INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
May 1961
Ralph Caplan [Editor], Peter Bradford [Art Director]
New York: Whitney Publications, Inc., Volume 8, Number 5, May 1961. Original Edition. Side-stitched perfect bound wrappers. 102 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Multiple paper stocks. Elaborate graphic design throughout. Wrappers lightly spotted with chipped spine heel, but a very good copy of this primo issue.
9 x 12 magazine with 102 pages and illustrated throughout and printed on different stocks, including an amazing variety of editorial content. Here is what the publishers wanted this magazine to accomplish: "A bi-monthly review of form and technique in designing for industry. Published for active industrial designers and the design executives throughout industry who are concerned with product design, development and marketing."
This issue of INDUSTRIAL DESIGN celebrated all the best of modern American industrial design. Includes many examples of furniture, ceramics, housewares, appliances, automobiles, buildings, radios, projectors, televisions, and many other objects designed for the burgeoning postwar middle class. Contents include:
- Editorial
- Exhibitions
- Mathematica designed by Ray and Charles Eames for IBM: 6 pages and 9 black and white photographs and plans. “Mathematics has been called "The Queen of the Sciences" for its intrinsic beauty and because it has mothered a host of other sciences. Traditionally, its branches have been arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics and logic. It forms the base of many practical sciences such as physics, chemistry, geology and meteorology. It provides the foundation for cultural arts such as music, art and architecture. It is rapidly being adapted as a basic tool by the social sciences and humanities- for studies of population, political trends and economic theories.”
- General Dynamics by Erik Nitsche. Four pages with a tipped-in 8-page color insert of the Dynamic America Exhibition Catalog, designed by Erik Nitsche. Elegantly designed presentation of the history of General Dynamics -- and maybe America too: "It is the chronicle of a tumultuous period, of a nation oscillating between war and peace, of a people committed to a scientific future both to protect and advance Western civilization."
- Biology of Man at the Museum of Natural History
- Building: zippered curtain wall
- Electronics: the 1961 IRE Show
- Packaging: new materials, new techniques
- Transportation: International Auto Show:
- Design Review: Garden Equipment
- Regular features include Contributors’ Profiles, Letters, News, Editorial, Technics, Design Review, and Manufacturers Literature.
Mathematica: A World of Numbers… and Beyond was a kinetic and static exhibition of mathematical concepts designed by Charles and Ray Eames, originally debuted at the California Museum of Science and Industry in 1961. Duplicates have since been made, and they (as well as the original) have been moved to other institutions.
In March, 1961 a new science wing at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles opened. The IBM Corporation had been asked by the Museum to make a contribution; IBM in turn asked the famous California designer team of Charles Eames and his wife Ray Eames to come up with a good proposal. The result was that the Eames Office was commissioned by IBM to design an interactive exhibition called Mathematica: A World of Numbers... and Beyond.
The 3,000-square-foot (280 m2) exhibition stayed at the Museum until January 1998, making it the longest running of any corporate sponsored museum exhibition. Furthermore, it is the only one of the dozens of exhibitions designed by the Office of Charles and Ray Eames that is still extant. This original Mathematica exhibition was reassembled for display at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, July 30 through October 1, 2000. It is now owned by and on display at the New York Hall of Science.
In November, 1961 an exact duplicate was made for Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, where it was shown until late 1980. From there it was relocated to the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts, where it is permanently on display. In January 2014, the exhibit temporarily closed to undergo a much-needed year-long refurbishment, and has since reopened in a new location at the Museum of Science as of April 2015.
Another copy was made for the IBM Pavilion at the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair. Subsequently it was briefly on display in Manhattan, and was then installed in the Pacific Science Center in Seattle where it stayed until 1980. It was briefly re-installed in New York City at the 590 Madison Ave IBM Headquarters Building, before being moved to SciTrek in Atlanta, but that organization was shut down in 2004 due to funding cuts. The exhibit was then shipped to Petaluma, California to the daughter of Charles Eames, Lucia Eames. As of 2015, the exhibit is in the hands of the Eames family, and some elements have been on display at the Eames office.
