Designing Modern America

An expansive take on American Art Deco that explores Chicago's pivotal role in developing the architecture, graphic design, and product design that came to define middle-class style in the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Midway Gardens, the iconic Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Marshall Field’s famed window displays: despite the differences in scale and medium, each belongs to the broad current of an Art Deco style that developed in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. This ambitious overview of the city’s architectural, product, industrial, and graphic design between 1910 and 1950 offers a fresh perspective on a style that would come to represent the dominant mode of modernism for the American middle class. Lavishly illustrated with 325 images, the book narrates Art Deco’s evolution in 101 key works, carefully curated and chronologically organized to tell the story of not just a style but a set of sensibilities. Critical essays from leading figures in the field discuss the ways in which Art Deco created an entire visual universe that extended to architecture, advertising, household objects, clothing, and even food design. Through this comprehensive approach to one of the 20th century’s most pervasive modes of expression in America, Art Deco Chicago provides an essential overview of both this influential style and the metropolis that came to embody it.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, two individuals, Joseph Urban and Norman Bel Geddes, did more, by far, to create the image of “America” and make it synonymous with modernity than any of their contemporaries. Urban and Bel Geddes were leading Broadway stage designers and directors who turned their prodigious talents to other projects, becoming mavericks first in industrial design and then in commercial design, fashion, architecture, and more. The two men gave shape to the most quintessential symbols of the modern American lifestyle, including movies, cars, department stores, and nightclubs, along with private homes, kitchens, stoves, fridges, magazines, and numerous household furnishings. Illustrated with more than 130 photographs of their influential designs, this book tells the engrossing story of Urban and Bel Geddes. Christopher Innes shows how these two men with a background in theater lent dramatic flair to everything they designed and how this theatricality gave the distinctive modernity they created such wide appeal. If the American lifestyle has been much imitated across the globe over the past fifty years, says Innes, it is due in large measure to the designs of Urban and Bel Geddes. Together they were responsible for creating what has been called the “Golden Age” of American culture.

A valuable resource for design professionals and historians, this book chronicles the evolution of modern interior design in the United States throughout the 1930s. With more than 200 images and detailed descriptions, design historian Marilyn F. Friedman presents more than eighty interiors by forty-five designers, including Donald Deskey, Paul T. Frankl, Percival Goodman, Frederick Kiesler, William Lescaze, William Muschenheim Tommi Parzinger, Gilbert Rohde, Eugene Schoen, Kem Weber, set designers Cedric Gibbons and Joseph Urban, and industrial designers Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Russel Wright. The book also highlights the work of women modernists who are practically unknown today, including Virginia Conner, Freda Diamond, Eleanor Le Maire, and Madame Majeska. Interiors cover the economic spectrum, from those created for wealthy patrons who embraced the modernist aesthetic, including Walter Annenberg, George Vanderbilt III, William Paley, and Abby Rockefeller Milton, to those designed with affordability in mind, including private commissions, as well as furniture and model rooms for manufacturers, design associations, and museum exhibitions. The book also profiles in detail entire model homes that highlighted new concepts in design and construction, such as Norman Bel Geddes¿ House of Tomorrow for Ladies¿ Home Journal, Macy¿s ¿Forward House,¿ Frederick Kiesler¿s ¿Space House¿ for the Modernage showroom, Eleanor Le Maire¿s ¿House of Planes¿ for Abraham & Straus, and the model houses at the 1933 and 1939 world¿s fairs held in Chicago and New York, respectively. The trajectory of American modern design during the 1930s was not linear. In rejecting the revivalism that had defined American design during the nineteenth century, the designers covered in this book forged something new-an American movement defined by simplicity, practicality, and comfort that embraced experimentation and variation in materials and style. An important survey of the early development of modern interiors in America, year by year.

“One of those designers whose interior and furniture designs look discovered, not created . . . both comfortable and exquisite, calm and eclectic.” —Apartment Therapy Designer and merchant, collector and tastemaker, Thomas O’Brien has made a career of translating cool notions of modernism into an easy and generous array of modern styles that anyone can attain. Now he introduces readers to a range of those styles—from casual to formal, vintage to urban—alongside stunning photography and charming design stories. O’Brien carefully describes the design process of his chosen projects, including a downtown New York City loft, a traditional Connecticut estate, and a converted schoolhouse in eastern Long Island. Each home explores a view on the modern design spectrum he has created, as well as the individual choices that make the design unique and its mix essentially American. He explains not only what was at work to create a given style, but how readers can import those practices to their own homes and personal design sensibilities. Important design principles such as architectural authenticity, color relationships, correctness of scale, and informed collecting are threaded through a practical narrative that reads like a master class in interior design. American Modern is an inspiring design volume that will redefine the way readers think about modern interiors. “O’Brien carefully describes the design process of his chosen projects. Beautiful imagery and a unique layout describe his approach to design in a new and innovative way.” —LIFEMSTYLE “It’s like getting a glimpse into the studio paintings of a great master . . . I especially love how all of his spaces feel so gender neutral, the perfect balance.” —Cottage Farm

A comprehensive view of the life, work, and ideas of one of the creative giants of modern American design Arriving in the United States in 1914, Viennese-born Paul T. Frankl (1886-1958) brought with him an outsider's fresh perspective and an enthusiasm for forging a uniquely American design aesthetic. In the years between the two world wars he, more than any other designer, helped shape the distinctive look of American modernism. This authoritative book draws on an extensive collection of unpublished documents and family papers and photographs to provide the first full account of Frankl's life and ideas. The book also explores the history of modern American design and the extent of Frankl's influence on its trajectory. In the early 1920s, Frankl opened a New York City shop that became an epicenter of American modernism. Over the next decades, his work encompassed everything from individual pieces of furniture and decorative accessories to entire interiors, and his style continuously evolved, from early "Skyscraper" furniture to relaxed and casual designs favored by the Hollywood elite in the 1930s to manufactured pieces for the mass market in the 1950s. The book charts the impact of Frankl's ideas on merchants and consumers, on his fellow designers, and on the changing look of American homes and workplaces. With close to 170 illustrations, Paul T. Frankl and Modern American Design is an essential reference on 20th-century design.

Smith reveals how this visual revolution played an instrumental role in the complex psychological, social, economic, and technological changes that came to be known as the second industrial revolution. From the role of visualization in the invention of the assembly line, to office and building design, to the corporate and lifestyle images that filled new magazines such as Life and Fortune, he traces the extent to which the second wave of industrialization engaged the visual arts to project a new iconology of progress.

Michigan Modern: Design That Shaped America is an impressive collection of important essays touching on all aspects of Michigan’s architecture and design heritage. The Great Lakes State has always been known for its contributions to twentieth-century manufacturing, but it’s only beginning to receive wide attention for its contributions to Modern design and architecture. Brian D. Conway, Michigan’s State Historic Preservation Officer, and Amy L. Arnold, project manager for Michigan Modern, have curated nearly thirty essays and interviews from a number of prominent architects, academics, architectural historians, journalists, and designers, including historian Alan Hess, designers Mira Nakashima, Ruth Adler Schnee, and Todd Oldham, and architect Gunnar Birkerts, describing Michigan’s contributions to Modern design in architecture, automobiles, furniture and education.