Streamline Design
Up to the 1920s, Decoration focused
on issues of style and beauty and followed a paralell development
to the while design had more in common with engineering as
it creates a solution to a problem. The history of design
is an evolution of aesthetics, but the emergence of the Streamline
Style during the 1930s was a new way of thinking.
The period between the 2 wars was marked by many profound
changes. Social disruption, political turmoil and economic
instability encouraged rejection of old ideas and the need
for new ways of living. Whereas the Art Deco movement, launched
with the 1925 Paris exhibition, was an artistic expression
of this desire for change, it proved difficult to make its
products available to a mass market, because of the high quality,
rare nature, and hence costliness of the materials used to
produce Art Deco designs.
In the 1930's merits of modernism versus traditional figure
painting were still being fervently debated. The social activism
and mass political movements of the 1930s demanded a public
and useful art. As the Depression had taken hold of America
and war was brewing in Europe, Americans drew inward, concerned
with domestic problems and injustice. This isolationism led
not simply to art in search of an American idiom, but an anti-European
sentiment espoused by American Regionalists.
At
that time, American designers were consciously far removed
from the utopian ideals and formal methods that influenced
the most progressive European designers. Prior to the 20th
century, many American artists have suffered from a "colonial
complex" and felt more comfortable imitating the European
practitioners of design. The rationale was the "they do things
better in Europe." It was not until the 1930s the Americans
finally developed a strong sense of identity and self-confidence
that wallowed them to break free of Europe's authority in
the arts.
A need to break with a luxury-oriented market became urgent
after the 1929 market crash. The industry, confronted with
a sudden drop in demand, was faced with the necessity of developing
new methods of production and techniques, and using newer,
more widely available materials. These new developments were
not themselves sufficient to overcome the gloom of the depression
and significantly raise demand. A new type of artist, the
industrial designer, would generate the momentum to initiate
a new period in design-production, which would come to be
known as the Streamline Decade. 
Realizing their products were more marketable when they differed
from similar consumer goods, American manufacturers turned
to design as an important solution. The designer's attempt
to modernize these products as a means of boosting sales led
to the pursuit of a new style, one which evolved from the
preceding fashionable Art Deco style of the 1920s and could
be applied to industrial products especially.
The design was alluring and looked expensive, but it could
be mass-produced by machines at lower cost. It emerged from
the design of airplanes, automobiles and marine vessels. It
was originally an effect of function that was applied to objects
such as clocks, radios and pencil sharpeners - objects which
do not move!'
The term Streamline refers to hydrodynamic (water) and aerodynamic
(air) principles which emerged from the physics of fluid dynamics.
As Norman Bel-Geddes, one of the style's best-known proponents,
wrote "An object is streamlined when its exterior surface
is so designed that upon passing through a fluid such as water
or air the object creates the least disturbance in the fluid".
The origins of streamline are found in Europe. In the early
1910s, a young italian architect who was part of the futurist
movement, Sant´Elia, did many drawings of large urban buildings
(station, office buildings) which were part of overall concept
for a futuristic city. The lines allthough art deco-ish (many
vertical lines) were also speed oriented and stretched.
Allthough he died in the 1st WW and never had a chance to
see his project turned to life, he influenced some of the
european architects of the time. The most famous among them
was Erich Mendelsohn, a german born architect who in the early
20s made many sketches of extremely streamlined buildings.
Mendelsohn went to the US in 1925-26 and met Norman Bel Geddes,
the soon to be most influential figure for streamline utopia
in the US .
On
the technology side, Paul Jaray started in the early 1920s
developping the study of aerodynamics applied to the car and
rail industry: his work was based on the evolution of the
zeppelin into which the germans had put much efforts since
WWI. Streamlining, observed the Hungarian-born engineer Paul
Jaray (1889-1974), designer of zeppelins, Tatra cars and Mercedes 
ashion
of aerodynamics crossed over the Atlantic at the beginning
of the 1930s. In the motorshows of 1933 and 1934, many streamlined
cars appeared. The windshields were more reclined, the front
grilles and the wings more rounded, the rear tails longer.
Streamline design differed from Art Deco in that the latter
was primarily concerned with upward motion, such as the rise
of a skyscraper, and was embellished with angular geometric
details. Streamline, in contrast, is rounded and curved. The
Streamline Style stood for also mobility, speed, efficiency
and luxury, all concepts that were identified with modernity.
Rejecting the luxuriousness of the 920s, '30s American designers
developed simpler, more useful objects that merged artistic
and industrial aesthetics and that were suitable for mass
production. It was an era where some optimistically dreamed
that rich and poor alike could share in the material abundance
of utility and beauty. Evolving from its original idea of
speed, the Streamline movement reflected also a positive vision
of the future.
Little
attempt was made to distinguish between functional and non-functional
streamlining. Whether moving or stationary, products were
cased in sleek, aerodynamic bodies, emblematic of the 1930s
obsession with speed and efficiency. At most speeds streamlined
styling did not, in fact, save much energy and, in stationary
objects, it saved none at all. These were secondary considerations
as the style came to represent an embracement of the machine
and the hope that it held for the future.
Streamlining was influenced by America's fascination with
high speed and dynamism of form. The style first materialized
in moving mechanical objects that featured aerodynamic shapes.
Designers based their creations on the porpoise's ovoid body
and the teardrop's unbroken surface. Throughout the decade,
streamlined trains, ships, plans, and motorcars familiarized
the collective awareness with this new form of design. Exciting
footage of technological wonders in Paramount and Movie-tone
newsreels helped to disseminate and popularize the progress
and pathways of America's future.
