One of my heroes in industrial design is Raymond Loewy, a Frenchman (later an American citizen) who took manufactured products by the scruff of their neck and made them attractive and practical.
It was the late 1920s. Loewy has been living in the USA for some years and was making a living as an illustrator for fashion magazines and the like. He enjoyed putting sleek cruise ships or other objects in the background, and this began to attract (favourable) comment. So he began to move into the new field of industrial design. He had always been interested in engineering, anyway.
Far too many manufactured products, he felt, were bulky, boring and awkward. They were often noisy and smelly, too. He wanted to be surrounded by objects that were bright, streamlined and easy to use.
The company he founded, Raymond Loewy Associates, grew to over 200 staff, and designed a huge variety of items. Loewy himself was involved in designing many. These included the packages for Lucky Strike cigarettes after a bet that he couldn't improve it. There were Greyhound buses, locomotives for the Pennsylvania Railroad, refrigerators, jukeboxes, cars, the labelling on tin cans, you name it.
He was responsible for a number of patents for functional changes as well as numerous American "design patents", for the look. Some of his work can be seen as Locomotive body, Motor coach, and Beverage dispenser.
An interesting article was written about him in Life, in the 2 May 1949 issue, called The great packager. In 1951 he published a splendid and highly personal account of his life as a designer, Never leave well enough alone.
After working into his late eighties, Loewy died in 1986 at Monte Carlo. He was 93.
Comments