INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Raymond Loewy
Raymond Loewy: INDUSTRIAL DESIGN. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1979. First edition. Square quarto. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Red silken cloth stamped in gold. Decorated endpapers. 252 pp. One fold-out. 700 + color and black and white illustrations. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Jacket with trivial edgewear, including a smal closed tear along the upper edge of the rear panel. A nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
10.75 x 10.75 hardcover book printed on glossy stock, 252 pages, with more than 700 color and black and white illustrations, sketches and photographs, including a full color fold-out.
The name Raymond Loewy is synonymous with industrial design. Loewy was one of the "big four" industrial designers, along with Walter Dorian Teague, Norman Bel Geddes and Henry Dreyfuss. This book is his personal testament to his legacy. A very impressive volume for aficionados of 20-th century industrial design.
Contents:
- Introduction: my life in design
- Industrial design by the decades
- Design illustrations and text
- Gestetner: In 1929 Loewy received his first industrial-design commission to contemporize the appearance of a duplicating machine by Gestetner.
- Hupmobile
- Pennsylvania Railroad: In 1937, Loewy established a relationship with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his most notable designs for the firm involved some of their passenger locomotives. He designed a streamlined shroud for K4s Pacific #3768 to haul the newly redesigned 1938 Broadway Limited. He followed by styling the experimental S1 locomotive, as well as the T1 class. In 1940, he designed a simplified version of the streamlined shroud for another four K4s. In 1942, he designed the streamlined shroud for the experimental duplex engine Q1 which was his last work of streamlining PRR's steam engine. In 1946, at the Pennsylvania Railroad's request, he restyled Baldwin's diesels with a distinctive "sharknose" reminiscent of the T1. He also designed the experimental steam turbine engine V1 "Triplex" for PRR which was never built. While he did not design the famous GG1 electric locomotive, he improved its appearance with welded rather than riveted construction, and he added a pinstripe paint scheme to highlight its smooth contours. In addition to locomotive design, Loewy's studios provided many designs for the Pennsylvania Railroad, including stations, passenger-car interiors, and advertising materials.
- Princess Anne
- Coldspot: Loewy’s styling for this Sears-Roebuck product established his reputation as an industrial designer.
- International Harvester
- Starliner: Loewy had a long and fruitful relationship with American car maker Studebaker. Studebaker first retained Loewy and Associates and Helen Dryden as design consultants in 1936 and in 1939 Loewy began work with the principal designer Virgil Exner. Their designs first began appearing with the late-1930s Studebakers. Loewy also designed a new logo to replace the "turning wheel" that had been the Studebaker trademark since 1912. During World War II, American government restrictions on in-house design departments at Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler prevented official work on civilian automobiles. Because Loewy's firm was independent of the fourth-largest automobile producer in America, no such restrictions applied. This permitted Studebaker to launch the first all-new postwar automobile in 1947, two years ahead of the "Big Three." His team developed an advanced design featuring flush-front fenders and clean rearward lines. The Loewy staff, headed by Exner, also created the Starlight body, which featured a rear-window system that wrapped 180° around the rear seat. In addition to the iconic bullet-nosed Studebakers of 1950 and 1951, Loewy and his team created the 1953 Studebaker line, highlighted by the Starliner and Starlight coupes. The Starlight has consistently ranked as one of the best-designed cars of the 1950s in lists compiled since by Collectible Automobile, Car and Driver, and Motor Trend. The '53 Starliner, recognized today as "one of the most beautiful cars ever made", was radical in appearance, as radical in its way as the 1934 Airflow. However, it was beset by production problems. To brand the new line, Loewy also contemporized Studebaker's logo again by applying the "Lazy S" element. His final commission of the 1950s for Studebaker was the transformation of the Starlight and Starliner coupes into the Hawk series for the 1956 model year.
- Avanti: In the spring of 1961, Studebaker's new president, Sherwood Egbert, recalled Loewy to design the Avanti. Egbert hired him to help energize Studebaker's soon-to-be-released line of 1963 passenger cars to attract younger buyers. Despite the short 40-day schedule allowed to produce a finished design and scale model, Loewy agreed to take the job. He recruited a team consisting of experienced designers, including former Loewy employees John Ebstein; Bob Andrews; and Tom Kellogg, a young student from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The team worked in a house leased for the purpose in Palm Springs, California. (Loewy also had a home in Palm Springs that he designed himself.) Each team member had a role. Andrews and Kellogg handled sketching, Ebstein oversaw the project, and Loewy was the creative director and offered advice.