An iron was given the shape of a bow wave, the design of a
pencil sharpener almost makes it more suitable for a speed
trial than simple office work, a seltzer water dispenser is
transformed into a space capsule avant la lettre, and plates
and bowls appear designed to fly back and forth between the
refrigerator and the table. Particularly radios, the new product
of the era, are important examples of the high-spirited, emphatically
positive Streamline Style in a period in which mass consumption
was uncritically embraced.
The roots of the Streamlined Moderne lie also in an infautation
with science-fiction. Utopian visions were provided by scores
of illustrators for magazines, comic books and Hollywood film
sets. The serial Buck Rogers began in 1930 and Alex Raymond's
Flash Gordon appeared four 
years
later. In H.G. Wells' 1936 film version of Things to Come,
montage and photoraphy were combined with state-of-the-art
moderne model sets. The futuristic cities painted for Amazing
Stories and other "pulps" variously anticipate or reflect
the advanced designs of Buckminister Fuller, Walter Dorwin
Teague and other pioneering designers of the thirties.
Some recurring distinct design elements appeared, allowing
the designer to create his own toolbox. To visualize streamline,
sharp corners of objects were rounded off and speed lines
(3 paralell lines) were created by introducing ribs or chrome
strips. This design was not arrived at on the basis of scientific
requirements for optimal air flow, but was a clichéd expression
of that.
Tear-shaped forms originally used on airplanes and trains
to reduce air resistance were now applied to everything. Commercial
and household furnishings appeared with blunt, rounded fronts
and tapering rears, suggesting speed as in mechanized transportation.
Four American expositions, all in the 1930s, also had a significant
impact on design awareness. Of the four, Chicago's Century
of Progress Exposition in l933-34 had the greatest mass appeal
and likely did more to advance the cause of design in America.
It drew 38 million visitors to the 424-acre parcel of reclaimed
land on the edge of Lake Michigan and turned a handsome profit
at the depth of the Depression. It is difficult to appreciate
the excitement, even euphoria, surrounding such an event,
but it provided a welcome relief from unrelenting financial
Toward the end of the movement, streamlining had gained its
"high art" credentials, and - somewhat paradoxically - it
was sometimes identified with glamour and purity (if not to
say eugenic ideas), rather than its original inspiration in
industrial techniques. 
This
vision of purity and progress through technology was very
popular in the fascit propaganda in Germany and Italy.
Additionally, designers turned to streamlining to accommodate
low-cost, machine mass production, while making salable, modern-looking
merchandise. Perhaps a core difference in how American scholars
received art deco and Bauhaus functionalism, and how they
regarded streamlining, lies in the fact that the former arose
from an artistic vanguard, while streamlining aimed at the
widest possible public and was based on an admiration for
industry and speed.
Just like any movement, Streamlining had its own evolution,
movements within and detractors. The industrial side of the
design remained mostly confined to the American continent
and clashed with the more austere Bauhaus movement or international
style.
Criticized as early as 1932 by modernists, the idiom evolved
in defiance of both Art Deco and functionalist modernism.
Philipp Johnson, Curator of the NY MOMA was the most ardent
opponent of the streamline movement and considered such streamline
as fake and ornamented, and as part of the 1944 catalogue
for The Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Design for Use, Objects
came in for explicit criticism with these words:
The new generation of designers, born in the United States
at the end of the twenties, grew after The Depression. These
people had the premonition that Americans needed a new shot
in the arm. They thought design could contribute to the moral
and economic recovery while designing a new scenery for everyone.
Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Deryfusss, Harold
van Doren, and Walter Dorwin Teague set up the group of designers
creating the new streamlined surroundings. The designers argued
their attitude was aimed at the common people, unlike the
Bauhaus philosophy, which was elitist and aimed at select
people.
They would be later joined by Harold L. Van Doren, Gardiner
Vess,George Walker and from lesser-known but significant designers
such as Lurell E. Guild, Clifford Brooks Stevens, Harold Van
Doren, as well as practitioners as John R. Morgan, William
B. Petzold and Louis Vavrik.
Raymond Loewy was one of the pioneer in terms of industrial
design and Kem Weber, originally educated in Germany, was
the only designer on the West Coast who apprehended fully
and very elegantly the streamline 
By the end of the decade, streamlining became accepted as
the American "machine" style. It became a way of marketing
items that were never designed with speed in mind. The new
style was an inherent reflection of the spirit of the decade.
Manufacturers capitalized on this relationship to help sell
their products.
In 1939 Walter Dorwin Teague wrote: "We are primitives in
this new machine age. We have no developed history behind
us to use in our artistic creations. We have no theories,
no vocabulary of ornament behind us to use in our work. That
is why so much of our modern work today has a certain stark
and simple quality that relates it very closely to primitive
work of Greece, of Egypt, and of most people who were discovering
their techniques and their tools."
The
Streamline movement spanned a period between ca. 1932 and
1940, until WWII broke out. After the war, products reappeared
that vaguely resembled designs of the l930s, but only as a
superficial application, for styling had replaced design.
American dominance in design would gradually yield to the
Italians, Swedes and Japanese. Yet its influence lingered
up to the 1960 in places like Germany, France and Italy.
In retrospect, the designs of the l920s are best remembered
for lavish interiors, angular designs, an emerging machine
aesthetic, an avoidance of both ornament and organic forms,
and a cerebral approach rationalized through mathmatics.
In contrast, the new breed of industrial designers in the
l930s were more open to the suggestions of science and practical
technologies, but were less restricted by aethetic traditions.
They must be credited with tempering rational engineering
with the artis's quest for perfected form.