American design ethic: a history of industrial design to 1940 PDF
Preview American design ethic: a history of industrial design to 1940
American Design Ethic \ A History of Industrial Design BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY The MIT Press Cambridge. Massachusetts London, England American Design Ethic A History of Industrial Design to 1940 Arthur J. Pulos Firstpaperback printing, 1986 © 1983 by The Massachusetts InstituteofTechnology All rights reserved. No partofthis book may be reproduced in any formor byany means, electronicormechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storageor retrieval system, without permission inwriting from the publisher This bookwas set in VIP Helvetica by VillageTypographers, Inc and printed and bound by Halliday Lithograph in the , United Statesof America Libraryof Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pulos. ArthurJ TheAmerican design ethic. Includes bibliography and index — — 1 Design, Industrial United States History, I. Title, TS23P84 1983 7452'0973 82-4625 ISBN 0-262-16085-4 (hard) 0-262-66057-1 (paper) Contents Preface vii Acknowledgment ix Note on Citations ix The Colonies The Arts of Survival 2 The Arts of Industry 12 The Arts of Affluence 18 The Young Republic The Search for Identity 46 The Promise of Free Enterprise 64 The American System of Manufactures 84 The Democracy Equality and Opportunity 92 Elegance and the Middle Class 779 4 The Aristocracy Industrial Arts and Good Taste 142 Industrialization and the Good Life 758 From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts 790 The New Century Industrial Arts and the Arts of Manufacture 228 Mass Production and Concern for Design 257 TheArsenal of Democracyand aCallfor Design 267 The Machine Age Commercial Art Discovers Design 270 The Rejection of Art Moderne 293 Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design 376 The Design Decade The House of Tomorrow 336 Skyscrapers and Streamliners 354 From "Cleanlining" to Accountability 396 Epilogue: From Affluence to Conscience 427 Bibliography 425 Index 433 Digitized by the Internet Archive 2012 in http://archive.org/details/americandesignetOOpulo Preface Design is the indispensable leavening of the postmaterialistic society in which products will American way of life. It emerged with the need serve humbly as elements of closed-loop en- of the colonists to transform the wilderness vironmental systems. into a secure haven and expanded as a natural component of the industrial revolution in the New American design is constructed from the building World. The United States was in all likelihood blocks of the puritan ethic and sheathed by liberal the first nation to be designed—to come into mercantilism. It is erected upon an economy of being as a deliberate consequence of the actions means and a respect for natural forces, and it of men who recognized a problem and resolved is illuminated with the spirit of self-reliance. It dis- it with the greatest benefit to the whole. America plays a 'aith in empirical discovery capped with did not just happen; it was designed. theory. It presumes that there is an inescapable correlation between the perfection of a solution Whatever their national origins, the first settlers to a problem and the elegance of the form it showed the courage, the energy, and the in- takes. There is no principle of American design genuity that would enable America to transcend so powerful as that an object acquires beauty aristocratic and theocratic rule. These emi- as it approaches the ideal typeform of its grants to the New World were more firmly held species. together by a concept than those who remained behind were united by religion and monarchy. History will prove that, if a humane democracy Their passion for freedom of individual opportu- is to be this country's legacy to mankind, its nity allowed enterprise and industry to flourish unique contribution to world culture may well in the service of an expanding common market. be the democracy of its manufactured products. Despite their transitory value, they are the true Despite the immediacy of the need to secure artifacts of the United States because in them a new life on a strange continent, these trans- civilizations to come will find an expressive crys- planted Europeans were unable to escape the tallization of our life energy and our daily bittersweet memory of their national origins. And existence. each succeeding band of immigrants carried along its native expression, stirring it into the common cauldron, so that even today the Amer- ican culture is a roiling brew of transplanted elegance and folk ethic. However, with the mass production that followed the industrial revolution, the Americans have been able to generate a unique cultural contribution. Products designed for industry and commerce, vehicles and vessels for transportation, and mechanical and elec- tronic appliances for the home reveal an Ameri- can passion for energy-conserving devices that are at times exquisitely suited to their purposes. At first the forms of these products were deter- mined primarily by technological factors and mechanical functions. However, as the virtuosity of productive means has been refined, the manufacturers of machine-made products have discovered a conscience that is now putting increasing emphasis on the primacy of the hu- man operator. The products of tomorrow will make it possible for Americans to move into a
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