The American Design Adventure 1940–1975 by Arthur J. Pulos

Abstract

312 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The American Design Adventure 1940—1975. By Arthur J. Pulos. Cam­ bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. Pp. vii + 446; illustrations, bibliog­ raphy, index. $50.00. For the past twenty years Arthur J. Pulos, an industrial designer, design educator, and international leader of the design profession, has been working on a history of industrial design in the United States. This second and concluding volume is more successful than the first (American Design Ethic: A History of Industrial Design to 1940, 1983) because its extensive primary and secondary research are informed by Pulos’s personal experience as a practitioner. Unlike the hrst volume, which sought to prove an almost inexorable evolution of each material typeform to perfection, the second limits its theoretical position to a mild but convincing assertion that the postwar American experience of an artificial landscape of mass-produced products, packages, and commercial images is becoming global. All too often, books on design, especially those focusing on the recently trendy 1950s, provide a superficial (and usually minimal) text that appears only to justify a series of slick illustrations chosen not because they are representative of their era but because they show it as we would nostalgically prefer to imagine it. One of the major strengths of Pulos’s book is that it downplays the Formica dinettes, wire chairs, and amoeboid coffee tables (those images that popular culture now conjures up as “postwar”) in order to show such things as a Honeywell thermostat, the furniture of a typical elementary classroom, detergent boxes, Polaroid cameras, and so on. The illustrations in The American Design Adventure more accurately represent what American things really looked like at midcentury. However, Pulos has relied on manufacturers’ publicity photographs that render products as static abstractions. Thomas Hine’s excellent Populuxe (1986), by contrast, relies on images from magazine advertisements and trade catalogs that reveal products integrated into idealized but dynamic domestic scenes. Pulos does not succeed as well as Hine did at treating the things of the 1950s and 1960s as embodiments of the expansive, progress-oriented “American cen­ tury.” The strength of The American Design Adventure lies more in its depiction of a new profession, highly influential behind the scenes of everyday life, as it came to maturity and debated the issues whose resolutions defined it. Designers argued over whether they ought to be offering aesthet­ ically uplifting examples of “good design” or providing the “borax and chrome” that consumers seemed to want. Those who worked as general consultants for a wide cross section of industries tended to look down on those employed by a single company to work in a specific industry. Furniture designers and craftsmen distrusted those engaged in design for machine production. While “first-generation” TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 313 designers of the 1930s had come from other professions—stage design, commercial illustration, advertising, and so on—postwar designers had to be taught to design. Opinions differed on the issue of certification of educational programs and on the question of whether designers ought to be “educated” with strong backgrounds in the liberal arts or “trained” essentially as technicians. Traditional art schools, seemingly the most obvious source of future designers, often imbued students with a desire for freedom of expression at odds with the commercial, technical, and popular compromises of industrial design. Through detailed coverage of these and similar issues, Pulos provides the gritty texture of reality lacking in previous accounts that emphasized not the process of design but the superficial visual appeal of postwar design styles. Sections of Pulos’s book that trace design changes in various types of products—furniture, televisions and radios, cameras, kitchen appliances, power tools, automobiles, pack­ aging, and so on—also retain this texture of rootedness in the real world by proceeding with close analysis of the development of individual products by specific designers and corporations. At times, however, the wealth of detail obscures the search for larger meanings. To adopt the internal-external distinction of history of technology, this is very much a work of internal design history—and all the more welcome because the sheer bulk of material that Pulos has gathered and presented daunted earlier authors more enthralled...