvin Furniture Company, Peter Muller-Munk, Onnie Mankki, Mac Tornquist, Egmont Arens, Walter Dorwin Teague, General Electric, Melvin (Mel) Boldt, Rudolph Koepf, Carl Otto, Brooks Stevens, Henry Dreyfuss, Imperial Glass Company, Smith-Scherr, Arbuck, Paul Mccobb, J. M. Little, Raymond Loewy, Stig Lindberg, Kay Bojesen, Eric Lemesre, Ernest Race, Henry Titus Aspinwall, John David Beinert, Karl Brocken, Sid Bersudsky, Good Design Associates, Gordon Florian, Wesley Junker, Harold W. Darr Associates, William Goldsmith, George Charles, Peter Cherry, Jack Collins, Franceso Collura, Laird Covey, Charles Cruze, Thomas Currie, Frederic Grover Associates, Lurelle Guild Associates, L. Garth Huxtable, George Jergenson, Leonard Keller, Strother Macminn, Reinecke & Associates, Richard Reineman, Joseph Platt, William O'neil, Carl Reynolds, Harper Richards, Hudson Roysher, George Sakier, Brooks Stevens Associates, Fred Storm, Peter Quay Yang, and many, many others.
"By the time he died at the age of forty in 1955, [Lustig] had already introduced principles of Modern art to graphic design that have had a long-term influence on contemporary practice. He was in the vanguard of a relatively small group who fervently, indeed religiously, believed in the curative power of good design when applied to all aspects of American life. He was a generalist, and yet in the specific media in which he excelled he established standards that are viable today.
"Lustig created monuments of ingenuity and objects of aesthetic pleasure. Whereas graphic design history is replete with artifacts that define certain disciplines and are also works of art, for a design to be so considered it must overcome the vicissitudes of fashion and be accepted as an integral part of the visual language." -- Steven Heller