American Streamlined Design

The twentieth century loved machines and the speed they made possible. Speeding cars, trains, and planes promised to conquer space and time; their aerodynamic styling and metal skins embodied a new and modern beauty, one that especially enchanted American designers from the late 1920s through the 1950s. Streamlining became the popular American style for all sorts of objects: from toy scooters to typewriters, from power tools to teakettles.
This book celebrates this beauty as epitomized by the work of Raymond Loewy, Kem Weber, Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes, as well as in works by many lesser-known industrial designers whose products are presented here for the first time. The book also demonstrates the resurgence of interest in streamlining among international vanguard designers from the 1980s to the present.
This volume is illustrated with patent drawings and period photographs showing how these dynamically styled objects were used. The one hundred eighty objects presented here, drawn from the Eric Brill Collection (recently donated to the American Friends of Canada) and supplemented by pieces from the Stewart Collection at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, were photographed for this book. A full bibliography, biographies of the designers, and index complete the study.

David A. Hanks, curator of the Stewart Program for Modern Design at the Montreal Museum, was former curator at the Art Institute (Chicago) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and curatorial consultant to the Smithsonian, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum. He has published several books including Design for Living (Flammarion).Anne H. Hoy teaches art history at New York University. She is consulting editor for Studies in the Decorative Arts, and is co-author of Design for Living.