Some of displays are minimally interactive, in that they start to operate at the push of a button. Other displays are motorized and run continuously, or operate automatically on a fixed cycle as long as power is supplied. The moving display elements combine with noise made by balls falling through the probability machine, to fill the exhibit space with an atmosphere of continuous activity. [wikipedia]
Here is former ID editor Ralph Caplan's recounting the magazines birth: "Fifty years ago, the publisher Charlie Whitney ran into Henry Dreyfuss. 'Henry,' he said, 'I'm about to publish a magazine for industrial designers.' 'Wonderful,' Henry replied. 'There are 14 of us.' Caplan remembered, "I.D. was not begun as a magazine for industrial designers, but as a magazine for anyone who had a stake in design and cared about it. This allowed a great deal of editorial latitude."
In DESIGN LITERACY (Second Edition, Allworth Press), Steven Heller wrote an essay describing the historical significance of Industrial Design magazine: “Industrial Design was the brainchild of publisher Charles Whitney, who also published the successful Interiors. In 1953 he was convinced by his friend and advisor George Nelson that the time was right to introduce a specialized periodical devoted to practitioners of this burgeoning field. Interiors was already featuring its own industrial design column that had evolved into a discrete section, which Whitney realized had commercial potential as a spinoff. Interiors was also so beautifully designed that Industrial Design could have no less the visual panache of a coffee table book/magazine, replete with foldouts and slipsheets, not unlike the legendary design magazine Portfolio, published between 1949 and 1951. To accomplish this an eminent art director was sought. This was the age of great magazine art directors -- including Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Liberman, Otto Storch, Cipe Pineles, and Alan Hurlburt -- and Whitney fervently believed that a magazine's design would be the deciding factor in its success. Hence Lustig was entrusted with considerable authority to design the magazine as he saw fit.”
“On the editorial side, however, Whitney decided to take a calculated risk by promoting two young Interiors associate editors to co-editors of Industrial Design. Jane Fisk (now Jane Thompson of the architectural firm Thompson & Wood in Cambridge) and Deborah Allen may have been inexperienced in the field of industrial design but nevertheless had a clear plan to introduce a distinctly journalistic sensibility into professional publishing that emphasized criticism and analysis rather than the puff pieces common to the genre. As it turned out, this became a point of philosophical contention between the designer and editors.”
“If they had a choice the editors would have preferred an art director who, as Thompson explained, "would have been in the trenches with us," a team player with journalistic instincts rather than a distant presence with a formalist sensibility. Because Lustig designed the initial dummy and subsequent two issues in his own studio and returned with the completed layouts to the editorial offices he had made certain assumptions about the presentation of content that were often inconsistent with the editors' vision. "We did not want the words to be gray space, we wanted them to have meaning," recalled Thompson about wanting more spontaneous design responses to the material. But instead of being journalistically intuitive, Lustig imposed his formal preconceptions, and designed the magazine as he would a book.”
“Blocks of text type were indeed used as gray matter to frame an abundance of precisely silhouetted photographs. But if there was a problem it was more in the editors' minds than Lustig's design. While it was not as journalistically paced as say, a Life magazine, it was respectfully, indeed elegantly neutral allowing, for a wide range of material to be presented without interference. Moreover, it was what Whitney wanted, so the editors reconciled themselves to building the magazine's editorial reputation through informative features written by authors not previously associated with trade publishing.”
“Thompson nevertheless hated the first cover with its tight grid and silhouetted photographs. Instead she wanted to disrupt the design purity with a few well composed coverlines. She further favored a conceptual method of intersecting photography, resulting in an editorial idea, not a pure design. Lustig thought coverlines would sully the design and intersecting ideas would be too contrived. Years later, Thompson grudgingly admitted that maybe Lustig's judgment was wiser: "He wanted to make a strong simple statement, which he believed (perhaps erroneously since Industrial Design did not have to compete on the newsstand) had to stand up against the covers of the elegant fashion magazines." Lustig's design set the standard for future covers, and his successor, Martin Rosensweig, continued to produce covers for a few years afterward that more rigidly adhered to the same formal practices.”
“Despite these creative tensions, the early issues of Industrial Design reveal a shift in the nature of professional publishing from a trade to cultural orientation that was in no small way underscored by Lustig's classically modern design.”