INTERIORS + INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
February 1947
Francis de N. Schroeder [Editor],
Ladislav Sutnar [Cover Designer]
Francis de N. Schroeder [Editor]: INTERIORS + INDUSTRIAL DESIGN. New York: Whitney Publications [Volume 106, no. 7] February 1947. Original edition. Quarto. Perfect bound and sewn printed illustrated wrappers. 156 pp. Illustrated articles and trade advertisements. Wrappers lightly worn and soiled with mild spine wear. Interior unmarked and very clean. Cover by Ladislav Sutnar. A very good or better copy.
9 x 12 magazine with 156 pages of color and black and white examples of the best modern American interior and industrial design, circa 1947 -- 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.
- The first installment of the Series "Designing Information" by Ladislav Sutnar and and K. Lönberg-Holm: 15 pages of elaborate design printed in two colors. The "Designing Information" Series was commissioned by Interiors magazine and originally appeared in three parts during February, March and April of 1947. “In emphasizing the importance of information today, the authors stress the increasing need for developing the most advanced techniques of visual ization to devise information tools of wider comprehension. This need itself makes greater demands upon design in information and requires dissemination of information on design to a vaster audience.” — Francis d. N. Schroeder
- New Furniture by Marcel Breuer: 5 pages.
- Paul Rand, Industrial Designer: 4 pages devoted to Rand's packaging design.
- Interiors Contributors: illustrated profiles of Marcel Breuer, Paul Rand, and K. Lönberg-Holm.
- Interiors Bookshelf: review of Paul Rand's Thoughts on Design.
- Architects Studio By Conrad Wachsmann and Serge Chermayeff [with fold-out].
- Modern Rooms Of The Last Fifty Years by Edgar Kaufmann: Includes work by Charles Eames, Marcel Breuer, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Edward D. Stone, Walter Bogner, George Fred Keck, Walter Gropius, G. A. Berg, Erwin Gutkind, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier And Pierre Jeanerret, Josef Frank, Josef Hoffman, Charles Rennie Macintosh and others.
- Furniture News From France by Saul Steinberg [with fold-out].
- And much more.
Ladislav Sutnar (1897 – 1976) arrived in the United States on April 14th, 1939 as the exhibition designer in charge of the Czechoslovakian pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. Sutnar was the Director of the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague and enjoyed a reputation as one of the leading Czech proponents of Functionalist graphic and industrial design.
Unfortunately for Sutnar’s American assignment, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist the previous month. Germany invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, and divided the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the puppet Slovak State. The dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the outbreak of World War II stranded Sutnar in New York City where he remained and worked for the rest of his life.
By 1939 many former Bauhaus faculty members—Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, and others—had won teaching positions at various American Universities. These educators were instrumental in bringing European modernism to American architecture and design. America offered the Europeans not only a safe haven, but also great opportunities to make their modernist visions reality. The dynamically developing US building industry and the open mass-production market permitted the exiled Avant-Garde to continue pursuing their ideas in a democratically minded society.
It was in this exile community that Paul Rand introduced Sutnar to Knud Lönberg-Holm, the director of Information Research for Sweet’s Catalog Service, the mediator for trade, construction and hardware catalogs that were collected in huge binders and distributed to businesses and architects throughout the United States.
In 1941 Lönberg-Holm appointed Sutnar as chief designer of the Information Research Division. Together the two men used modern functional principles to solve the contemporary problem of information organization and —most importantly—retrieval. During the next 20 years at Sweet’s Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm defined and pioneered the field now called information design.
Sweet’s Catalog Service (established in 1906) was an information clearing house, evaluating hundreds of catalogs of individual manufacturers with the aim of making the resulting information searachable in an optimal way. Information organization was the central issue, and optimizing it through visual means was an important element in the enterprise, hence the need for a competent art director.
U. S. industrial catalog production in the early 1940s was not in tune with the faster rhythms of the modern tempo. According to an undated internal Sweet’s memorandum “ . . . an industrial catalog is far from an inspiring project, we picture it as cumbersome, colorless, indifferently-printed item of necessity nothing [other] than dreary inventory . . .”
Major flaws included a proliferation of long descriptive texts and mediocre layout, as the manufacturers usually commissioned their catalog production to local printers who simply followed their every whim. The need for informative, relevant and quick-to-read advertising, common in Europe for more than a decade, appeared in the U. S. only with the heightened tempo of production due to the war effort.
During their tenure at Sweet’s from 1944 and 1950 Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm wrote and designed three publications on information design, delivering the most definitive explanation of their mission and in turn they succeeded in revolutionizing the field of information design.
Catalog Design [1944] introduced the basic concepts in catalog design. Designing Information [1947] applied the basic concepts of information design to a broader range, and Catalog Design Progress [1950] further developed ideas in visual communication. All three books demonstrate the very thesis they had worked to develop at Sweet’s — information that is easier to read is easier to comprehend.
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. [sutnar_2023]