EVERYDAY ART QUARTERLY No. 8
A Guide to Well Designed Products
Hilde Reiss [Editor], John Szarkowski [Staff photographer]
Hilde Reiss [Editor], John Szarkowski [Staff photographer]: EVERYDAY ART QUARTERLY [A Guide to Well Designed Products]. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, Summer 1948, Number 8. First Edition. Slim quarto. Thick printed stapled wrappers. 20 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. A very influential publication and quite uncommon. Wrappers creased from mailing, rubbed and lightly worn. Typed mailing address to rear panel, but a good or better copy.
8.5 x 11 softcover magazine with 20 pages devoted to Toys and the Design of Play:
- Magnet Master: four page article with 11 black and white photographs of the Arthur A. Carrara-designed toy, including the Designer’s biography. The Magnet Master was devolved in a partnership between Arthur Carrara, his brother Reno and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It was suggested, by the magazine Everyday Art Quarterly, as a toy for people of every age or intellectual conditions. About the toy Carrara wrote, in the catalog of the exposition of 1960 at the Milwaukee Art Center: “Magnet Master grew out of my experiments with the new found magnetic and electromagnetic metals. Every idea of man is first employed as a toy or in a toy. Every scientific principle was at first presented in a toy form. Magnet Master grew out of a comprehensive study of man’s methods of fastening materials (...) joinery techniques. The uses inherent in Magnet Master for architecture and other fields are apparent. As a study method Magnet Master was first exhibited and manufactured with the tremendous encouragement and financial help of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which deserves the credit or whatever popular acceptance this adventure has received. The unit shown here has been distributed around the world, it is hoped with some good effect.”
- Tyng Toy: single page article with 4 black and white photographs of the Anne Tyng-designed toy, including the Designer’s biography. Tyng developed her Tyng Toy in 1947, the year she joined Louis Kahn’s Philadelphia practice. Designing the modular, slot-together building set was an early step in the evolution of her groundbreaking ideas about architecture and geometry. The Toy came in three sets, ranging in size from 6 to 21 pieces. Sixteen toys could be made using the largest set, which came with a horse head for a rocking horse and wheels for a mini-car.
- Making Pictures:single page article about Carol Kottke’s forthcoming How To arts book.
- Toys:three page article with 12 black and white photographs of twelve different contemporary toys.
- Children’s Furniture:single page article with five photographs of childrens’ furniture from Baldwin Kingrey, Babee-Tenda, Dow Chemical, Robert Limpus [new DEsign, Inc.], and Charles Eames.
- Product Review:John Vassos lamps, William Armbruster cocktail tables, Bob Stocksdale salad set and folding tables by Charles Eames for the Herman Miller Furniture Company.
- Everyday Art In The Magazines:articles about modern design published in such magazines as Arts & Architecture, Interiors, Progressive Architecture and others.
- Books :review of Furniture from machines by Gordon Logie.
- Addresses:for designers, manufacturers, distributors, etc.
Arthur A. Carrara (American, 1914 – 1995) was born in Chicago to an immigrant Italian laborer who worked for the firm that supplied terra cotta ornament for the buildings of Louis Sullivan. Carrara grew up in the Lakeview neighborhood on the North side of Chicago, and continued to live there for most of his life. While in high school, one of Carrara's teachers recognized his nascent interest in architecture and accompanied Carrara and several other students to Frank Lloyd Wright's 1930 architectural exhibition and lecture, "To the Young Man in Architecture," at The Art Institute of Chicago. In 1931, Carrara graduated from the Smith-Hughes architectural course at Lane Technical High School, and began his study of architecture and engineering at the University of Illinois, from which he graduated in 1937. After college, Carrara worked briefly for Herbert B. Beidler, a Chicago architect, and John S. Van Bergen, formerly a draftsman in Wright's office.
During World War II, Carrara served with a topographic mapping battalion in the southwest Pacific theatre. While researching duplicating techniques for army engineer intelligence, he conceived the idea for the permanent transfer print, which he created several years later. In 1943, while stationed in Australia, he was commissioned by the Australian government to design the Cafe Borranical in Melbourne, a teahouse in which he incorporated his theories of the use of hydraulics and magnetics in architecture. In 1944, he was invited to assist in the organization of the City Planning Commission in the Philippines and in the planning for the rebuilding of Manila and Cebu. In 1947, Carrara was commissioned to design the Centro Escolar University in Manila, which had been destroyed during the war.