- Shell
- NASA : Raymond Loewy worked for NASA from 1967 to 1973 as a Habitability Consultant for design of the Skylab space station, launched in 1973. One of NASA's goals in hiring him was to improve the psychology, safety, and comfort of manned spacecraft. Due to long duration confinement in limited interior space in micro-g with almost non-existing variability in environment, the comfort and well-being of the crew through the use of esthetics played high importance. Loewy suggested a number of improvements to the layout, such as the implementation of a wardroom, where the crew could eat and work together, the wardroom window, the dining table and the color design, among others. A key feature of Raymond Loewy's design for the sleep compartments was that the floor plan for each of the three was different to create a sense of individual identity for each compartment. Elements of the crew quarters included sleep restraints, storage lockers, privacy partitions, lighting, a light baffle, privacy curtains, mirrors, towel holders and a communication box. The table was designed by Loewy in order to avoid creating hierarchical positions for crew members during long missions. Food was eaten using forks, knives and spoons, which were held in place on the table by magnets. Liquids were drunk from squeezable plastic containers.
- Maya
- Appendices
Raymond Loewy arrived in New York from France in 1922 with little more than his military uniform (which he had redesigned) and a $40 pension, but a sketch he'd made en route earned him an invitation to Condé Nast and other publishers to work as an illustrator. Soon celebrated as an expert on the new fashion of art deco, Loewy moved from illustration to window dressing for Macy's to his first industrial design, a duplicating machine for the British Gestetner company. By the end of the 1940s Loewy International proclaimed itself as the largest design agency in New York, responsible for the look of everything from lipsticks to locomotives. This book describes Loewy's impact on American design, fashion, and industry, and looks at such design successes as steam and diesel-electric train engines, the Studenaker Starline and Avanti cars, the Coldspot refrigerator and the Hallicrafter radio, and pioneering shop interiors for Lord and Taylor and Foley's.
Often referred to as the century of design, the 20th century saw the rise of the engineer-artist, the industrial designer who created the forms and the functionality of the products that advances in technology and industry made possible. This series looks at some of the most important designers of the mid-century, offering critical analyses of their careers and designs, illustrated with black and white photos and drawings on nearly every page.
Raymond Loewy (France, 1893 – 1986) was a French-born American industrial designer who achieved fame for the magnitude of his design efforts across a variety of industries. He was recognized for this by Time magazine and featured on its cover on October 31, 1949.
He spent most of his professional career in the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1938. Among his designs were the Shell, Exxon, TWA and the former BP logos, the Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, Coca-Cola vending machines and bottle redesign, the Lucky Strike package, Coldspot refrigerators, the Studebaker Avanti and Champion, and the Air Force One livery. He was engaged by equipment manufacturer International Harvester to overhaul its entire product line, and his team also assisted competitor Allis-Chalmers. He undertook numerous railroad designs, including the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1, S-1, and T1 locomotives, the color scheme and Eagle motif for the first streamliners of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, and a number of lesser known color scheme and car interior designs for other railroads. His career spanned seven decades.
The press referred to Loewy as The Man Who Shaped America, The Father of Streamlining and The Father of Industrial Design.
Loewy was born in Paris in 1893, the son of Maximilian Loewy, a Jewish journalist from Austria, and a French mother, Marie Labalme. Loewy distinguished himself early with the design of a successful model aircraft, which won the Gordon Bennett Cup for model airplanes in 1908. By the following year, he had commercial sales of the plane, named the Ayrel.
He graduated in 1910 from the University of Paris. He continued his studies in advanced engineering at École Duvignau de Lanneau in Paris, but stopped his studies early to serve in World War I, eventually graduating after the war in 1918. Loewy served in the French army during World War I (1914–1918), attaining the rank of captain. He was wounded in combat and received the Croix de Guerre. After the war he moved to New York, where he arrived in September 1919.
In Loewy's early years in the United States, he lived in New York and found work as a window designer for department stores, including Macy's, Wanamaker's and Saks in addition to working as a fashion illustrator for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
In 1980, Loewy retired at the age of 87 and returned to his native France. He died in his Monte Carlo residence on July 14, 1986.