INTERIORS & INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
July 1946
Francis de N. Schroeder [Editor],
Alvin Lustig [Cover Designer]
Francis de N. Schroeder [Editor]: INTERIORS & INDUSTRIAL DESIGN. New York: Whitney Publications, Volume 105, no. 12, July 1946. Original edition. Quarto. Perfect bound and sewn printed illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Illustrated articles and trade advertisements. Cover by Alvin Lustig—his only cover design for this publication. Wrappers lightly worn and soiled, but a very good copy.
9 x 12 magazine [the first issue of the new, larger trim size] with 136 pages of color and black and white examples of the best modern American interior and industrial design, circa 1946 -- offering a magnificent snapshot of the blossoming modern movement after World War II. A very desirable, vintage publication in terms of form and content: high quality printing and clean, functional design and typography and excellent photographic reproduction make this a spectacular addition to a midcentury design collection. Highly recommended.
- Charles Eames: A Designer's Progress to the Development of Plywood Furniture. 8 pages and 21 black and white photographs [primarily by Herbert Matter] by the Eames Office featuring early Evans prototypes of the molded plywood chairs we all know and love as well as the coffee tables and the unproduced Case Goods originally developed with Eero Saarinen for the 1941 MoMA Organic Design Competition. Eames Office employee Benton Urmston is incorrectly identified as Charles Eames in one of the photographs. The Herman Miller furniture lines from 1948 has been called the most influential groups of furniture ever manufactured. This early reference to the Eames Plywood Furniture predates the Herman Miller manufacturing/distribution contracts from 1946, and was current to the initial trade-only prototypical offerings by the Venice-based Evans Products Co. This article was a direct result of the first promotional push for the Eames Plywood furniture initiated by Alfred Auerbach Associates in December 1945. A very cool original reference item, if that's the kind of thing you're into.
- For your Informtion: the "Barwa" chair!
- Cottage For Cape Cod: Marcel Breuer Designs His Summer House For An Ideal Site: 4 pages with a 2-sided fold-out site illustration by D. C. Byrd.
- Junior's Functional Domain: Room For Teenage Occupants By 3 Designers: Alexander Girard, Florence Fincke and Paul Bry.
- Display Art: Don Smith
- Decentralizationa and Industrial Design
- On Designing For Industry: By Eva Ziesel, Instructor At Pratt Institute
- Wallpapers
- Lessons From Lasalle Street
- Industrial Design: Leo Skidmore And Donald Deskey
- Newsreel: new Jens Risom designs from H. G. Knoll.
- Merchandise Cues:
- People Addres Book
- Interiors Sources
- And much more.
"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
George Nelson famously served as Editorial contributor to Interiors, where he used the magazine as his bully pulpit for bringing modernism to middle-class America. Interiors was a hard-core interior design publication, as shown by their publishing credo: "Published for the Interior Designers Group which includes: interior designers, architects who do interior work, industrial designers who specialize in interior furnishings, the interior decorating departments of retail stores, and all concerned with the creation and production of interiors-- both residential and commercial."
Interiors from this period remain an amazing vintage mid-century resource, not to be missed. Excellent vintage resource for wallpaper, rugs and floorware, funiture, lighting, decorative objects, etc.