Carrara established his own architectural practice in Chicago in 1946 and opened a second office in Buffalo, New York, in the mid 1960s. The work he produced over the course of his career included not only private residences and corporate buildings but exhibition spaces and industrial products. He also exhibited his work in one-man shows and juried exhibitions and presented several lectures. Arthur A. Carrara died in 1995. [The Art Institute of Chicago]
Architect Anne Griswold Tyng (American, 1920 – 2011) paved the way for women in architecture and design. She graduated in the Harvard School of Design’s first co-ed class, and in 1949 she was the only woman in Pennsylvania to receive her architecture license. She is best known for having collaborated with Louis I. Kahn at his practice in Philadelphia, for 29 years. She served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for 27 years, teaching classes in morphology. She was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and Academician of the National Academy of Design.
Tyng received her bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College in 1942. Later, she studied with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at the architecture school at Harvard University. In 1944, she was among the school's first female graduates. Tyng was the only woman to enter the architecture licensing exam in 1949 and, at the test, one of the male proctors turned his back on her and refused to cooperate.
Tyng moved to Philadelphia and landed a job at Louis Kahn's architectural practice, Stonorov and Kahn, in 1945. Her fascination with complex geometrical shapes had a strong influence on several projects, most notably on the five cubes that comprise the Trenton Bath House and the triangular ceiling of Yale Art Gallery. Tyng also says that the concept for Kahn's famous "City Tower" design was largely her invention, though when the model was included in a show at the Museum of Modern Art, Kahn left her name off of the credit label at first. The two also collaborated on the Eserhick Studio and on Bryn Mawr's Erdman Hall.
She developed her Tyng Toy in 1947, the year she joined Louis Kahn’s Philadelphia practice. Designing the modular, slot-together building set was an early step in the evolution of her groundbreaking ideas about architecture and geometry. The Toy came in three sets, ranging in size from 6 to 21 pieces. Sixteen toys could be made using the largest set, which came with a horse head for a rocking horse and wheels for a mini-car.
Tyng designed the Four-Poster House in Mount Desert Island, Maine. Using logs and cedar shakes, she sought to make the house seem like an outgrowth of its natural environment. The house was also structured around the concept of a four-poster bed, with four central columns, each made from a cluster of four tree trunks, and a top floor entirely given over to a master bedroom. Evidence of her style can also be seen in aspects of her former residence, known as the Tyng house, in Philadelphia's Fitler Square. On its third floor, the building features a pyramidal timber-framed ceiling and slotted windows. Its staircase also utilizes openwork metal screens that she had originally chosen for the Yale Art Gallery project.
In 1989, Tyng published the essay, "From Muse to Heroine, Toward a Visible Creative Identity," which was a study of the development of female creative roles in architecture. In it, she wrote, "The steps from muse to heroine are accomplished by very few. Most women trained as architects marry architects. No longer the women behind the man, the woman architect in partnership with her husband may nevertheless by barely visible beside (or slightly behind) the hero," further noting, "The greatest hurdle for a woman in architecture today is the psychological development necessary to free her creative potential."
Tyng is named in many sources as Kahn's partner and muse. In a letter recommending her to the Graham Foundation, Buckminster Fuller called her, "Kahn's geometrical strategist." After a nine-year relationship with Kahn, she became pregnant and, because of the potential scandal, turned down a Fulbright Scholarship and departed in the Autumn of 1953 for Rome. During her year in Italy, where their daughter, Alexandra Tyng, was born, Tyng studied with the structural engineer and architect Pier Luigi Nervi and wrote weekly to Kahn. After their falling-out in 1964, Tyng left his firm, where she had been a partner.
Aged 82, Anne Tyng appeared in Nathaniel Kahn's documentary My Architect discussing her insights into his work and her experience with Louis Kahn. Dr. Tyng returned the building on which Kahn and Tyng first collaborated, the Trenton Bath House, for the first time since its completion, finding it neglected and in disrepair. Due in part to the attention that the film drew to the bath house's condition, the building was completely renovated in 2009. [Wikipedia]
Everyday Art Quarterly was published by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis starting in 1946. The editorial focus aimed to bring modern design to the masses through thoughtful examination of household objects and their designers. Everyday Art Quarterly was a vocal proponent of the Good Design movement (as represented by MoMA and Chicago's Merchandise Mart) and spotlighted the best in industrial and handcrafted design. When the magazine became Design Quarterly in 1954, the editors assumed a more international flair in their selection of material to spotlight.